Anxiety Disorder Drive – ground issue (solved)

[Anonymous]

Hi.

I’m a newcomer to this forum and recently started building guitar pedals. I encountered an issue with my ADD build, similar to the one discussed in this thread. Specifically, there is no ground connection for R13, as well as for the volume and tone potentiometers in the circuit.

I’m not certain if our problems are identical, but I did measure DC voltage on the output jack (nearly 9 volts). The capacitors in the vicinity appeared to be functioning properly. After some random probing, I discovered continuity between R13 and the first pin of the volume potentiometer. Removing R13 resolved the DC issue.

My primary questions are: What could cause the ground connection to be absent? Is it acceptable to add a jumper wire in this case? Do I have a short somewhere?

I’m new to electronics and pedal building, but I have successfully built a few pedals. This is the first one that has encountered problems. I would be grateful for any guidance on where my build went wrong to avoid making the same mistakes in future projects.

I’ve attached pictures of the board in its current state. During troubleshooting, I removed the offboard components to narrow down any potential issues. The board didn’t look this scuffed before all the desoldering :p

Thanks,
Ruben

[Barry]

While extremely rare I am looking into a manufacturing defect on this batch.

You can add a jumper to get a ground connection just fine and that was what the other guy did.

[Barry]

Looks like the simplest way to do it is to use any available ground pad and connect a small jumper from the ground pad to the center lug of the tone control. You can tack it onto the extra solder from the Tone pot center lug sticking through or whatever seems best. That is the easiest and smallest kludge which will be unobtrusive on the back of the board.

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I’ll give it a shot 🙂

[Anonymous]

Yup! That fixed it. The pedal sounds great! Thanks again for the help 🙂

[Author]

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