Pedal kit with no wiring / all parts on PCB?

[MrHat]

Hi,
thats it!
That helped me find the video I was looking for here it is:

http://youtu.be/tfchx4ijnk0?t=1m15s

I can see this method is quite controversial.  I'm just interested to try out some different methods.  I have some old pedals from the first days of Korean outsourcing and I found it really interesting that they were hand built with through hole components, and was thinking about how things must have moved on.  I was just thinking about different approaches to building pedals.  I do find the EHX ones very interesting too just due to the miniaturisation of all the parts.

I might still try doing one "all in one" board, just to try it out.  I guess there must be problems though or else everyone would be doing it this way.  I was thinking about perhaps putting the sockets on the end of the box, as I do that with normal open sockets, perhaps they just wont fit though.  I need to sit down and try it all out..

[greaser_au]

A friend of mine used to be one of the two people in the IBM panel manufacturing facility that was trusted to do "deep deletes" on mis-wired planar cards. Planar cards are - well, by now, probably were - about 12" by 18" circuit boards covered with holes on 100mil/2.54mm centers except where BGA chips or other special chips were installed. They got three wires between pads on 100mil centers.  The guy's job was to drill through up to four layers, picking spots where the drill would not cut traces on the outer layers but would cut a trace that needed cut on the inner layer. I was always amazed that this was possible by a human. 

It's amazing what you can do with a steady hand, a 10,000RPM micromotor with fractional-mm dental drills, and a binocular microscope with a fibre-optic lighting ring with polarising filters!    Once you dial out the surface glare, the inner board layers just GLOW - and can be easily separated by focus management!

david

[nate77]

Ah, synthotech, that's right. I have build one of those. It was actually my first kit that started me down this road. It was inexpensive and easy to build, it actually sounds quite good although a bit noisy (may due to it being unboxed), and the chip is even socketed. I built the "toobscreamer" kit. Good fun

[tombaker]

synthrotek - they do pcb and parts kits and synth stuff

[Ice-9]

They cut slots around the jacks on the PCB so that the jacks can flex a bit without affecting anything around them.

The slots are interesting, but they don't seem to be for strain relief from plugs getting stepped on, because the wrong end is free; when the plug gets stepped on or kicked the nut end/sleeve end stays stationary and the tip end, the inside end wants to move.  Like a 1st class lever, a teeter totter.  The EH thing is set up like a 2nd class lever, a wheel barrow, so the sleeve end can move while the tip end stays stationary.  I think this is so they can shove the board into the box.  The jacks have to stick out into their holes a little, so it is a trick to get them to flex enough to get into the box, even though flat, the jacks stick out a little farther than the inside walls of the box.

I agree here, I have repaired many EHX pedals with this type of relief slot in them and it is there to facilitate the insertion of the pcb into the enclosure. As the jacks reach the holes they then snap into place. A little more difficult to remove the pcb but the reverse does apply.

[nate77]

Yep, I forgot the "r" in my haste. The synth stuff looks interesting but I've never tried it out. It's quite possible that had my first kit been a "regular" kit, the extra wiring and such may have dissuaded me from all this. Of course my next to were MOD kits, and those kind of disorganized, point to point kits are quite daunting for a new fish and even though 1 out of 2 worked, I kept with it.