modded WAH problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter zepfan59
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zepfan59

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Let me know if there is a better forum for this. I opened my Dunlop Jimi Hendrix wah and made a small adjustment to the gear hoping to get a tad more on the high end. While in there I cleaned out the dust etc--air in a can type thing. Now the pedal comes on but doesn't WAH! Basically it sounds like a great lead boost, but no wah. I checked the shaft from the gear to the pot and it is turning. WTF?
 
You adjusted the gear positions so that the pot would operate outside of its intended range, right?

First suggestion would be to adjust it back and see if that fixes it.
If that's no good, inspect the thing to make sure you didn't break any solder joints or disturb any of the connections in there.
 
Out with the magnifying glass! Also check for burnt caps (especially the .05 uF at the output of the wah section) (assuming yours is the capacitor vintage). Never done these mods myself, but my brother was big on mods back in the 90s (and still is).
 
Ok so weird. I did adjust the gear back again and now it's working, wah wah again. But it's even more midrangey than it was so I did not get the gear back in the same spot--maybe one more tooth to get a bit more of the high back. What I was trying to do was get more high freq from the original position but she no like.
 
There are mods for that if you're handy with a soldering gun.
 
have you checked the circuit for dry solder joints? sounds likely to be a botched job.
 
Open it back up and try turning the pot by hand. Turn it all the way up to the toe end and then turn it down slowly and see how far down you have to go before you hear a change.

IDK for sure what's happening here, but I know that some of these wah pots have a kind of S shaped taper such that nothing really changes at the ends of the rotation. It's also theoretically possible that there's just a certain point in the circuit itself where increasing (or reducing, whatever...) the resistance of that pot just won't make a difference because it's already hit some sort of limit.

Either way, though, if you figure out how far up you can turn it before it stops making a difference, and set it up so that it gets just there at full toe-down, you've got all the treble you're going to get without changing components.
 
Some wahs just aren't right for what you need. I had a Dimebag Wah (Lol, I know, but it was free) for a little while and it never ranged like I wanted it to. Stupid metal head shit. So I tried to redo the pot/gear thing and it still never got to where I liked it. So I dumped it and bought a Crybaby 535Q. Perfect wah.
 
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