Modding and breaking

[aron]

Some pedals are assembled in ways that foster breaking when taken apart.

I've noticed super tight arrangement of parts so that if you don't have the DC jack, i/o jacks oriented just right, you get a short. (Solution - take picture before you disassemble).
Use of resistor leads to jump from lets say a pot to the board. But on the board the resistor lead is not going through the hole, just lying on a pad. Yes it will break with flex.
Really tiny traces which will break when heat is applied or pads that come off very easily.
Wires that are easily broken.

There's more, but keep these in mind. All I did was change an IC, diodes and tone stack and while that took very little time, making the circuit work again took hours.

[Bad Chizzle]

I feel your pain!

I'll bite, what was it you were modding that sent you into a frenzy? I haven't done much modding if any. I've put better switches in pedals that have gone out due to really bad junk switches. You know, maybe I modded a DS1 once and gave it to a friend. Anyway, yeah, you get inside and you're all oh crap, I don't know if I wanna touch that!

First thing I usually notice is how many components they think they need to build a simple clipping distortion pedal!

[petemoore]

  The list got exponentially longer recently. There are thousands and thousands of these things laying around, many/most of them require mods...lol, if they cost more to begin with they'd probably be ok more often.
  Not to be condescending, but I know what you know, and what you know doesn't include what you should be knowing...electronics make me "silent with plenty of relevant comments" ..to say..more than it used to.
  Just last night I was forcefully offered irrelevant explanations: 'la-la electron should' is what I call it [everything from makes no sense to 'will fail' type stuff]. I failed to have at my disposal relevant responses which I could choose to share, I decided he's doing just fine 'without' [knowing].
  But I explained: "people tell me 'ideas' about electronics, many are incorrect, but very often I choose to not point that out"...in one ear...out the other...moving right along...

[Paul Marossy]

Yeah, and I have seen some circuitboards that use single sided PCBs with tracks that are only 1mm wide. All you have to do is accidentally bump a transistor inside the unit and the thing is broken all of the sudden because the pads lifted off the board and broke the track connected to them. And it if it's something that a schematic is not available for, it takes even longer to figure out what the deal is. Ask me how I know. 

[ayayay!]

I'll gladly throw out BBE's name here.  Wow.  You merely touch the traces and they'll lift off.  Also without a doubt they have mastered the "one time use" hookup wire:  Thin, few strands, easily broken.  I've never seen wire like it!  Needless to say, if you open up a BBE, you have been warned.   

[petemoore]

  The thing to remember about thin wire is that the weight/strength equation.
  Intentionally makes no sense, is incomplete sentence^
  The thick stuff, beefy old shielded wire...could literally be hammered on over decades and still be <5% compromized at compromize points [such as at a potlug/solderstop].
  Some of the stuff I call 'cheese-wire', don't open the package or it's molded over, solders like cheese [insulation is stronger than copper, copper takes in insulation, copper doesn't hold shape, solder rolls off, strands become stray connections of solder-glom...ugly mess, I'd rather clean the refridgerator.

[edvard]

The one time that happened to me was when I was repairing a friend of mine's op-amp Big Muff and a pad lifted, taking  1/4 inch of trace with it.
After wiping off the cold sweat I suddenly broke out with, I took a small-gauge piece of wire, soldered it to the broken end of trace and wrapped the other end around the lead where the pad hole was.


That and discovering I could not repair an XXL pedal after wicking off about a quarter pound of solder to get the board off the jack lugs and finding the circuit was hidden under a nickel-size pile of goop.