Holowon - Static Egg

MoreCowbell · Post by **MoreCowbell** » 28 Jan 2009, 21:13

Wow, talk about poor build quality. This came in a trade deal, so I went to put a new battery in and TWO wires came off ! The board is loosely lodged in between the switch and the input jack, and the battery is lodged ...well, placed....on the other side of the switch. When I pulled up the battery clip to put in the new battery, it moved some of the other wires...and two of those wires broke at their solder joints ! (1 on the switch, for the LED...the other was a ground wire on the board)

HORRIBLE build quality. I had heard horror stories about these, but found it hard to believe that somebody would put out such a poorly made product...I was wrong. The sad thing is that the pedal itself sounds kind of cool....but I'm half afraid to step on it ! Someday when I can do more soldering maybe I'll build a better quality one.

Anyway, just in case any of you are interested, here's a schematic for it. It's basically two boosters with a Big Muff tone stack.

jrod · Post by **jrod** » 28 Jan 2009, 23:18

Thanks for the info and schematic!

RnFR · Post by **RnFR** » 29 Jan 2009, 00:40

glad to see you stoppin by andy. thanks for the schemo!

soulsonic · Post by **soulsonic** » 29 Jan 2009, 02:37

I almost want to see a pic of it now, just to view the horror...
Thanks for the scheme; now I'll have a reference if I ever need to repair one!

MoreCowbell · Post by **MoreCowbell** » 29 Jan 2009, 03:57

soulsonic wrote:I almost want to see a pic of it now, just to view the horror...
Thanks for the scheme; now I'll have a reference if I ever need to repair one!

OK, but this is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me...

Pictures are attached. The wire is so thin that if you breathe on it wrong it breaks. Solder joints are sketchy. The pots - I tossed a bunch in the garbage a few years back (I bought them for 5 cents each) because they were so bad I couldn't even use them for prototyping.

That said, this is a pretty cool sounding fuzz.

Also, you might notice that the board has one more resistor than the schematic...that's a 3k for the LED, so I didn't include it. Of course instead of drilling an extra hole in the pcb to secure the wire, they just soldered it to the underside on the trace.

Enjoy.

flood · Post by **flood** » 29 Jan 2009, 04:13

yeesh, what an unholy mess. that looks seriously disgusting. like the first PCBs i made at home, before i knew what a transistor was, using copper clad pressed-paper board, a marker and FeCl3...

that is definitely the shittiest build quality i've ever seen in a commercial stompbox.

PurplePeopleEater · Post by **PurplePeopleEater** » 29 Jan 2009, 04:25

WhiteKeyHole · Post by **WhiteKeyHole** » 29 Jan 2009, 04:28

PurplePeopleEater wrote:

RnFR · Post by **RnFR** » 29 Jan 2009, 05:13

wow. those pots are the kind that i see in shitty old japanese transistor radios. really crappy.

soulsonic · Post by **soulsonic** » 29 Jan 2009, 06:15

Reminds of some things I built in high school before I knew what I was doing... just kinda jam the board in there and hope for the best. Definitely has that hand-drawn-with-marker look to it. Actually, it's not as bad as I expected... not quite on Dirty Boy level in my opinion (which, by the way, is the other place I've seen those cheap pots used...). Of course, the Dirty Boy stuff doesn't seem to break as easily, so I guess it's actually better quality, though I have trouble using the word "quality" in the same sentence as "Dirty Boy".

What is up with those burn marks all over the board? I can only imagine what kind of iron they were using. Maybe they soldered with a cigarette lighter?

WhiteKeyHole wrote:
PurplePeopleEater wrote: