The Wreck of the Ella Fitzgerald

[chip]

This is my latest pedal. It's a take on a Big Muff, but with op-amps on the input and output and an active tone stack with variable mids, designed by dylan159 and built on stripboard.

The things I was mostly doing with this were 1) making a white-on-black design and 2) starting to use stranded silicone wire. I feel like I'm starting from zero with this wire for some reason...it's so springy and flails all over the place and I find tinning the ends unnecessarily tedious (compared to pre-tinned solid). I suppose the silicone is nice, but I had a certain amount of skill built up for dealing with PVC insulation and its melting point wasn't really an issue. There's going to be a bit of a learning curve in getting my wire runs as neat as I had them with solid, but I guess this will hold up better over the long haul.

Full write up and more photos are here: https://dunningkrugerfx.com/the-wreck-of-the-ella-fitzgerald

 

[Bricksnbeatles]

I love it!

 

[Phil hodson]

And what an absolutely stunning wreck she is too. Deep, dark and cold!!!!

 

[Coda]

Clever and original. Very nice.

 

[Barry]

Looks great, love the art

 

[GizzWizzKing]

This looks like some Joy Division album art that never quite made it to the mainstream. Awesome. Love the vibe.

 

[Feral Feline]

Great pedal, and a sharp turn on the name.

I was going to name a pedal The Edmund Fitzgerald, but I don't have as good a graphic design.

 

[Alan W]

Great great name! And graphics to match!

have you had durability issues with the wire you were using before? I’ve bought the silicone wire for test leads, but really like most wire to have some “shape-ability”— on the other hand, I use solid pretty consistently, and there are times when a little flex would be nice. Especially with vero, the stiff wires help hold it in place. (But with vero I use some adhesive board mounts to stabilize it.)

 

[chip]

have you had durability issues with the wire you were using before?

I don't know for sure. I don't make pedals for sale, but I do occasionally make them for friends, and the last one didn't work after shipping. I haven't been able to do an autopsy, but there's nothing obviously wrong from the photos. My guess is that it's a broken solder joint or wire, and someone elsewhere suggested that I shouldn't be using solid core wire since it's more likely to break with repeated bending. I'm not sure how big a deal this actually is, and I probably will still use solid for my own stuff because I like working with it a lot more, but the experiment here was to get some practice with stranded and see how I liked it. I didn't, but I guess it's nice to have options.

 

[Alan W]

If it’s a non pot/switch secured board, I can understand the concern about potential breakage at solder points. On bigger boards, using some sort of attachment is a good idea, and even on small vero boards I tend to use a small bit of foam based double side tape to hold them against the inside pedal top (this also acts as an insulator). I used to use 22 g in pedals, but have pretty much set on 24 g, which I don’t find too stiff.

For the amounts of wire we typically use, getting pre-tinned is an appealing option if you go stranded.

 

[Feral Feline]

Pre-bonded/tinned stranded-wire holds its shape almost as well as solid-core, kinda the best of both worlds.

How long have you been using solid-core vs how long for stranded? Maybe you didn't like it 'cause you're still not used to working with it yet?

 

[chip]

The one that failed was pot-secured. This one is vero, and my usual [cheesy?] technique for that is to put a piece of duct tape in the bottom for insulation and then hot glue the board to it. It's reversible if necessary (ask me how I know) but still reasonably secure.

I didn't realize that tinned stranded was an option. That seems like it would defeat the purpose of stranded in some ways, but maybe not, and it does sound like a potential middle ground. I've definitely got way, way more experience with solid core.

I'm totally open to the wire all being a red herring in terms of what went wrong on that one. I just felt dumb, and thought I'd give this a shot. For science. The silicone insulation is interesting from a "non-melting" POV, but like I said, I haven't had much trouble with melting PVC since my technique got reasonable.

 

[HamishR]

I've used teflon-coated wired before and while I like it stripping the plastic of can be a pain. And surprisingly it's very slippery! I started off using solid core because it's easier but had too many dud joints because it snaps so easily.

In amps now I usually use cloth covered or more frequently the PVC coated tinned/stranded stuff. For joints it's not so different from solid though. You have to be careful it doesn't snap where it emerges from the solder joint, especially if it's on the underside of the board. Used properly it's great and I have very few issues with it these days. Amps are a little bit different though because you have a bit more room, the wire is thicker and you can anchor things more readily. Still, the tinned/stranded stuff is easy to snap - possibly because the individual strands are quite thin. Using PVC doesn't bother me as much as it used to because I've learnt how to use it without it melting into a black mess.

The way I avoid issues like these in pedals is to route the wires somewhere where they won't be subject to much movement. So my wires from the sockets to the switch are routed along the bottom corner of the enclosure. Here they are out of the way of anything else and stay put. It makes tracing the circuit for mistakes easier too.

BTW I absolutely love the name and artwork. Beautifully done.

 

[chip]

This isn't actually about the Wreck of the Ella Fitz, but given that we were talking about my other pedal that got messed up, I thought I'd provide a minor followup:

I got the other pedal back from my friend. It definitely didn't work. I took it out of the case (including cutting the wires from the power and audio jacks) and wired it up to my test pedal, and it worked fine. I can't tell for sure, but I guess something was wrong with either a broken wire (internally, where I couldn't see the break) or a bad solder connection to one of those wires, because I didn't do anything to fix it.

Then I repainted the case to something of my own and put the circuit board back in...and screwed up the wiring and broke it again.

While trying to troubleshoot that, I got way deeper into the schematic, which was pretty frustrating to make sense of for this newb, since apparently major portions of it don't actually do anything?

Anyway, it's working now. I don't really love the case design (I was initially going for an inverted White Album thing, but it's obviously way too busy and kind of got away from me) and I'm not sure that this circuit is my thing, but I now have a Conqueror of my own.

The full writeup is here: https://dunningkrugerfx.com/gently-weeps