Repairing Mooer Hustle Drive?

Flanging_Fred

A little while ago my Hustle Drive stopped working. This evening I opened it up and sure enough inside is a burnt out component. (See the black square blob at the front of the photo). Can anyone tell me what the blob is that has burned, an op-amp maybe?

Seeing as the components are so small, would this be repairable by someone or should I just write it off and bin it?

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb102/flanging_fred/Music/1C6B8247-A3DE-4BAA-A34F-08D6680B01C5_zps0urv0bng.jpg

4114Effects

Tricky one, depends what the component is. Hard to tell from that picture, but could be a capacitor or diode of some kind. Looks to be only two solder points, so not an opamp. Trouble is, could have burned out other components on the board too. Looks to me like it was powered with the wrong supply, or got a power surge. Might be worth a try though, if you can track down the part.

NervousJohn

That was once a tantalum capacitor. Generally used to get a big capacitance in a small package, but they do fail a bit more often than ceramic capacitors.

Probably one of these but check the sizes before ordering.

http://cpc.farnell.com/1/1/88180-capacitor-c-case-100uf-16v-t491c107k016zt-kemet.html

It's repairable if you know how to rework SMT components.

thermionic

In that case it was probably installed the wrong way round. Tantalum caps can withstand a small amount of reverse bias voltage but they should be treated as electrolytics - there's a little protrusion to indicate polarity. If you solder in the replacement, make sure you get it right, because their failure mode is "bursting into flames". That's what probably happened here - it was soldered in the wrong way and could just about cope with the reverse voltage, but burnt out when it was exceeded for whatever reason.

A few years ago, in a previous life as a designer of SMPS chips, I had several test boards with the chip's output smoothed by a bank of 8 tantalum caps (similar to the dc power supply caps in a valve amp). I'd been testing and experimenting at the optimum conditions of 1.1V output for a while but needed to plot a few graphs at the highest output voltage the chip was designed for, up to about 20V. When I got to the board which had all 8 Ta caps soldered in wrongly, the flames leapt up over a foot into the air! 

NervousJohn

Most electronics engineers have a dead tants story.... Mine involves wiring up a 250W RF power amplifier to two phases of the mains rather than one and neutral.

Thinking about it, the only place you could use a cap that big is for a very smoothed power supply line. I'd just remove it and see if it worked and if you really feel like it bodge an electrolytic in there.

Danny1969

You can change that with a standard iron, gently heat one end while sliding a blade under it, then when it's clear of the pad do the other end. If you aren't sure you can do that then cut it in half with a set of side cutters and do one half at a time. That SMD is much bigger than the one's I deal with on laptop motherboards and I rarely break out SMD desoldering kit for anything other than VLSI chips

dano

There may well be something else that has gone wrong. If that is a tantulum cap then it will most likely be on a power line (rather than the audio path), between power and ground doing some filtering. Try removing it and see if the pedal works, it may be shorting power to ground.

Flanging_Fred

Thanks for all the advise. My soldering skills don't go much further than putting cables together. It sounds like it might be salvageable but probably by someone with a bit more technical nous than I.

Then again, it's already buggered so I may as well have a crack at it!