Wow. First off, this is the 700th post on EffectsBay.com. Crazy! For the 700th post, I’m super stoked to post this guest post by Mojo’s Army out of San Francisco. A couple weeks ago, I saw his video on putting together a DIY pedalboard, and asked if he would be interested in writing a guest post. That goes for you readers out there. Have a interesting tip, story, review, etc. Let me know, and I would be happy to post it. Obviously, needs to be about guitars, pedals, etc.

Like many musicians on a budget, I look for bargains and take on DIY projects whenever possible. Faced with the need for a pedalboard, I thought it would be fun & frugal to put together my own using scrap wood and a hardshell suitcase. The whole project cost me less than $25 and only took about an hour and a half! Some basic tools and materials are assumed to be on hand. It’s a good idea to lay your essential pedals out in as small an area as you can fit them to make sure the size you’re looking at will work. You can also make this project without the case.

Now, I’ll admit I had a harder time locating a suitable suitcase than I expected. Definitely a case of something disappearing as soon as you start searching! After looking everywhere I could think of, I found one that was just the right size in my in-laws’ garage (they never throw anything away). Luckily they were willing to part with it with a little persuasion. I had expected to spend $10 at a thrift shop.

Once I stripped the lining out and cleaned the inside, I measured the case for the largest rectangle that would fit. Rounding down to account for the foam, I came up with a 15″ x 22″ board size. I cut & lightly sanded some 1/2″ scrap plywood and then cut a piece of 1×4 scrap for the heel. I didn’t want it to be too steeply angled, accounting for the depth of the case and also too much of an angle would mean that the large diameter rubber feet I bought for $3 wouldn’t grip as well at the top of the board.

The low-nap carpet was just a scrap from a remodel at work. I had intended to pick up a $5 doormat for this use. A yard of felt or the type of fabric that covers amps would work well too, just wrap around the back of the board and staple before screwing on the heel. The foam was from electronics shipping boxes from work (free). You could get clever and get a bed egg crate a size bigger than your bed and cut it down, then use the big piece on your bed and the cutaway part in the case, giving you a net zero cost for the purposes of your project.

The assembly of the board is straightforward: wood glue and 3 screws for the heel, polyurethane adhesive ($5) + staples for the carpet, then the drawer pull handles ($3 each) were centered on the sides to get the board out of the case easily. For the case, I thought I was going to use the poly caulk adhesive for the foam, but it was too thick so I went with 3M spray adhesive instead. Definitely dry fit the foam before gluing!

If you’ve used your pedals much you’ll want to clean the bottom with alcohol before attaching the stickyback Velcro ($9 for 15′). The rest is just putting your pedals together in the order you want them. Seriously, if you have a couple of hours you can put together your own board easily in less time than it took me longer to put together the video and write up the description! Hope you find this helpful. Rock on!

Materials List

case:
used Samsonite suitcase
foam
3M spray adhesive

board:
1/2″ plywood
additional wood for heel
carpet/felt/doormat to cover board
polyurethane adhesive caulk (or spray adhesive)
“wire” style drawer pulls (2)
roll of Velcro
rubber grip feet

Bio:
Mojo’s Army is a San Francisco Bay Area music project consisting mainly of music-obsessed Mojo, a drummer and graphic artist turned songwriter/guitarist/producer. Mojo first appeared on the independent online music scene in 2008 with the release of his wicked industrial cover of Malvina Reynolds’ classic “Little Boxes”. Mojo’s Army has continued to release music steadily ever since, with a full length album “It’s Hard” in 2009, an electric cover of Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy” and an EP of originals in 2010 (“Summer’s End”), along with a few remixes and other tracks thrown in along the way.

The project’s heavy, groovy sound is a true Bay Area blend of genres – hard rock, punk, pop, and industrial with just enough blues to bring it all together. Major influences are early heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, and modern hard rock / industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails and Rob Zombie. Find them online at mojosarmy.com.

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A musician here in town heard from a mutual friend that I was into pedal projects and he was interested in getting a tremolo pedal. One of my big things as I try to get better with my skills is to continually work on projects. Practice definitely improves your ability to work electronics. You become more efficient and proficient with various tasks from soldering to drilling enclosures, etc. So what I’ve been doing is only charging for parts. Pedal repairs.. I usually accept a 6 pack for my troubles. I’m always looking for opportunities to fire up the soldering iron.

Anyways, this guy wanted a tremolo. I started reviewing various schematics on the internet. Tremolos are definitely more intense than my normal projects. One schematic that looked appealing was at General Guitar Gadgets (EA Tremolo). I fired up my DIY Layout Creator and started laying it out for a vero board. One thing that was evident right away was the size of the board. Vero is great but it can be a pain trying to get the size down to where you want/need it. While I was dicking around with that, I could see the General Guitar Gadgets PCB staring at me in the monitor and decided to just buy the PCB and be done with the hassle.

I also opted to go with the blinking LED mod that would flash the LED with the speed trem speed. I like to things move/blink, so that was a obvious choice. I had most of the components on hand already, but had to purchase a few resistors and the transistors.

Assembly on the PCB was cake (was happy I chose this route). I might try this again, and see if I can etch a PCB based on the schematic. I really want to go this direction in the future and move away from Vero all together. I had a few powder coated enclosures from PedalPartsPlus.com so after completing the circuit board and did my testing, I measured and drilled out the holes. I’m really starting to get a feel for my drill press and holes are coming very easy now-a-days.

