Misbehavin' Muff Voltages Part Deux

[JacksonG]

Hi!
New to the forum and pretty noob at building pedals, have a few successful builds under my belt now but I'm currently stuck and not sure how to troubleshoot.

I'm building a EQD Hizumitas (basically a big muff) on stripboard, it's passing signal when circuit is engaged but it's clean, low gain, low vol and the tone pot is scratchy

Interestingly I found a post here of someone who had the exact same symptoms I'm experiencing...

https://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=101520.0

He had issues with his transistor voltages and they seemed be able to solve the issue but I'm too much of a noob to apply the solution to my build 

Just measured transistor voltages. Here's what I got....

Q1
C = 5.33v
B = 0.835v
E = 0.237v

Q2
C = 8.10v
B = 0.916v
E = 0.263v

Q3
C = 4.26v
B = 0.655v
E = 0.047v

Q4
C = 8.12v
B = 0.876v
E = 0.224v

Collector voltages on Q2 and 4 seem way to high but I'm not really sure where to go from here.
Any help would be super appreciated!
Cheers!

[antonis]

Hi & Welcome..

Your board looks fine (from possible shorts point of view) but the fact of high Collector bias voltage (too low voltage drop across R11 & R13) in conjuction with same value for both resistors (18k) indicates wrongly low actuall values..
(maybe 1k8 instead of 18k..)

Unfortunately, it's hard to say due to not enough distinct colours..

[JacksonG]

Aaahhh!
That's it! Thank you man!
I bought a resistor kit on ebay and 18R were marked as 18k!
I neglected to check with MM or colour code  :
Switched them out and also replaced the crackling pot and everything works great!
Thanks a bunch for your help!
Valuable lessons learnt