Aion FX Elysium delay - extremely quiet

[volemos]

Hi all - did some looking back but unable to find this specific issue discussed. In brief:

Built an Aion FX Elysium (Ibanez EM5 Echomachine) with great success, and loved it. The other day, turned it on and it was suddenly extremely quiet - essentially unusable. Both the dry and effected signals come through, and all controls function, but nearly inaudibly compared to when the pedal is deactivated.

For troubleshooting purposes, the pedal is directly between guitar and amp, with cables that I've tested with other pedals. It is powered by a Gigrig Mr. Universe (9v 1000mA) that's functioning correctly, having tested it with other pedals.





Anyone else with a similar experience or who might understand why all of a sudden this has ceased functioning as intended? Everything looks exactly as it did when I boxed it, and it sounds exactly the same...just 1/100 of the level.

Thanks in advance!

[idy]

First things: make sure all signal and ground wires are well soldered. Some of your joints look a little stingy, and like no pre-tinning occurred.

the stomp switch daughterboard is...words fail me... You should not see voids between the terminals and the eyelet in the PCB.

Cold solder joints: nothing like them. Often you cannot see that a wire that looks like it is a blob of solder is actually loose inside. But that footswitch...looks like if you wiggled it, it would come loose.

[ElectricDruid]

+1 agree. Most likely culprit is a bad solder. Many of those look like they haven't had enough solder or enough heat. People are taught that the problem is that you will kill components if you overheat them, which is sometimes true as far as it goes, but tends to lead to people being over-cautious and not using  either enough solder or enough heat to do a good job.

Definitely re-do the 3PDT stompswitch with more heat and more solder because those joints are empty. On the PCB there's plenty of examples where the solder hasn't flowed through the board as I'd expect if it was fully heated. Those need another touch with the iron until you see the solder "suck" into the through-hole.

Fundementally, I don't think there's anything serious wrong with it. Get the soldering touched up and it should be reliable.

HTH.