Troubleshooting intermittent Blues Breaker II pedal questions

[kdawson]

I have a Blues Breaker II pedal which I use mostly as a booster.  Recently it failed, but not fully.  The sound it was producing was similar to the "bad clipping/gating" sound you get from some pedals with a low battery, but it exhibited the same symptoms with AC power.  It also had a fairly low output with the level turned all the way up - less than half the level of when the pedal was bypassed.

I had been using it for a few months with no problems, but I did buy it used, so I thought I would crack it open and see how difficult it would be to just replace the Op amp, caps and transitors as an attempt at a quick fix without any serious troubleshooting (consequently, it looks pretty easy to get at all of these in this pedal).  While I was there I reseated some connectors and looked for bad/cold solder joints - nothing immediately popped out as the problem.  When I threw it back together and tried it out, it was back to it's old self - a bit to my pleasant surprise.

My questions are:

Can/should I trust this pedal?
Would retouching the solder on all connections be worthwhile?
Given that it appears to be fine again even after a couple of hours of steady use, can I rule out component failure?


Thanks in advance!

[spargo]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe a failed cap can exhibit this behavior.  I once accidentally put some polarized caps in backwards, and the pedal still worked.  I had expected it to blow up if I made this mistake  But it slowly failed over a period of a few hours and began cutting out eventually.

[kdawson]

That was one of my initial thoughts, hence the thought that I might replace all caps initially - but if it were a cap, I wouldn't expect it to start functioning normally again for a two hour period (would I?)