BossAreaForum

Hello, everyone!

I just bought my first vintage pedal after a long time of research, and I hope I didn't make any mistakes while looking at this Boss CE-2's identification elements.

As far as my research went, it's a CE-2 made in Japan on April 1981 (serial 051600), long dash font, black label, black screw and rounded enclosure.

Are these elements right? And do they match based on the month/year of manufacturing? Here are the pictures:

https://imgur.com/a/h7BmIBW#yRPf0QE

Last, but not least, is the circuit in good shape? Are the solders OK?

I'd be very grateful if I could get some opinions from you guys! Many thanks in advance and cheers from Brazil!

It all looks good apart from there appears to have been some solder work done on the board. If you can post a clear shot of the component side I'll check it out and let you know.

One of the clear indicators that it is true vintage is the nuts on the input and output jacks. On pedals of this vintage the nut sits at the end of the thread - no thread on the jack itself showing. This looks good here.

laurie wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 21, 2019 2:12 am

It all looks good apart from there appears to have been some solder work done on the board. If you can post a clear shot of the component side I'll check it out and let you know.

One of the clear indicators that it is true vintage is the nuts on the input and output jacks. On pedals of this vintage the nut sits at the end of the thread - no thread on the jack itself showing. This looks good here.

Here are the images: https://imgur.com/a/koaBLIs

Please, give me some good news!

Welcome to the forum!

It looks pretty good to me. Some of the solder joints looked a bit bad on the first picture, but it seems like it only looked so because of the light. On your new pictures only a few solder joints look strange around a few resistors, but really strange are the solder remains on the "C" of the circuit board label (CE-2 052-516B). Maybe the previous owner had to put a bit of new solder on a few joints and didn't do the tidiest job. To me it looks like these are all the original parts.

Pepe wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 21, 2019 2:14 pm

Welcome to the forum!

It looks pretty good to me. Some of the solder joints looked a bit bad on the first picture, but it seems like it only looked so because of the light. On your new pictures only a few solder joints look strange around a few resistors, but really strange are the solder remains on the "C" of the circuit board label (CE-2 052-516B). Maybe the previous owner had to put a bit of new solder on a few joints and didn't do the tidiest job. To me it looks like these are all the original parts.

I noticed that "stain" on the "C", but it doesn't look like it has any impact on the circuit's functioning, am I right?

Is that black stain just under number 12 (on both sides of the board) OK? What about that kind of orange stain on number 13?

Sorry for the inquiry! I'm really a layman on this subject.
But apart from the fact that a minor job has been done here, is everything in its right place? I mean, the pedal sounds great, but I wouldn't know if it should be sounding better

Thanks for the feedback!

Floydsound wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 21, 2019 1:27 pm

laurie wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 21, 2019 2:12 am

It all looks good apart from there appears to have been some solder work done on the board. If you can post a clear shot of the component side I'll check it out and let you know.

One of the clear indicators that it is true vintage is the nuts on the input and output jacks. On pedals of this vintage the nut sits at the end of the thread - no thread on the jack itself showing. This looks good here.

Here are the images: https://imgur.com/a/koaBLIs

Please, give me some good news!

Someone has definitely been doing some soldering on this board. You can see it looks different just above the "CE-2" letters on the board - there even appears to be a solder dag on top of the "C" in CE ... poor soldering skills.

However. The components all look original, so I do not know why this would have been done.

laurie wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 21, 2019 3:39 pm

Someone has definitely been doing some soldering on this board. You can see it looks different just above the "CE-2" letters on the board - there even appears to be a solder dag on top of the "C" in CE ... poor soldering skills.

However. The components all look original, so I do not know why this would have been done.

I appreciate your observations, laurie!
Could you look at my reply to Pepe, above? I just wanted to know if, regardless of this minor intervention, there's nothing to worry about in the long term.

I mean, I don't know if there's anything burned or clearly about to fail in there.

Is there anything to worry about? It's very hard to tell from a pic, but the soldering I pointed out does look sub-standard. Will it fail? Probably not.

Would I fix it if it was mine? Yes...