HAHA, I'm a hack when it comes to engineering. lol Yeah, Joe has had a very nice impact. One of his best, and I think it is his mod, I may be wrong, is an input volume for the octavia. It takes it from a very narrow window of use to a broad range of use by attenuating the input so the circuit isn't over saturated. It makes the octave track much better.
Believe it or not, I'm blind, not black blind, but I can't see anything with any detail, so I can't see the graphs. These are ideas I was mostly hoping to help you with, and yeah, for my own selfish desire to help you develop a very nice pot too. I assume, with a taper plotted out, CTS or Alpha would be willing to build it, if you buy enough of them. lol
My favorite pots are the Hot Potz 1, and the BYOC ICAR taper pot. Which I prefer all depends on where I have the wah in the chain. If it is after fuzz (and I use fuzz as a warm preamp boost), I prefer the BYOC ICAR taper pot. If it is before octave and fuzz I prefer the Hot Potz 1 when I cover Jimi's BOG songs.
The Hot Potz 1 is warmer through more of its throw, so it sounds better with octavia. However, going into fuzz and octavia, the difference between pots is less noticeable. After my warm preamp fuzz, the difference is very noticeable, because the wah is much more expressive. I keep two wahs in the chain because I use wah both ways.
Which wah I use depends on how much I want to have to move my foot for the wah and the riff, and how expressive I want the wah to be. The BYOC ICAR taper requires less movement to get that vocal vowel, and it has a longer upper mids than the Hot Potz 1, whereas the Hot Potz 1 is a bit more broad, with a shorter upper mids of its sweep. They both feel good under foot. I think a pot that lands somewhere between them would be nice.
Something I do hate about the Hot Potz 1 is how it has its useful sweep crowded down into the treble/counter clockwise end of its rotation. Its useful sweep should have been better centered within its range. I always set the gear one tooth back from the full counter clockwise treble extreme, then clock the pot a bit. As you mentioned about limited gear range, you have to leave some pot travel for the front bump stops to compress, so you can latch the footswitch without breaking the gear.
Some people like to remove the front bump stops, then latch the footswitch with the treadle and set the gear in its last tooth. You have to loosen the nut and clock the pot to do this, because it needs a slight bit of wiggle to ensure you don't break the gear. If you do this, the footswitch is the bump stop, so it is impossible to break the gear this way, but I don't like it quite this bright, and I always end up accidentally toggling the footswitch at some point, so I always install the Dunlop 3/8 long front bumpstops, if they have been removed.
I have a McCon-O-pot in a wah, and it sounds good, but I don't like the stiff high torque feel (it impedes movement), and it doesn't have as nice of a vocal feel under foot. However, I do still have the stock .193 long bump stop in the heel of the treadle of that wah, and that is limiting the treadle's sweep. It may have a better vocal quality if I extend that range a bit with a shorter rear bump stop. I do have the wah set center of the sweep, and I'll recenter it by clocking the pot once I increase the treadle's sweep range.
By clock, I just mean to loosen the nut, turn the pot, then resnug the nut. It gives a finer adjustment than moving the gear by a full tooth. I always try to set the wah in the center of the treadle's sweep. I almost never leave the solder lugs facing straight up. I usually install a shorter rear bump stop too, to increase the sweep range.
All I've ever used are Dunlop Crybabies, and recently I started buying 90's V847's. I now have six of them. lol Those have chassis mount jacks (not PCB mount like the GCB95), through hole components, and no goofy battery door on the bottom plate. They are easy to work on. They typically only need some paint sanded off around the jacks, the pot, and the footswitch to get them well grounded to reduce noise, and swap in a good pot, if it is worn out, to get them up and going. We always true bypass them too, and we ground the input and the output of the circuit when the switch is bypassed.
We install a 3/4 x 1/8 neoprene pad with contact cement, with a 3/4 x 3/16 heavy duty felt furniture pad stacked on it to reach the short bushing 3PDT footswitch. I had already bought these pads and they weren't long enough alone to reach the footswitch, thus the 1/8 neoprene idea under the felt pad. A .250 thick neoprene pad, or a 1/8 neoprene pad, with a 1/8 felt pad would reach. I use the LMS low profile footswitch Joe recommends.
We have swapped in the Wilson halo in a couple, which by the way, is great, but the Wilson pot is the one I do not like, at all. The Wilson pot has almost no vocal mids. It is almost like a bass/treble on/off switch. It is good for the intro of Voodoo Child, when played the way Jimi stabbed the toe end down while he vibratoed the string, but to play it rocking the treadle like SRV did, it sounds shrill and nasal past mid sweep. Nasal when moving back from toe down.
