I don't know if the Catalinbread Naga Viper MKII's input attenuator was implemented like what I did. But I thought it would be simple enough to add the input knob. The enclosure is Weston Gray 1590B from SBP.
This one was a doozy. I thought it would come right together, but I made a ton of mistakes along the way. I swear I wasn't drunk or high when I built this. To the "rock it before you box it" folks: this build might be the thing that pushes me into that camp. Here's what went wrong.
The first time I boxed it, the LED didn't work, the GAIN only worked at full CW, only the GE transistor worked, and the IN was wired backwards AND I hooked it up directly to the input jack
. My takeaway with the transistor was that there may be a biasing issue.
So when I unboxed it, I flipped the LED around, fixed the wiring for the input knob and put a 100k trim on R2, which was just a guess based on what I know so far. Then I reboxed it.
The trimpot proved to be pointless later on. The GAIN still only worked at full CW, and the SI transistor was still not working. I figured the 2N2222 was in backwards. And indeed it was, somehow I misinterpreted the diagram on the datasheet, or I was looking at a PN2222? I don't know. I flipped it around and boxed it up.
This is starting to sound like a children's book. The GAIN still only worked fully CW. Then I noticed something that absolutely mortified me:
I put EVERY board-mounted pot in the wrong position.
Not really sure how I pulled that off. That GAIN knob was was an A500k instead of B1K. No wonder it only worked fully CW.
So it was surgery time. I managed to get all the pots off put them in the correct places. I reboxed it the third time.
This time, the IN and OUT knobs didn't do a whole lot, and the pedal barely reached unity gain. At this point I walked away from it for the night.
The next morning, I was pretty sure I ripped off a pad when removing the pots. So I bridged pins 1 and 2 on the GAIN and RANGE knobs.
HOLY SHIT IT'S ALIVE! I was relieved.
The pedal itself? I like it a lot. I did one other mod- I couldn't find a 68nF in my stash, so I went for a 150nF. This worked out nice, and made the RANGE rangier. Tt sounds pretty rad on bass.
This one was a doozy. I thought it would come right together, but I made a ton of mistakes along the way. I swear I wasn't drunk or high when I built this. To the "rock it before you box it" folks: this build might be the thing that pushes me into that camp. Here's what went wrong.
The first time I boxed it, the LED didn't work, the GAIN only worked at full CW, only the GE transistor worked, and the IN was wired backwards AND I hooked it up directly to the input jack
. My takeaway with the transistor was that there may be a biasing issue.So when I unboxed it, I flipped the LED around, fixed the wiring for the input knob and put a 100k trim on R2, which was just a guess based on what I know so far. Then I reboxed it.
The trimpot proved to be pointless later on. The GAIN still only worked at full CW, and the SI transistor was still not working. I figured the 2N2222 was in backwards. And indeed it was, somehow I misinterpreted the diagram on the datasheet, or I was looking at a PN2222? I don't know. I flipped it around and boxed it up.
This is starting to sound like a children's book. The GAIN still only worked fully CW. Then I noticed something that absolutely mortified me:
I put EVERY board-mounted pot in the wrong position.
Not really sure how I pulled that off. That GAIN knob was was an A500k instead of B1K. No wonder it only worked fully CW.So it was surgery time. I managed to get all the pots off put them in the correct places. I reboxed it the third time.
This time, the IN and OUT knobs didn't do a whole lot, and the pedal barely reached unity gain. At this point I walked away from it for the night.
The next morning, I was pretty sure I ripped off a pad when removing the pots. So I bridged pins 1 and 2 on the GAIN and RANGE knobs.
HOLY SHIT IT'S ALIVE! I was relieved.
The pedal itself? I like it a lot. I did one other mod- I couldn't find a 68nF in my stash, so I went for a 150nF. This worked out nice, and made the RANGE rangier. Tt sounds pretty rad on bass.
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