Crazy Tone problems?

[decadentdesign]

A friend of mine has this old 'Crazy Tone' fuzz pedal that I'm trying to fix for him.  But I'm kind of at a loss.  I'm not that well versed with electronics and pedals so I'm just trying to feel my way to see if I can work it out.

Initially I simply replaced the 9-volt adapter but I didn't know where to attach the positive end (as it was not connected) when I first got it.  Initially I figured it should run to the on/off switch that's part of the volume knob.  Obviously this didn't work.  I more or less mapped out the PCB and found one contact point that appeared to have remnants of a wire and realized that the power to still has to run into the board so I tried that contact and still no go.  I removed the board and wires that lead into it and using a bread board and other parts tried to make shift the pedal without the foot switch, new jacks, a new pot (linear and not audio, but for testing purposes I figured that would be ok), and just a 1k resistor for the tone/fuzz knob.  And still nothing!

Until, by strange chance I tried the pedal without the battery attached at all.  Then it worked to some degree...  Not very loud, but definitely a distorted, fuzzed out sound.  The off switch turns the pedal on and off, the volume increases the volume.  The foot switch did already work, at least in the through/bypass setting so that wasn't anything new.

So I went back to my previous research and looked over a couple of versions of schematics that I found for 'Crazy Tone' pedals...  They were very close in layout with the same number of parts but not the same values.  In fact I'm not sure what the values for all the caps are and the transistors seem to be from 63 or something like that and, as far as I can tell, are no longer available....  Anyway, so I looked everything over and compared the schematics with what I had and it appears that the positive and negative are reversed on the pedal I have???  So I decided that maybe someone else re-attached the wires incorrectly, and though I know it might not be the wisest thing, I went ahead and switched the positive and negative contacts on the board.  i felt relatively confident about this when I noticed that the negative runs straight to the positive leg of one of the caps ~ that's not right, right?  Anyway, I did that and still nothing ~ and then it wouldn't run without a battery.  So I put the negative back to where it was, switched out most of the wiring, attached a replacement pot for the tone control and I'm still not much further ahead...  The only difference now is the tone knob does seem to do a little something now, but still the pedal only works when the battery is unattached. 

I'm guessing that the positive has to be attached somewhere else, but I have no idea of where.  Part of me is tempted to just take the pcb entirely apart and rebuild it based on the schematics that I found.  As it is there are some minor differences to how it has been wired compared to the schem's...  I did also read that these things were poorly built so I wonder if maybe that would be the best thing to do.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?  Would anyone maybe have one that you could provide a clear picture of the insides?  I'd like to try and verify the wire placement.  My gut tells me that it's repairable, just mis-wired but I don't really know.

Also, if anyone happens to know how best to remove the knobs off these older pedals.  In case I do get it working I need to remove the old pot to switch in the new one, but I can't seem to figure out if the knob is just a push on or screwed into place or what (can't see any locking screws either).

Thanks,
David