Landtone Klon Centaur Clone Kit Guide [Fix]

Let me preface this by saying I am not throwing anyone under the bus here, I'm just stating a fact. As I browse r/diypedals, I find that the Landtone Klon Centaur Clone overdrive kit comes up often. A majority of the time the person is seeking help with their build not having output. The issue here is there is a guide online that most people follow, since the instructions included with the kit are useless, that has a mistake in it. I myself used this guide and came up with the same results of no output. Frustrated, I started to remove the cables from the pedal while the amp was still turned on. As the tip of the cable came out of the jack it scraped against the right part, allowing me to hear my guitar. This told me the wiring on the jack was done wrong. All I needed to do was swap two wires and everything worked perfectly.

Every time I see someone needing help with the Landtone Klon clone kit I post an image of my known working wiring because I understand how frustrating it is to build a kit and it not work. It's even more frustrating when a guide is put online and it's WRONG. Which leaves most novice builders completely in the dark as to what happened to their build, and possibly ruining their first experience building a pedal. Which may also ruin them ever wanting to try again. I will provide an imgur link as I don't think blogger will support such a large image. So, if you've purchased a Landtone, or Landtone style kit from TTone or ProLandtone, etc. and your build has no output, check the image provided below. The main problem will be the top jack on the righthand side of the image. The wiring is colored different to make things a bit easier to follow. Hopefully this will help people, maybe even so much so that GuitarGearFinder will fix their guide, or post a correction of some sort.

Correct Landtone Klon Clone Image

After publishing this I went back through and noticed they acknowledge they wired it wrong in the "guide", but they still got it wrong in the image, even though they claim it's corrected. Please note: The image below is the incorrect way to wire the output jack.

Small Amp Repairs

Today's title is literal in both meanings. Firstly I will be repairing small amps, and they are indeed small repairs to said amps. Up first is my Fender Mustang Mini with an input jack booboo. With the amp being as small as it is, and the input jack sticking out of the top, sometimes things such as guitars can accidentally bump into the cable while it's plugged in and snap that input jack. It happened to me!

I continued to use the Mustang Mini this way for a quite a while. I finally got tired of losing the part that broke off of it in the first place, because it was still required to hold the guitar cable properly, and decided to change out the jack. Now I almost made a mistake, but I think I managed to redeem myself. I checked to make sure it was all going to fit, and it seemed it would, until I completely mangled the original jack to get it out. Even though it was broken it still worked, but after I removed it I was at the point of no return and had to make the new jack work, even though it was slightly bigger than the original.

After it was soldered in, tightened down and everything was put back together it seems to work just fine. I am a bit concerned about it's longevity, but I guess we'll worry about that some other time. As long as it works I'll use it. The only external difference is that the new jack has a chrome ring around it, but otherwise it looks pretty good, I think.

Before

After

Next up is my Lyon AMP3. This is a little amp I've had for years and rarely ever use, because it's really just a novelty more than anything. One day, many years ago, I noticed it wasn't working properly, so I opened it up to see what was the matter. The only problem I could find was one of the capacitors was absolutely obliterated. It was just a pile of dust between two solder mounds. I was confused because even back then I rarely used it and it worked perfectly when I put it away. I decided to replace the capacitor with whatever I could steal from my collection of old broken electronics.

As you can see I didn't do the cleaned job installing the capacitor, but it worked and that's all that mattered. I figured since I was going to be soldering on the Mustang Mini I may as well give this little amp an adjustment. My SMD soldering skills aren't any better than they were when I originally repaired it, but it's somewhat more refined. Kind of? Regardless it works and I feel a little better about how it looks inside.

Small repairs that will hopefully extend the life of these little amps. The guitar pedal builds have ceased, for now, as I'm not sure how many more guitar pedals I need. I have some ideas, but they're currently just ideas. I felt I should use this nice sunny day and get something accomplished, so I did. Yeah, I do need to work on my SMD soldering skills.