Tremulous Bear Troubleshoot

[BWFalcon]

Building the tremulous Bear - wondering if anyone has had this problem and know's how they fixed it...

The stage I am at is components in, no switch wired up, no jacks wired up.  I have a battery snap to the power so my timer and LED should work.

Basically everything downstream of R15 is grounded somehow.  So I get ground at Pin 1, 4, & 8 of my 555Timer IC2.  This is with sockets only, all chips removed.

No joints seem to be shorted.  I've started checking each component after R15 to see if both sides of it are grounded and also each component that should be grounded to see if both sides are grounded.
So aside from a general "something is grounded that shouldn't be", has anyone seen this happen to them?

Anyone ever seen a bad IC socket that doesn't have all the pins isolated properly? 

[BWFalcon]

OK, so I got this going a while back, but it has too much dirt to it.

I get the oscillator working great and the tremolo part of it works perfect.  There just seems to be clipping somewhere I can't get a nice warm clean sound out of it.  Anyone know what could be causing this, or a possible mod to make it cleaner if everything is already working right?

I've tried different levels of R14 from 2.6K to 10K.

[smallbearelec]

Brian--

IC1-b is probably still getting overdriven. 10K is probably too low for R14 in this case. Try increasing that to 12 or 15K.

[BWFalcon]

Will do.  Thanks