strange problem with odie stompbox

[jaguarcat311]

alright this one is really wierd. i breadboarded the odie pedal http://www.runoffgroove.com/odie.html however i substituted most of the caps for close values. all the electrolytic caps are correct though. i substituted j113's for the 3 j201's reccomended. to my surprise, it made no sound...... except when i wiggled the hot voltage wire going to the last j fet. just makes kind of a crackling sound. now here comes the wierd part. when i was looking over it for any bad connections, the ground wire slipped out, and then the pedal worked (aside from the horrible ungrounded buzzing noise. however the 250k drive pot didnt do anything. i plugged back in the ground wire, and then unplugged every grounded wire one by one to see if the signal was getting grounded out somewhere..... none of that did anything. i tested my power supply, about 8.4 and 4.2 V. i even tried running all the j fets at 9 volts just in case 4.2V wasnt enough to run it. still nothing. im soooo lost here.

[Stevo]

Pretty straight forward pedal .....are the pinouts correct besides that its got to be a basic problem signal out connected to ground by mistake or no gound connects to jacks....is gain pot wired right ...many simple things to check will lead you to the one big thing that it is....I added a 220pf to ground from first resistor for radio stations and added on the gain pot a 390pf from the input to the signal out parallel...Now this is not your problem but when you get it, these things get rid of noise and oscillation that I did not want!!!

[jaguarcat311]

hey thanks for the info, i tried getting rid of the drive pot just in case something there was bad, still makes no sound. i know the pinouts are correct, i just used two of these jfets to make an orange squeeze compressor. again i checked each connection to ground to make sure that wasnt it, so im still lost here.