Triad Distortion: no sound

[coward]

What did I do wrong?
I thought this one would be a breeze. It’s one of my cleaner jobs now that I’ve built a few and gotten experience, my last pedal worked right out of the gate, LED lights up when engaged and doesn’t when disengaged, it seems like I’m getting continuity (unless I’m checking that incorrectly ) but there is no sound at all coming through when engaged or disengaged. Nothing. No clean sound, no distorted sound, nothing at all.

Please help. I’m sure it’s something simple and stupid cuz those are my go-to mistakes.

 

[Sturdag Lagernathy]

Output jack looks to be wired backwards. That'd do it

 

[coward]

Me no smart. Me try hard but no smart.
Disappoint parents. Bad.

Thanks for the help! Hopefully I rewire that and it works and I’m not left to find there are additional problems.

 

[Sturdag Lagernathy]

Your parents may in fact be disappointed, but EVERYONE has done this at least once. I've built this kinda crap for 30 years, and I did it twice last week..

 

[comradehoser]

... Solved?

 

[coward]

Sigh…. No
There’s sound now but not good sound. When disengaged there is a lot of hum coming through the amp. When engaged the sound is much quieter and not at all distorted. So back to the drawing board I guess…

 

[coward]

Did more fiddling and now the clean signal comes through fine but when I engage the pedal there is once again no sound. LED lights up but zero audio coming through the amp. Sigh. And here I thought I did a good job this time….

 

[swelchy]

your build looks pretty clean for a newb...... unsolder your DC jack carefully and pull the pcb out and takes some pics of the back of the board... it's surely something simple.. your soldering looks pretty good... you probably have a solder bridge or stray wire somewhere , bridge from too much solder on break out board is possible.... most likely is where you source the JFET from.. could be a fake or way out of spec.

 

[jimilee]

See, it’s the easy ones that get us, every time.

 

[Guilherme Collateral]

Sigh…. No
There’s sound now but not good sound. When disengaged there is a lot of hum coming through the amp. When engaged the sound is much quieter and not at all distorted. So back to the drawing board I guess…

If there’s hum coming through the amp when in bypass, you 100% have a grounding issue there!

 

[Guilherme Collateral]

Also, the clipping LEDs are missing

 

[Sturdag Lagernathy]

Also, the clipping LEDs are missing

I figured he did the "no diode" so he could get op-amp only tonez..

 

[GizzWizzKing]

Can you verify your input signal is soldered to the 3PDT breakout? I assume it is but I can't tell from the photo.

Can you see flow through on any of the socket posts?

 

[Guilherme Collateral]

I figured he did the "no diode" so he could get op-amp only tonez..

Now that makes sense

 

[comradehoser]

Also, the clipping LEDs are missing

yeah, that might be something to put in, maybe.

 

[comradehoser]

After that, it's got a jfet, so maybe the biasing is off (?) I don't know how prone j202s are to spec variance.

Your resistors around the jfet look to be the required values, so I don't know.

Do you know if this works out of box (rock it before you box it)

I'd do a visual inspection first. Make sure that nothing is grounding out, for example. Your in/out tip wires could be contacting the back of pots or the enclosure, 9V power is also very close to jack ground, so maybe look for contact/bridging around there.

Recheck all of your values according to the build doc, and then it's time for voltage measures on the tl072 and the j202 pins, and also an audio probe could be productive.