Repair WASP Filter Clone D.I.Y.

My friend Robert Babicz gave me this unique wooden box asking me for repair. Condition was non working, partially damaged. As I opened it up I thought (nooooooooo wayyyy). In this case most repair people would refuse a repair. The inside looked like a mess and very time consuming. Everthing inside was hanging around, loose wires, weird construction. That box was, what I call, do-it-yourself. In my mind d.i.y. (short form of do-it-yourself) is, build something with the parts you have in stock. In this case it meant: even a single wire was soldered together by different pieces of different length. All pcbs were self made. No earthing, no safety grounding. I have no idea, why so many people do that.

The box consists of an phaser module, an LFO, a WASP filter clone and a fuzz module. All can be flexible connected to each other or to a modern Eurorack.

Since there weren´t any connectors inside the 1st thing I had to do was to extend most wires so that I had a chance to disassemble and document the whole thing. That took quite a while. Once I had everything seperated I would do some research, what’s all about it. One pcb was a phaser module (still don´t know excactly what phaser), another was a simple VCLFO, a (multi) WASP filter was on one pcb and last but not least there was a distortion stomp box pedal pcb. All this was powered by an old SMPSU (switch mode psu). That had seen better days. Since these are cheap these days I decided to replace that with a new one, one with more protectio circuits and a quiter one. I had to change all the wiring, all the jacks and most potentiometer.

Since the pcb’s were self made and not protected against corrosion I had to fight with a lot of bad connections, bad, cold solderjoints, lifted or intermitten traces.

I added a fuse (!), earthing, ground and a propper mains wiring.

The wooden case also got some attention.

Here are the pictures, mostly for my own documentation, but I also share this with you guys.