Pedal build diary - blow by blow account

SteveF

Philtre said:

SteveF said:

You planning on doing any more etched ones at any point?  I'm keen to give that a go at some stage.  I have spent a bit of time looking at graphics and have a little folder of images that would be good for pedals.  Just need to work out what effects they would suit.  Some of them I think would look amazing etched with some kind of paint in the fills.

Hmmm...might do, but I think I'll wait to see how you get on with that!

Haha, okay, I will have a go at some stage and do a blow by blow of it 

marauder

Good to see the tutorial me and John did for the Envirotex works for other people.  Lots of bad pours before I got to that stage.  Hardly ever any issues now, and I know the signs of a bad pour before its hardened and can usually rectify.

Adam_MD

marauder said:

Good to see the tutorial me and John did for the Envirotex works for other people.  Lots of bad pours before I got to that stage.  Hardly ever any issues now, and I know the signs of a bad pour before its hardened and can usually rectify.

Your guide is gold Cleggy.  I’ve only had 1 bad pour since I started using it when I didn’t measure the 2 parts properly.  

Thank you to you and John for giving so much back to the diy community.  

Philtre

marauder said:

Good to see the tutorial me and John did for the Envirotex works for other people.  Lots of bad pours before I got to that stage.  Hardly ever any issues now, and I know the signs of a bad pour before its hardened and can usually rectify.

Nice one. That tutorial has become the de facto instruction bible for Envirotex. Cheers!

Philtre

Part 17

And now I'm going to finish this pedal build. Huzzah!

But before I do that I'll share my method for mounting the LED.

I don't like LED bezels and prefer to have the LED poking through a 3mm hole in the enclosure. I found a useful method to achieve this in a forum post over at diystompboxes.com. It consists of a 5x5 hole piece of vero board with a hole drilled in the centre. I drill this hole just large enough so the LED can poke through it:




Then I glue this small piece of vero, track side facing outward, to the inside of the enclosure with the hole lining up with the LED hole.

The LED is pushed through the hole so it just pokes out the top of the enclosure. The LED legs are soldered to two vero tracks. Later on I can solder two connections from the main board and to the stomp switch to these tracks. Handy.

I suppose I could hot glue the LED into the hole but if I need to add a CLR I can solder it onto the mini-board here.




I then attach all of the pots, the DC socket, the mini switch, the stomp switch and the two jack sockets in the side:




Then I start on the off-board wiring using the wiring layout found over on tagboardeffects:





First off, I solder the connections between the pots, jacks and the stomp switch:


 

 

 
Then I add some polarity protection.

Here's a Schottky diode soldered on the positive terminal of the SC socket. Wired in series, this protects against inadvertently powering up the pedal with the positive and negative terminals swapped.

I'll put some heat-shrink over this to hide it:

 


Here are all the connections completed. (It's a bit mad that the circuit board is so tiny compared to all of the real estate taken up by the hardware)

 


And here it is! Finished. :-)



I need a beer...

SteveF

Huzzah!  Looks great - nice and neat! Did you stick the board itself down with anything? 

Philtre

SteveF said:

Huzzah!  Looks great - nice and neat! Did you stick the board itself down with anything? 

Nope, it's a floater.

Well, I put some insulation tape on the underside, and the wires seem to somehow hold it in place. As Paul Daniels used to say, "now that's magic!"

SteveF

Yeah I figure that I'll have to tape up the back - some of the pots that came with the kit didn't have the covers on and I haven't got a Tayda order yet. 

Sesh

This electronics stuff is beyond me and I'm very impressed.

I had a thought about the ET curing and how CO2 helps. Do you think rigging a second chamber above the dust cover, with say, a couple of tea lights or one of those little homeopathy burners in it to burn a cleanish fuel to generate a constant supply of CO2 to wash down into the dust cover. Or, as a second better thought, pipe in the CO2 from a soda stream cylinder.

aord43

I like the LED mounting board.  On my two pedals so far it was soldered directly to the stomp switch terminals (via a resistor) which just holds it in place.  I was thinking of using a bezel on my next one but maybe I will try your method, if there's room in the case.

Philtre

aord43 said:

I like the LED mounting board.  On my two pedals so far it was soldered directly to the stomp switch terminals (via a resistor) which just holds it in place.  I was thinking of using a bezel on my next one but maybe I will try your method, if there's room in the case.

You could probably just dob a blob of glue gun over it instead of the mini-board and solder direct to the LED pins. But I like this method because I can solder the CLR to it if it needs a separate one.

Edit - I just realised I already said that above!

Philtre

Just a quick update - since I finished the pedal in this blow by blow account, I've built a few more. They can be seen in The Pedal Finishing Thread - Painting, Coating, Drilling, Envirotex, etc