Saturday 15 July 2017

Ibanez FL9

A quick one. I got this original 80's 9-series flanger that didn't seem to be "flange-ing".

Ibanez Fl9

When plugged in it gave out that tell-tale "whirr" sound when power was applied that some kind of delay was happening. It sounded like the signal was delayed correctly and mixed in with the clean signal, but nothing was happening with the LFO, so there was no "movement". First thing to check is if the Speed pot is wired up or broken.


Back of speed pot

Hey, are those two lugs of the speed pot shorting together? I removed the pot and separated them with some needle nose pliers. The speed pot now varies the speed of the LFO and everything works as expected.

PCB topside

A quick shot of the board while I have this open. The BBD and clock generator ICs are MN3207 and MN3102, manufactured by Mitsubishi. Build quality is pretty high for what was standard at the time. All the electrolytic capacitors are Nichicon brands, some have "8138" datecodes so I think this is 1981 vintage.

The flanger sounds great, but is much more subtle than the MXR I looked at recently. This does chorus-style sounds much better rather than screaming airplane sounds. 9V operation is a bonus.

3 comments:

  1. those two yellow electrolyte caps are prone to leakage. i have fixed several of these pedals where those caps had leaked and there was no flanging sound.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those IC's are made by Matsushita\Panasonic. I mention that if you are trying to find them through online searches.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Is this right? I have seen plenty of these ICs with the "M" Panasonic/Matsushita logo. The ones on this board have a Mitsubishi (?) markings.

      Delete