Volume pedal/wah housing alternatives

[senorsnor]

I've built some oscillators and filters and I'd like to control those with my feet so I can play them while playing guitar .. it's an experiment I want to try. Now I'm wondering if you guys have any ideas on a housing for this? Basically I just want to operate a variable resistor with my foot but modding existing volume/wah pedals will be getting pretty expensive as I want to try a few. Plus a home-brewn solution would be more fun :-) I've been looking around in my room but can't really seem to find anything useful. Anyone here has an idea?

[rmo]

Mount the pot on the side of a box and cut a largish (2-3 inch) wheel to mount on the pot. Roll the wheel back and forth to adjust. Wheel could be wood, plastic, metal, etc.

May not work as well as a traditional volume pedal enclosure, but it's worth a shot.

[Processaurus]

Mechanically it is so involved to make a reliable chassis.  Some people here have at great effort made very impressive rocker pedal contraptions.  Seems like they are into the challenge of the design and construction rather than doing it because it is the easiest/cheapest (hah!) solution.  I've had good luck acquiring dead crybabies from mom & pop music stores.  Also it seems like every guitar player has a wah pedal in the closet that never gets used, maybe it has a scratchy pot.  $15 seems to be the magic price. 

Those old maestro pedals are cool with the knobs on the sides:



here's something I threw together with a surplus knob (dumpster actually) with a nice rubber boot:

[petemoore]

  There are a few simple, quick, effective ways to do it.
1  Ziptie is trimmed to come off a potknob past the edge of the top of the box, specially tapered pot makes the ~1/3 potshaft rotation work right for the assigned parameter. Works great and doesn't increase box profile functionally, if you can stand the ugliness.
2  Ziptie is wrapped around a potshaft 1-2/3rds times so a teeny ziptie drive pinbolt can fasten the ziptie to the shaft and it'll still turn 100% range [you'll have to drill and tap the potshaft], hook each end of the ziptie, just tight enough, to either end of a just short enough 1/2 = 1/2 treadle seesaw arrangement, kinda pulls-stresses on the potshaft the whole time, I made one to fit in a regular sized RACO, [punchouts for each ziptie end from potshaft to treadle], worked fine though.

[spule]

A great thread- really got me thinking!

One idea crossed my mind  :
Has anyone thought about putting a large knob on the pot (maybe something like the one in the Maestro Parametric Filter picture) and somehow mounting the pot horizontally inside the enclosure so that only a part of the knob sticks out? Something like the scroll wheel on your mouse 

Of course this would include drilling a rectangular hole, sorting the problem of mounting the pot inside the enclosure and making the whole thing robust enough to withstand a grown mans foot.. Maybe not really DIYable 

[spule]

But now-when I think about it, Patricks idea is about the same thing, only much more DIY friendly

[senorsnor]

Thanks guys! I'm gonna try out some stuff this weekend .. one idea that crossed my mind yesterday evening was to use the pedals from a pc racing game kit (you know, the steering wheel + the pedals). Somebody created his own wheel and pedals from wood, see http://www.student.oulu.fi/~heinanen/wheel.html