Small Stone Version 1, V1, Adding LED

Now that we've solved the volume drop issue, I can clean up the Small Stone, figure out a final value for the LED dropping resistor and finish it up.

I read on some web forum recently about this Evapo-Rust stuff.   I've used Naval Jelly with mixed results and even tried muriatic acid (!) on rust.  But the Evapo-Rust sounds promising, especially since it's non-toxic and biodegradeable.

There is some mild corrosion on the outside of my Small Stone, so I dipped it in Evapo-Rust overnight.

It came out pretty well.  There are a lot of scratches and pits on the surface, which of course won't get removed, but it cleaned it up nicely enough.  I have a couple of radio chassis that are very rusted; I'm looking forward to trying this stuff on them.  The only downside is: it ain't cheap.

I had wired up the bypass switch earlier, using the diagram on General Guitar Gadgets.  Makes it easy for a maroon like yours truly to figure it out.  If you try this yourself, I had put an image of the input and output leads on an earlier post, which may be helpful.

We just put the switches back into place, bolt the input and output jacks on, and drop the board back into place.  You can see how the Rate pot is what holds the whole circuit board into the pedal.  The 3DPT switch is a bit taller than the old switch, but there is enough height to accomodate it.  I reused the old foam insulator between the switch and the top side of the board.

This is the whole enchilada (mmmmm) back together.  I tried to tidy up the wiring some - and I added ground wires (the black and purple wires) to a 'star' ground on the output jack.  The input, board, and output grounds all go to that point now.

 Compared to the original, which had wires flying everywhere, it at least looks better.

One thing I forgot to mention is I also changed out the two ceramic caps on the board to 'modern' plastic caps.  I don't think ceramics are great for tone - the plastic caps might clean up the tone a bit.  Or not.

A little before I started this project, I got these Erem wire cutters.  I have 2 cheap pairs of cutters, and then I read about these on the interweb, so naturally I had to check them out.  They totally rock.  Really sharp, and nice and smooth to use. 

Erem also makes surgical tools...you can work on electronic junk and then do open-heart surgery!

It was straightforward to wire up an LED.  There was a hole someone had drilled for an on/off switch, so I just used that for the LED.  Worked perfectly.

The LED is a green 'super-bright' I got from the good folks at Small Bear Electronics.  I bought a small assortment to experiment with.  A lot of times a 1k dropping resistor is used for these things, but in this case, I started with a 2.2k and a 1k in series and it seemed like the brightness was ok.  But when I tried it while practicing, it was way too bright...so I wound up with a 5.6k in it, not the ones you see here.  YMMV, as they say.

The final touch is polishing up the old Rate knob...

...and the finished Small Stone with LED lit.  It actually doesn't look quite so scratched up as it does in the picture.  In fact it's pretty shiny looking from a few feet away.

It sounds pretty cool.  I think the tone is a bit more transparent, at least in the brighter color mode.  The dark mode isn't quite so heavy, which, for me is a good thing.  It's really swooshy too.  Now I'd like to get a new reissue to compare the two.