I am building my own distortion pedal but every time I connect it to a 9V power source it does not seem to work?

Question

I am trying to build my own distortion pedal. I initially built this on a breadboard and connected it to a 9V power supply and it seemed to work fine when I connected it to my electric guitar. So I decided to solder it to a prototype PCB board. The ground and live wires are connected to a 2.1mm barrel jack and is then plugged into a 9V power wall adapter. But for some reason every time I try to power up the circuit board the live and ground wires between the 2.1mm barrel jack and the circuit begins to smoke and the plastic casing melts. I am unsure of how to fix this problem and I was wondering if anyone had any solutions? I've added the image of the circuit and schematic below

Answer 1

For a start it appears that you have forgotten to cut the traces between the pins of the chip. That means that pins 1 and 8 are connected, 2 and 7, 3 and 6, 4 and 5. They shouldn't be.

Figure 1. A Vero tool is rotated by hand to remove copper around any hole thereby isolating the strips either side of that hole. This tool doesn't go right through the board as in Figure 1.

If you haven't got one of those then a 3 mm drill bit twisted in your fingers will do the job.

Next you shouldn't really be connecting all the wires directly on the bottom of the board. Keep components and wires on the top side and at the edges. That way you'll be able to inspect it more easily.

Figure 2. Rather neat circuits can be built on Veroboard if the components can be mounted perpendicularly to the direction of the copper tracks. Here there are no flying wires and all cross-connections are done with components or wire links. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Note that the links are all straight wires going across the direction of the strips. To get from one side of the chip to the other would take two links.

Answer 2

It's a very poor circuit for a guitar input (they need much higher input impedance) and there's no indication in your schematic that you have connected power rails to the chip. Also, the TI version of the TL082 does not state that it will run from a single supply of 9 volts: -

I can't see cuts in the copper tracks that would prevent opposite pins of the TL082 shorting. Neither do your photographs indicate how the back-to-back diodes are connected to the chip.

On another note, your tone control will cause the op-amp to oscillate if wound to close to one end i.e. it would place a 22 nF capacitor on the op-amp output and that's usually a recipe for disaster.

In short, your design looks poor and your implementation also looks poor and very suspicious.