Pots and Watts

[keninverse]

So I built triwave picogenerator sometime ago because I etched a few extra boards and I had a cheap enclosure plus I wanted to figure out how to mix in a suboscillator using a norton quad.  I put it all together and I decided to include that waveshaping mod for the circuit.  I didn't have any low wattage pots so I figured I would just use these extra 500K 2watt pots because I could purchase them cheaply.  

When I hooked it all up the waveshapers wouldn't work at all and wouldn't pass any voltage.  But when I went ahead and replaced with the little 1/2watt alphas I didn't have any sort of problem.

So my question is this.  Does the power rating of a pot cause a problem with passing DC voltage as you increase the power rating?  I see these pots used all the time in other stompboxes...

[Transmogrifox]

with oscillators, it would be of little surprise to me that parasitic effects such as stray capacitance and inductance are a problem if you're operating at higher frequencies.

If the oscillators you have are LFOs, I would be more prone to think there is a finite resistance between the pot enclosure and the electrical contacts.  Do you have the enclosure grounded?  Measure the resistance between the pot enclosure and each of the pot lugs and see if it returns anything less than 1 Meg.  If it does, that may be the problem.


Ultimately, better advice could come from somebody more familiar with the manufacture of these things than I am...these are just some ideas that may help lead you to an answer...

[keninverse]

yes the enclosure was grounded but I've since torn that pedal apart...  I do remeber measuring resistance between pot and enclosure and it was fairly high...well over 1M