After assembly I gave it a thorough test, and it sounds great. I really like the volume pot. You can overdrive circuit with it dimed. Unity gain is about 12 noon. Sounds great with tube amps. I’m not a bit tremolo guy, but I think it’ll cut the mustard. A couple of issues, the blinking LED will immediately blink when input jack is in. I’ll either break this out to the ground on the primary LED or provide a SPST switch to kill the LED. I can see some benefit to adjust the speed while the pedal is off (so you don’t have to engage it to see the rate). Not sure. I’ll ask the guy who this is for.. and go from there. Here is a shot from top.

If you’re into tweaking, building, modding.. love to include your stories as well. Let me know if you’re interested in a guest post!

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Over the weekend I found myself working on a fun project. I’ve been slowly chipping away on my pedal board and one item I wanted to introduce was a bypass loop strip.  I wanted this for several reasons.

- To isolate my pedals and remove them from the signal chain while not being used
- Create chained effects and activate those effects with one switch
- Create a loop for my delay

Now, I already use a Boss LS-2 for my primary lead loop which consists of Holy Fire Overdrive and Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer, but I really wanted a loop for my Line 6 DL 4. I’ve been working on a few songs where I want to turn the delay on and off, but I loose my tempo when I do so, with this in a loop I can maintain the tempo I set throughout the song and pull it in or out.

There are lots of loop strips out there, but I wanted to see if I could build one. It was somewhat challenging to understand how the 3PDT switches work in relationship to the signal paths, and there is a lot of soldering involved, but overall, it was a easy project.

For those of you that might be interested, I documented my steps, and I’ll supply my part list for building the 5 loop strip. First though, I have to thank SingleCoil.com for writing a great article on this very subject. I used their diagram for this project and is a great resource to understand how this all works. Please check out their website. I’d also like Matt from Cheese Blocks Effects for taking a look at my project (via email) and offering some suggestions for the next build.

Okay… now to the build. First off, let’s start with a part list. I ordered everything from PedalPartsPlus.com.

1 1411TU Looper Enclosure
1 Switchcraft 1/4″ Stereo Jack #12B (I would probably not order this again and just go with 12 monos)
11 Switchcraft 1/4″ Mono Jack #11
1 DC Power Jack
5 Red LEDs (5mm)
5 5mm LED Bezels
5 Xicon 1/4watt 1* Metal Film Resistors 470 ohms
5 (CLIFF) RoHS 3PDT True Bypass Switches
#24/7 Green Wire
#24/7 Red Wire
#24/7 White Wire
#24/7 Black Wire

Tools you’ll need: wrenches, screwdriver, soldering iron, wire strippers, wire cutters, solder (I used 60/40 rosin-core .032 dia) and needle nosed plyers. It’s incredibly nice to have the ’3rd set of hands’ alligator clips deal for soldering. Also a nice pair of wire strippers makes things easier.

This is what it looks like when I got the package. Note in this photo I have 5 560k resistors. I did not need to use those.

Next, I loosely inserted the jacks and switches. I locked in the LED bezels. I say loosely added them, because you’ll be pulling them out again. I basically put them into position so I could measure the wire lengths needed. I wanted to make sure I could open the enclosure if there was a problem. Also this enclosure is pretty tight for soldering.

Next, I thought I would work on the switches. In the diagram I was using you needed to make a ground jumper from bottom left to middle right.  I first soldered the resistors for the LEDs and clipped the remaining unused lead tail and used that as the jumper and soldered that in place. I was using this diagram from SingleCoil.com (http://www.singlecoil.com/tb-strip/dia3.html).

I then started on the ground connections. Linking all the mono jacks and linking the send/receive pairs back to the the switches, as well as linking those to the master input and output of the strip. It’s important to understand the jacks and what lugs are what. Mono jacks only have ‘tip’ and ‘sleeve’.  Stereo jacks have tip, ring and sleeve. The sleeve will be the ground and the tip will be your signal from the guitar. The lug (what you’re soldering to) is opposite of the tip or opposite of the sleeve. For this strip, you should be using all mono jacks since it’ll be DC powered and we don’t need to activate the current with the input jack like most pedals. For this project, I accidentally wired the signal to the sleeve of the stereo jack instead of the tip. Here is a good diagram that I was using illustrating a jack and it’s lugs: http://skyturtle.com/2009/02/17/stereo-phone-jack/

From here, I started to wire the send and returns of the effect loops as well as the DC jack.

All that is left is to connect the LEDs to the resistors and to chain the positives together. Matt from Cheese Blocks recommended that I should have used heat shrink tubing on those leads, and I definitely thought about it. In the future I’ll definitely add that to help prevent any shorts. For this project I made sure that the leads were bent up towards the lid and away from the switches as best as I could, but that little bit of shorting prevention could go a long way.

One thing that I would recommend is to make sure you clip any excess leads from wires and components, especially at the jack lugs. These jacks are very close together and could be another area of potential short circuits. Make sure you use a hot soldering iron and to focus on clean joints.

When she was all done (and after I fought the ‘sleeve’ issue with the master input) it was time to test it out. All the loops worked and everything sounded great. Here is shot of it on my board for initial testing:

Hope this comes in handy. I’ll be making another one here shortly, like to add a few more items in there.. master on/off switch, tuner out.. maybe even play with a buffered loop.

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