Update on the pedal

I started to work on the guts last night and was able to accomplish most of the soldering in an hour or so with my friend Matt, who is much more experienced with this kind of thing and also has a basement full of a zillion cool nerd-toys that make the job easier—a nice soldering iron and space age wire strippers and the like.

Then today, I started applying the clearcoat lacquer to the enclosure. Three mist coats 30 minutes apart had it looking very nice and shiny, with the added benefit of obscuring the edges of the decal film. After a 24-hour drying period, I'll sand it with very fine sandpaper and apply additional coats of lacquer.

I set out to finish the wiring tonight, but no sooner was the iron hot than I realized I would need to start screwing pieces into the enclosure, which as I've just told you is not finished yet. So I had to stop for now. Bummer—it's a lot of fun. I'm already thinking about my next build!

Before I sprayed on the lacquer, I placed the knobs, LED, and footswitch loosely into position and snapped a quick photo with the circuit board next to it. It's looking great. I can't wait to see and hear the finished product!


(This photo can be enlarged to see the nerdiness up close; just click on it.)

My tremolo pedal

My mom got me a great Christmas gift this year: a tremolo pedal kit from Build Your Own Clone, a company that supplies idiots like me with a bunch of electronic components that, when soldered together properly, make really nice guitar effects pedals.

I haven't gotten to the soldering part yet, but I've been having fun turning the enclosure from a boring bare metal box into something that I would be proud to have on my pedalboard. First, I primed it with some Rust-Oleum, then put three coats of yellow Rust-Oleum spray paint on it. Then it was on to the design phase.

I spent a little bit of time mocking up the pedal in Pages (which is solid as a basic design/layout application, if you're wondering). After I was satisfied with the design, I had some decals printed. Originally, I had planned on purchasing some waterslide decal paper suitable for use in my inkjet printer, but as luck would have it, I saw an ad on a nerdy guitar player forum for professional quality waterslide decal printing. This seemed like a much better option than the inkjet version. I submitted my design, and the decals arrived from the UK today.

After Abel went to bed, I put the decals on my yellow box. I didn't do a perfect job; it's a little tricky getting the decals off the backing and onto the surface, so the alignment is imperfect. But overall, I am quite happy with the results. I'll post again during the soldering phase, and again when it's all finished.