I just finished a Supa Tonebender build.  This is the first of three pedals I am currently working on – hopefully in about 10 days I will have the other 2 finished.

At the end I ran into a couple of difficulties due to a grounding issue at the input jack.  I knew there was a problem when the LED would light up after depressing the switch without a guitar jack placed into the input jack.  Also the pedal volume was way less than that of the bypass into the amp and there was no fuzz.  I encountered this problem before having placed the transistor backwards into the socket on a previous build, so I first flipped the transistors around and got fuzz and all 3 knobs to work, but again the volume was way less than bypass volume.  So I double checked the transistors and yes the original orientation was correct, so I pulled out the IP and OP jacks, plugged in the guitar and voila copious and loud amount of fuzz.  I carefully placed the jacks back into the enclosure making sure there were no contact of any of the jack lugs or associated wires with anything metal and problem solved.

This build was somewhat tight due to the IP/OP jacks and DC power jack at the top of the enclosure and close proximity to the control pots and LED.  Very tight fit which took some planning and strategy to get it all to work.  As when I work on most projects, I compare the board schematic to those found on the internet and discovered a couple of interesting things.  First, some Supa Bender schematics show the diodes as being silicon (1N4148 or 1N914) although I found a schematic that stated the diodes are Ge.  Another difference is the placement or not of the second diode pair in the schematic – most don’t but one does.  Pictures below.