Hello,

A few years back I got a Black Finger Tube Pedal off of Ebay. It always sounded fantastic except that occasionally it would emit this, sound. Weird electronicy kind of thing. After a while I finally tracked it down to a filter cap that had one pin cut too short to solder properly to the board. A couple of years later I finally ordered new caps and just recapped the whole thing. Voila, no weird sounds, just tube compressor goodness.

But then there was a new problem. Or probably not a new problem–just one I hadn’t noticed before because I hadn’t really been using the pedal much before due to the aforementioned weird noise problem. But what I noticed was that when I changed the Squash/Normal knob I got a *big* change in gain structure. Would go from really quiet to really loud. What was even stranger is that this would happen regardless of whether I was using the lamp or the led setting. It should only really have an affect in the lamp setting and even then it should be fairly subtle. Even stranger, switching between lamp and led didn’t seem to yield much difference at all.

Well, I’m sure I screwed something up when recapping. So I open her back up and spend some time poking around, referring to a schematic I found somewhere on the internet. Then I notice something. On the auxiliary circuit board that holds the pots and switches, the leftmost switch is labelled “Squash/Normal” and the middle switch is labelled “Lamp/Led”. That’s odd. On the case, they’re labelled just the opposite of that. So I actually dig in there and trace those leads up that ribbon cable and back and lo and behold, the circuit board is labelled correctly. The leftmost switch is actually the “Squash/Normal” switch. The symptoms I described above? They make perfect sense if the labeling is reversed. The pedal is functioning perfectly well–it was just behaving counter to my expectations because I thought that a switch that was doing one thing was actually doing something completely different.

Naturally, I’ve been Googling. You’d think a mistake like this would have been noticed. I can’t find anything. Maybe I don’t know what to search for, but I haven’t found any mention of any Black Finger pedals with the switches reversed. And I’m sure it’s been fixed by now. Surely new compressors aren’t coming off the assembly line with this mistake.

So, I’m just curious, really. How rare is this pedal? Has anyone else ever seen one like this? They can’t all be screwed up like this and no one’s noticed. Anyone from EHX care to comment? The circuit board is labelled: EC-T13 Rev A. No idea what the current rev is, or what the rev history is. Oddly all of the photos I can find of the Black Finger have the same control layout labeling as mine, so assuming it has been fixed, EHX fixed it by changing the circuit boards rather than by changing the labeling. Which seems like the more expensive way to fix it, but maybe they really wanted to keep the control layout labels.

Anyway, I’m really just curious about the history of this pedal. Who knows something about this? I was just floored when I finally figured this out. Just really funny.

Thanks!

Chris