If I knew then what I know now...

[Madferret]

As I've said before I'm still new to diy electronics and pedal building and I've just made the incredibly rookie mistake of putting a freshly painted box paint-side down onto some kitchen roll before it had fully dried (12 hours is kind of like 24 hours, right?).  With this in mind I thought it'd be good to start a thread so we could share our school boy errors and tips that we wished we'd known about from the start so that if anyone just starting out reads them they don't have to make the same mistakes as we did.

To start things off:

1) A clean, properly tinned tip = a hot tip = super easy, neat soldering - I must have ruined a bunch of boards before I realised that the reason why I couldn't solder properly was because my tip wasn't getting hot enough because of all the crap on it

2) Double check the resistor colours - After I learnt how to solder properly the main reason for having problems with a build was because I'd used the wrong value of resistor, there's a hell of a difference between red and orange sometimes!

3) Start small - I started looking at all kinds of circuits I wanted to build until I came to the conclusion that I'd have no chance, after trying a few circuits off Runoffgroove without success I tried a Muff Fuzz and got it working first time.

4) For NPN try 2n5088, for PNP try 2n3906 - With a few notable exceptions those transistors will work for most things, you don't need to pay a fortune for weird out of production transistors.  If you socket the transistors yo7u can always swap them if you need to later.

5) Takes 24 hours to dry means 24 hours ;) - Or in other words have patience

Hopefully some of these might be of some use to people.

[IvIark]

Don't use those metal bodied DC sockets with metal boxes.  Putting 9V straight to the case makes a noise like an Ann Summers gift bag.

[dexxyy]

The 2 most important things i`ve learned are,

1. if your building a verified circuit and yours doesn`t work always presume builder error. No matter how many times you`ve checked it, check it again, component placement, component values, solder bridges, cold solder joints all the  usual subjects. If a layout is verified as working then the only reasons for it not to work are builder error or component failure.

2. Never ever ever ever ever ever admit to knowing the noise an Ann Summers gift bag makes

[Geiri]

1. I've fixed countless circuits simply by having a little hacksaw and use it between the veroboard tracks to clean everything properly.

2. Use Marks offboard wiring layout. It's bulletproof!

3. Quick, find the perfect wires. I've gone through many types (stranded, solid) and gauges. What I favour now is 1/0.6 or 22AWG solid core.

4. When cutting the vero to whichever size you need, count the holes twice. I've cut them one row too small sooooo many times.

5. Use a tiny tiny drillbit when doing the initial holes. It gives you more precision. Also use a drill press.

6. Two resistors of the same value in series doubles. Two resistors of the same value in parallel halves.

7. Two capacitors of the same value in series halves. Two capacitors of the same value in parallel doubles.

8. If unsure about opamps, google them and check what the pins are. A lot of the times I use TL072 (because I have a shitload of them) when the layout specifies another one. Honestly can't hear much of a difference.

9. Buy bulk. It's worth it.

10. Don't use cheap jack sockets. Just don't.

[GermanCDN]

I'll chime in with a couple

1) Make a copy of the Beavis transistor guide.  Check it against your pinouts, regardless of what the layout looks like

2) Build a $5 test rig from Tayda.  Never box before you've played the circuit

3) Wear glasses whether you need them or not.  Solder and wire bits fly everywhere.

4) Always make sure you have the opamp installed in the opamp socket.  They're the same colour, and you'd be surprised how many times you forget.

5) Sign up to the Tayda facebook page to get the twice a month 15% discounts.

6) As soon as you smell smoke, cut the power to the circuit.

7) Buy an ESP guitar multispanner from Stewmac, you won't need another wrench on your bench.

8) Always wear pants when you're building.  Molten solder hurts.

[Heath]

+1 for pants.

[burksguitar]

I wish I had found this site sooner, I found some useful info on Beavis Audio too.

I guess I really don't have a lot to add that hasn't been posted already, but the best thing I did was build a box to use to test boards with, I have a 1590bb with jacks and switch wired and leads with alligator clips, also lots of holes drilled for various layouts and switches. The first two boards I built I wired up everything sans box and plugged them in to test them, it worked but noisy, ground noise everytime you touch something.

One more thing I'm going to do to my test box is hard mount an alligator clip to hold the board itself in place while testing.

[alltrax74]

GermanCDN, do you have a link for that Tayda test rig ?
Thanks

[GoranP]

I don't think there's a test rig there, per se... I think he meant that one should get spare (cheap) parts from tayda and build a testbox?

[alltrax74]

Hum yeah probably

[dexxyy]

try this

[GoranP]

That's cool. Even has a dying battery pot...

I myself never bothered with a test box. I only build effects that I know that I want (even if they end up sounding not quite like the original). I therefore build and box the thing even before firing it up. More often than not it works right away :) so I never had much incentive to build any other way.

If I built things just to hear what they sounded like, then I'd definitely build one of these...

[alltrax74]

looks interesting, thanks

[toddvirgil]

So, still a newbie here, but just learned a valuable lesson... Don't create some really awesome hand drawn graphics with a gold paint pen, then follow up with a coat of polyurethane... It's an awesome paint pen solvent! I'm going back to a spray on clear coat...

[Kost1978]

Based on a true story:
1) Be sure you cut the veroboard with the correct orientation (or avoid to have the board oriented with the connected stripes as "column" while they must be "rows"), please check before start soldering...
2) Double check also all the cuts needed for a board (number and position). Once finished, check again.
3) Avoid to mark all the cuts in more than one board at the time and leave the boards untouched for a couple of days/weeks, thinking they're ready: you may don't remember you still need to drill the cuts and start soldering stright away...

[ichilton]

Some interesting points here.

A few questions:

6. Two resistors of the same value in series doubles. Two resistors of the same value in parallel halves.
7. Two capacitors of the same value in series halves. Two capacitors of the same value in parallel doubles.

That works the same with ones of different values though, right?

i.e 10k + 5k = 15k
10k and 5k in parallel = 5k

10. Don't use cheap jack sockets. Just don't.

Why?? - surely it only makes contact or not?
Which ones do people recommend?

2) Build a $5 test rig from Tayda.  Never box before you've played the circuit

Are you able to give more info on this??

Thanks,

Ian

[Geiri]

6. No 10K and 5K in parallel is 3.33K. Calculating in parallel isn't as straightforward as in series. I could've worded the series part better. Two resistors in series basically just adds together.

Use this for calculating in parallel: Link

7. With capacitors, it's the exact same but opposite. When you put them in parallel you add the values together and when they're in series, it's like resistors in parallel.

10. I always use high-quality jacks and have for the last 200 pedals but before that I thought it would be a good idea to buy the really cheap ones. I threw a lot of them away because they were absolute crap. The metal is thinner and less reliable and the feel when you insert the cable is just "meh" if you get me? Also, tightening them to the enclosure just isn't the same. I also had problems where the nut wouldn't tighten enough so it came loose because I was trying to get it tight.

If you're in the UK, I recommend the jacks from http://www.pedalparts.co.uk/ because they're at a good price and are good quality.

[ichilton]

Cool, thanks.

I'm not sure the link for the calculator is right though - it gives a circuit layout.

[GoranP]

For the parallel calculator you can either calculate it yourself by using this formula
1/R=(1/R1)+(1/R2)
or just use this or any of the gazillion other parallel calcs out there
http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-paralresist.htm

As for the testbox thing, Dexxyy posted this link in this very thread a few posts up. The point is that the parts cost you about $5 and it's worth way more than the sum of its parts.

http://www.beavisaudio.com/bboard/images/io_diy.jpg