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A high school buddy of mine messaged me on Facebook with a bunch of pedals he was selling a few days ago.
I went out to his place to check them out and came home with a Caline Blue Ocean for $10 and also a vintage Japanese Boss Turbo Overdrive that he gave me for free after he couldn't get it to work when showing me.
The Caline delay sounds great and the decay is quite different from my Visual Sound H2O in that as the repeats continue they degrade on the low end frequencies as opposed to losing high end.
I do pedal mods so I decided to have a look at the Boss OD2 and see if I could figure out why it wouldn't work. I was told if I could fix it, I could have it for free. He already knew that the AC Jack was no good, but said it worked on batteries last time he used it, so I opened up the pedal and examined the PCB, wiring, etc and couldn't see anything wrong; but when you plugged into it the LED wouldn't work and nothing but horrible noise from the amp. I decided to double check by taking everything out of the housing and then compare the wiring to another Japanese Boss pedal I owned and confirmed it was all wired correctly. Then, I had the "aha" moment... Where was the plastic shield that goes between the cover plate and the PCB? There was none. Cut one from a piece of clam shell packaging and reassembled the pedal and tested. It now works on batteries. The circuit. Was being shorted out on the cover plate.
Now, to address the faulty jack. It was melted. Obviously someone connected the wrong power supply to it and fried the Jack. I had an old pedal laying around I couldn't repair so it became an organ donor. I took the Jack from it and soldered it into the Boss and now have a fully functional vintage Boss pedal that averages $70 on eBay.... And I got it free. It doesn't sound bad either. Some feel it lacks bass but to me, I'd likely use another pedal for rhythm tones and stack this with it as a lead boost. The treble from this pedal will cut through nicely and it doesn't have the fizziness of the modern Chinese version.
I went out to his place to check them out and came home with a Caline Blue Ocean for $10 and also a vintage Japanese Boss Turbo Overdrive that he gave me for free after he couldn't get it to work when showing me.
The Caline delay sounds great and the decay is quite different from my Visual Sound H2O in that as the repeats continue they degrade on the low end frequencies as opposed to losing high end.
I do pedal mods so I decided to have a look at the Boss OD2 and see if I could figure out why it wouldn't work. I was told if I could fix it, I could have it for free. He already knew that the AC Jack was no good, but said it worked on batteries last time he used it, so I opened up the pedal and examined the PCB, wiring, etc and couldn't see anything wrong; but when you plugged into it the LED wouldn't work and nothing but horrible noise from the amp. I decided to double check by taking everything out of the housing and then compare the wiring to another Japanese Boss pedal I owned and confirmed it was all wired correctly. Then, I had the "aha" moment... Where was the plastic shield that goes between the cover plate and the PCB? There was none. Cut one from a piece of clam shell packaging and reassembled the pedal and tested. It now works on batteries. The circuit. Was being shorted out on the cover plate.
Now, to address the faulty jack. It was melted. Obviously someone connected the wrong power supply to it and fried the Jack. I had an old pedal laying around I couldn't repair so it became an organ donor. I took the Jack from it and soldered it into the Boss and now have a fully functional vintage Boss pedal that averages $70 on eBay.... And I got it free. It doesn't sound bad either. Some feel it lacks bass but to me, I'd likely use another pedal for rhythm tones and stack this with it as a lead boost. The treble from this pedal will cut through nicely and it doesn't have the fizziness of the modern Chinese version.
coming from a technical support background I sometimes find myself thinking outside the box to find solutions. This time was just a matter of finding the right stuff to get my parts from.
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