Hi Everyone,
I couldn't think which forum section would be most appropriate place for me to start this thread, but the amplifiers section seemed the most appropriate cause we guitarists tend to use pedals with our amps anyway, I just had a bit of a win with regards to fixing my Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer pedal.
So what was wrong with it?, basically, it wasn't foot-switching reliably, sometimes it was a bit intermittent, other times it would simply refuse to foot-switch at all, sometimes it would stay bypassed, or un-bypassed, I decided to open it up and have a good look around on both sides of the circuit board using a magnifying glass to see if I could spot anything that might be causing the foot-switching to malfunction, this is a classic example of where you need to have a clear head while doing any troubleshooting, at the time I was doing the troubleshooting, I was feeling a bit tired so my mind wasn't as sharp as it could have been.
While looking at all the components on top of the circuit board with my magnifying glass, I noticed some whitish-looking substance underneath a small ceramic capacitor, one terminal of the capacitor was connected to a resistor that connected to one of the contacts of the foot-switch, the other terminal of the foot-switch was connected to circuit-ground, on a hunch I grabbed my digital multimeter, set it to the 20M resistance range, and measured the resistance of the capacitor, which should have measured close to infinity, it actually measured about 7.5 kilo ohms, that looked very suspicious to me, so I tried de-soldering the capacitor and then scraping away the whitish substance with a Stanley-knife blade, then I soldered the cap back into it's place on the circuit-board, result....that fixed the foot-switching malfunction completely and now the foot-switching reliably functioned as it was supposed to.
I'm going to take my Ibanez TS-808 pedal into uni tomorrow to give it a good test out with my Marshall amp along with my Boss BD-2 Blues Driver pedal (it had been playing-up too, but I believe I have also fixed it as well), will let you know how it goes.