Ibanez WF10 fuzz wah oddness

[Josh_bb]

Hi, i am looking at my old pedals again and finding some issues i can't figure out

I have an old Ibanez WF10 it has a couple of things going on that are odd.

Firstly, it seems to use up a battery way too quick, like it has a short or something, but it still seems to function ok.

Secondly: when fuzz in on and you press to switch on the wah there is a bit of a delay the the effect to happen, and when you switch it off, it seems to go off gradually. When it is just wah alone it is instantaneous, its just when fuzz is on that it happens.

any help figuring out whats going on would be greatly appreciated.

hopefully a schematic is attached..

[Mark Hammer]

ALL pedals that use JFET switching will insert a small, largely undetectable amount of delay in turning the FET on or off.  That's what the 1M resistor and 4N7 cap to ground are for.  The intent is to avoid any sort of "clicking" artifacts.

As drawn, however, the JFETs for switching the fuzz section in and out do not show any such components.  I don't know if that was a simple erroneous omission on Dirk's part, or the way it is actually designed.  That said, I see from the drawing that a possible culprit for the delay in onset of fuzz may be C26, a 47uf electro, which seems to be used to partially fulfill the traditional role of the 1M/4N7 pair.  It's not an especially old pedal, so one's instinct to replace all electros is not the same as with something from pre-1975, but try replacing that cap and see what happens.

[Josh_bb]

Hi Mark,  that's great information, I appreciate that. 

Could a bad capacitor be the cause of seemingly massively excessive battery drain?  (is there a way to test?)

I was considering bypassing all the jfet stuff completely if possible and making it old school true bypass for both the wah and fuzz so they could also be used independently, not sure if that's sacrilege on a quite rare pedal such as this maybe just by cutting some traces so its reversible...

I attached a schematic of the WH10 which is supposed to be the same as the WF10 but without the fuzz.

I find these WH/WF10 pedals are really good sounding vocal wah's with not an inductor in sight....

[Mark Hammer]

Could a bad capacitor be the cause of seemingly massively excessive battery drain?  (is there a way to test?)

Above my pay grade.

[thermionix]

Could a bad capacitor be the cause of seemingly massively excessive battery drain?  (is there a way to test?)

Above my pay grade.

Above mine too, but I would guess that an electro that's leaking DC, especially one directly connected to the battery (C24), would hurt battery life.  How old is the pedal?  Could be due for some new electros.

[Josh_bb]

hi,, it's  29 years old

[thermionix]

Yeah, it's due.

[Josh_bb]

thanks i will have a fiddle and see wah happens

[duck_arse]

C8 [4n7] connects to the FUZZ_ON line, and therefore to D1 and D2. C10 [4n7] connects to the FUZZ_OFF gate diode D8. C26 charge and discharge will have to affect the turn on and turn off times of the fuzz on/off fets.

[Josh_bb]

Cheers mate, I appreciate that I will investigate into that too

[Josh_bb]

hello peeps

so i changed the electrolytics suggested by you chaps and it seems to be much better now.

below is a quick demo of the pedal, apologies to Mr Hendrix in advance, it's the first thing that came to mind.....