# Bring out the shame cube



## flemming (Oct 9, 2022)

In the spirit of sharing mistakes...  I'm going to guess that I'm not the only person to ever do this, but I do feel like today's screw up was pretty dumb.  I've been working on some of the Madbeans bass pedals for a friend and I have a couple in flight.  I started populating a board today and as I reached the end of the list of resistors (having soldered in most of them up to this point) I noticed there were still some empty resistors spots on the board.  err, that's not good.  Turns out that I started populating the board while looking at the wrong build doc! 😡  At least 4 of them were the same value, so there's that.  So here's to having the values printed on the board itself 🍻  This message was brought to you by the Engineer Desoldering Pump, Chem-Wik and WD40 Contact Cleaner. sigh.


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## Barry (Oct 9, 2022)

Haven't done that one yet but have had plenty of mishaps I can only blame on me!


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## Funnel (Oct 9, 2022)

I’ve done something similar. I was populating two boards at once part way through I mixed up the build docs. I can’t remember how many resistors I had to redo. It sucked. I’d like to say I learned to take things slower and focus on doing one build at a time, but no, I’m still reckless.


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## Dan0h (Oct 9, 2022)

Oh man! I will agree having values printed on the board is light years ahead of R1-43 C1-23. When I was populating a recent MBP board I accidentally put C32 into C37 because the gotdamn print is so tiny the c37 looked just like c32 and since there is no rhyme or reason in the ordering layout of Rs and Cs they are randomly strewn throughout the pcb I had no way of knowing it was wrong. Luckily I caught it and desolidered the bad value out without effing up the pads. 
Thank god for wick….


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## Deperduci (Oct 9, 2022)

I mess up when calculating how many I need for a build, I never solder until all the resistors are places.. now being shown the error of NOT checking for pin 1 on some IC's... 🤦‍♂️ 🤦‍♂️


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## MichaelW (Oct 10, 2022)

flemming said:


> In the spirit of sharing mistakes...  I'm going to guess that I'm not the only person to ever do this, but I do feel like today's screw up was pretty dumb.  I've been working on some of the Madbeans bass pedals for a friend and I have a couple in flight.  I started populating a board today and as I reached the end of the list of resistors (having soldered in most of them up to this point) I noticed there were still some empty resistors spots on the board.  err, that's not good.  Turns out that I started populating the board while looking at the wrong build doc! 😡  At least 4 of them were the same value, so there's that.  So here's to having the values printed on the board itself 🍻  This message was brought to you by the Engineer Desoldering Pump, Chem-Wik and WD40 Contact Cleaner. sigh.


Ok I haven't done that one yet but I've come close...hahaha. 

My latest is a long running in flight project that I just can't seem to get to finish. It's a complicated multi-board-multi-pedal-in-a-box custom board. It's got about a million components and a mix of SMD and through hole. It took me a while to get all the parts for it, always seemed like I was missing one value this or that.

Finally got it all together, had all the parts pulled, sorted neatly into compartments in a plastic tackle box. Ready to go....
Couple days ago I was working on a guitar project (same wheeled bench that I keep all my pedal project components). 
Somehow I swung the bench around too fast, the tackle box went flying, exploded open on impact with the garage floor and I had components everywhere. My garage floor is not known to be particularly neat or clean, there's always leaves and debris blowing in. Took me forever to pick everything up and I'm not positive I got everything. I have yet to go back and resort. Extremely glad I had already soldered the SMD components to the board. There is NO WAY I could ever find MMBFJ201's in my garage floor if I dropped one. (Ask me how I know......heh)


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## vigilante398 (Oct 10, 2022)

flemming said:


> Turns out that I started populating the board while looking at the wrong build doc!


I have actually done exactly that. You are not alone.


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## Robert (Oct 10, 2022)

flemming said:


> Turns out that I started populating the board while looking at the wrong build doc! 😡



+1 for no build docs!  Can't use the wrong doc if none exists....   

(This also doubles as my entry into the thread)


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## szukalski (Oct 10, 2022)

I've been trying out vero for some basic circuits recently, populated resistors. Grabbed coffee. Populated some caps and then realised I had flipped the vero half way through and a bunch of stuff was in the wrong place.

Lesson learned, populate left to right always. Mark the top right corner. Never fight a land war in Asia.


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## flemming (Oct 10, 2022)

MichaelW said:


> Somehow I swung the bench around too fast, the tackle box went flying, exploded open on impact with the garage floor and I had components everywhere.


