Dr. Blade tube distortion schematic help!?

[shiner555]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum to post in....however I'm looking to getting into pedal modding, etc...and I'm looking to have this one be my first project.  However, I can not find a single thing about this pedal anywhere on the net...except for a review on harmony-central.
A friend of mine gave me the pedal since it stopped working, and I was looking to get it back up and running again and mod it to work for bass..

Has anyone ever heard of this thing? Again, all I could find was that it was made by a now defunct company called Audio Sound Research, designed by Todd Brindell.

If anyone out there could help me out I'd really apreciate it as I don't want to throw this thing out.

Thanks!!
-Jason

[RLBJR65]

This is the right forum. That's a great review, but as you said no other info to be found.

If you discribe the problem(s) and take some detailed pics. (get lots of pics inside) there are a lot of members here that are very good at tracing circuits so I'm sure you can get the help you need resurrecting it.

[shiner555]

Hi!

Thanks so much for replying back to me.  I'll have to take a few pictures of what the guts are and see if anything makes any sense.  Here is a quick review....however this may not make any sense.

I was able to get the pedal to fire back up after I found a loose connection in the step down xfmr, and it worked but only for a min or two.  When it was hooked up it really killed the high end tone of the bass...It looks like it's not set up for true by-pass...but even when I direct connect the out to the in, in passive mode(effect out), I still get the tonal problems.  I'd say that this is a side issue to my main problem of the effect blowing up.

So I found that there is a secondary voltage supply circuit where it has two NPN tied together with two diodes and then a 5V regulator and then the ouput of the regulator is tied to the VCC of a dual op-amp-TL072.  I found the second NPN to be shorted and when I put a new one in, the circuit fired up, but the part got real hot.  And there was no output from the effect at all.  When checking the 5V regulator in circuit, I was getting 13.5V out!!  

A few seconds later, the new NPN died.  I've checked a few resistors in the path of the NPN's and they all look good, there are two caps that I'm going to check out next....

I'm just a bit stumped as why the second NPN is blowing up.  I realize that I’m leaving a bunch of info out as to how the dual NPN circuit is wired.  I think I’ll try and make a crewed schematic of it, and see if it makes sense to any of you.  

Thanks,
-Jason