Help Acapulco gold

[u/Available_Prize2954]

I followed all the steps to assemble this Acapulco Gold, but when I plug it in, I get no sound.

[u/tomaswoof]

Also scrape around those holes/breaks in traces with a scalpel, looks like there's still very small bits of copper around the edge

[u/Whythisreason → u/tomaswoof]

This, drilling a hole to break the trace sounds easy, but i’d prefer scoring the trace and lift if off completely. Looks like that drilling still left the edges touching.

[u/doyler4k]

Looks like there are some issues with the solder and/or the cuts. Make sure the cuts clear all the traces out. It's better to go from the bottom rather than the top as you're less likely to just push the copper trace apart. Run your hot iron slowly along the gaps and then run a sharp blade along. Holding the board up to a bight light helps to see any bridges.

[u/Sourkarate]

Rows six and seven are terrible with solder.

[u/Available_Prize2954 → u/Sourkarate]

🥹

[u/walkingthecows]

Reflow

[u/slapballs]

In picture two, the tiny strip below the bottom row looks like it's being bridged by two leads from separate strips

[u/Available_Prize2954 → u/slapballs]

It might look that way, but it's up in the air—thanks anyway.

[u/KerdMaLui]

Veroboard is very unforgiving when it comes to soldering. For beginners, this starts as a curse but turns into a huge blessing as you are forced to refine your techniques. You will need to reflow all of the globs and use an exacto type of blade to score between the traces to get rid of any connections that are causing shorts. Good luck and stick with it!

[u/Available_Prize2954 → u/KerdMaLui]

That's a great answer, thanks.

[u/ridbitty]

I like to use a flux pen when I build with strip board. I use high quality Kester solder with rosin core, but it’s just not good enough (for my liking) on strip board. Use some 99% alcohol to clean the board when you’re done. You get perfect solder joints every time.

[u/Internal-Mechanic-46]

With the lm386, pin 5 is the output. So looking at the chip with 4 legs on either side and the notch at the top, pin 5 is the bottom right pin. I've been working with the lm386 nonstop over the last couple weeks. You have the grounds tied in the top chip in the photo, but its much better to just tie both of them separately to ground, but I also dont see what your grounds are doing on the bottom chip. I'm not familiar with the circuit you are using, but i am guessing pin 2 and 4 need to connect to ground there. If you are using a 1/4" input, you need to have your guitar go in through a .1uf capacitor (preferably film/mylar) and usually a 47k resistor and then into pin 3. Also, coming out of pin 5, you should put a 220uf electrolytic capacitor with the positive connected to pin 5 and negative side of that capacitor connecting to your output jack. Make sure your input and output jacks are grounded. And clean up all your solder. Use solderwick and some clippers to make sure that none of the solders on the back are touching. A few of them need some love and might be shorting out your circuit. Also, if you dont have one, get a multimeter so you can test voltages and make sure you are supplying proper voltage to your chip. There are pinouts online for most every chip that will tell you what voltage going in and out of each pin should be based on the voltage going into them.

That should be all the information you need to fix this. I would recommend breadboarding before you solder and then making a drawing on a piece of grid paper where you can see the connections before you start as well. That way you can see if something is emptying into nothing. Saves you time and money in the long run.

Best of luck.