Maxon OD808 Repair

Originally posted: 24 June 2010

Maxon OD 808 Repair

I bought a Maxon OD808 overdrive on ebay for $22.50 (+$10 shipping). It was listed as not working, but because these pedals sell for $150 new and $60-$90ish used, I thought it was worth a shot.

Based on the seller mentioning a burning smell after the pedal stopped working, I assumed that he had used the wrong power supply.

I was correct. The diode that protects against reverse polarity (D5), had been thoroughly burnt, along with the adjacent DC jack and the circuit board. I read a post by someone who ruined a pedal by using a 2-amp power supply; most pedals this size use about one-tenth of that (200 mA for the math-impaired).

So it was clear that I needed to at least replace the burnt diode, so I started there. A few months ago, I disassembled a broken CF bulb to see what it looked like inside, and I ended up salvaging some parts from it. Among those parts was the diode I used to replace the fried one in this pedal (1N4001).

 So, after an investment of $32.50 + 20 minutes + $0 in parts, I have a $150 pedal, which sounds awesome.

Silencing the Fisher Price Geotrax Grand Central Train

We bought a train set for Maisie (and me) at a rummage sale today. It has a remote control locomotive but it plays loud train sounds whenever you operate it. The sounds scared Maisie, so I wanted to silence the remote while keeping it operational. To do this, I did the following:

1. Removed the batteries, then removed the five screws showing in this photo above, as well as one on the other side.

2. The speaker wire was not difficult to find after opening the remote. It's the yellow wire (note arrow) that connects the speaker to the solder points marked "SP" on the circuit board.

3. The picture above shows the bottom view of the solder points for the speaker. I gently heated these points with the soldering iron -- keeping slight tension on the wires as I did so -- until the wires pulled out.

4. I reassembled the remote, which is now completely silent. Now Maisie can hang out with her smelly wino friends at Fisher Price's GeoTrax Grand Central Station without being scared away by the noises.