Return Of The Rat

My buddy brought me his ProCo Rat distortion pedal for repair.

I smell a Rat...

It wasn’t working at all; with the pedal off, he had signal but, with the circuit engaged, he got nothing.  That sounded to me like the switch had failed so I decided to go ahead and start there.

I swear, nine times out of ten, if your stomp box is crapping out, it’s the switch.  The good old heavy duty Carling switches last a long, long time, but the trend towards converting pedals to “true bypass” has introduced a lot of cheap, low quality 3PDT switches into the market.

New switch installed, done deal!

That wasn’t the case here, however.  This was an older Rat pedal; I haven’t seen inside of a newer one but these were built like tanks!  Nice, solid engineering and assembly.  Changing out the switch was a cinch and solved the problem.  Case closed (oooooh, bad one…).