MOWAH heel click : maybe this is a SOLUTION ????

[Christian Wasmer]

Hi everybody

I have put a MOWAH board in an old CRYBABY pedal with almost all possible mods, pots, toggle switches, and I had the dreadful “heel click” syndrome.

I have tried everything around the potentiometer to change its taper, its value (with paralleled resistors), tried an old pot, to little or no avail. I suddenly realized that moving around the wires that run from the MOWAH board to the pot did affect how the click happens ! In fact if you very slowly rotate the pot you can have the click become a continuous oscillation. These wires run from the PCB, which tends to be on  the heel side of the housing, up to the pot on the opposite side, and they cross many wires so they are prone to picking all kinds of noise . I believe that there are as many layouts or wire routings as builders, so not two builds are the same. In the end my solution to the click is :

1. add a 22 K ohms heel (pun intended) to the pot on  its “hot” side (not the ground side)
2. carefully twist the two wires  between PCB and pot (hot and wiper)

Maybe a piece of shielded cable would be even better.

Nevertheless, nothing happens much between heel down and a fair amount of travel, so at the end of the day this solution isn’t much different from the previous one I had adopted : put a carefully metered travel stop under the form of a hard rubber pad.

 

Hope this can help !

 

[Author]

Posts