Oh man, that's one of those moments that I'm sure you felt like you were watching in slow motion. I hope you found everything.


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## K Pedals (Oct 10, 2022)

I soldered all the resistors on a Klein Bottle v2 pedal from Vfe only to realize I was looking at the v1 docs!.!!

I felt at that point it’s time to buy an electric desolder gun 😔


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## Quirkey (Oct 10, 2022)

I hate to admit how many times now I've soldered the breakoutboard/3pdt switch upside down!


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## flemming (Oct 10, 2022)

K Pedals said:


> I soldered all the resistors on a Klein Bottle v2 pedal from Vfe only to realize I was looking at the v1 docs!.!!
> 
> I felt at that point it’s time to buy an electric desolder gun 😔


Ouch! At the end of the day I only needed to desolder 16 or so resistors, so not the end of the world, but that moment of realization stung. The board cleaned up great and looks brand new. It most certainly could have been worse.


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## Oh_Discordia! (Oct 10, 2022)

I'm in the middle of doing a little tuneup on my fender Pro Jr.....sit down with pile of components and instructions and pull all the relevant stuff off the PCB......start repopulating.....aaaaaaand i realize i've been using outdated instructions and have pulled out more than i should have.   amp is sitting behind me as a patiently wait for my new parts to arrive.....

check parts list BEFORE you start!


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## Laundryroom David (Oct 11, 2022)

Multi-transistor build. Tight board. Thought I had the correct pinout for all 6 transistors.  I had the datasheet!  Ffffrrrrrooommmmmm the wrong manufacturer. Coincidentally also the last time I soldered transistors directly to the board.


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## Harry Klippton (Oct 11, 2022)

Once I wired the in and out jacks backwards (tip to ground, sleeve to the circuit.) The pedal worked but sounded terrible. 

Another time I made a pedal without graphics 🥶


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## steviejr92 (Oct 11, 2022)

When I started I was drilling the holes by just taping the template on the enclosure and drilling. My holes would be off so much that it bothered me and bought the drill template from PEDALPCB. Happy as @&$” to use my new drill template I went to drill the holes for my seabed delay only to drill in the wrong spots. These holes were so off I did a worse job after getting the template than I had ever done when I started. Suffice to say I pay attention now and learned my lesson. 🙄


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## cwsquared (Oct 11, 2022)

szukalski said:


> I've been trying out vero for some basic circuits recently, populated resistors. Grabbed coffee. Populated some caps and then realised I had flipped the vero half way through and a bunch of stuff was in the wrong place.
> 
> Lesson learned, populate left to right always. Mark the top right corner. Never fight a land war in Asia.


Inconceivable!


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## mhshizz (Oct 11, 2022)

Quirkey said:


> I hate to admit how many times now I've soldered the breakoutboard/3pdt switch upside down!



Yeah, this is always infuriating. I always buy more of them little boards than I need because you never know when I might biff this.



steviejr92 said:


> When I started I was drilling the holes by just taping the template on the enclosure and drilling. My holes would be off so much that it bothered me and bought the drill template from PEDALPCB. Happy as @&$” to use my new drill template I went to drill the holes for my seabed delay only to drill in the wrong spots. These holes were so off I did a worse job after getting the template than I had ever done when I started. Suffice to say I pay attention now and learned my lesson. 🙄


My drilling was always off early on and it was driving me crazy. Then I finally remembered to choose print "full size" or 100% scale, and turn off any "fit to page" or other resizing options that seem to auto-apply as soon as the print dialog box opens. Then it was pretty smooth sailing and my holes weren't too close together.


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## steviejr92 (Oct 11, 2022)

mhshizz said:


> Yeah, this is always infuriating. I always buy more of them little boards than I need because you never know when I might biff this.
> 
> 
> My drilling was always off early on and it was driving me crazy. Then I finally remembered to choose print "full size" or 100% scale, and turn off any "fit to page" or other resizing options that seem to auto-apply as soon as the print dialog box opens. Then it was pretty smooth sailing and my holes weren't too close together.


It’s pretty humbling isn’t it? 🤣


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## Mentaltossflycoon (Oct 11, 2022)

Quirkey said:


> I hate to admit how many times now I've soldered the breakoutboard/3pdt switch upside down!


Definitely guilty on that one over here. Let's not talk numbers...

Just remembered, years ago, I bonked a fuzzdog 8 knob 2 footswitch fuzz factory. I confused which was latching and which was momentary. It got aggressively thrown into the trash, no stop in the box o shame.


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