My Finished Pedalboard

[Fleetdog]

This project has been a long time coming but it's finally done.  I actually managed to do this surprisingly cheap too since most of the wood and all the vinyl was left over from my amp.  Now I've got the matching set.  The color didn't come out too good in these pics though.  The vinyl is actually a bright teal color.  I used neutrik locking jacks for the input and output and power is supplied by a one spot.   


The set


A little room left to grow.


A view of the output and power jacks.  Input is on the other side.

[flo]

It looks great! Do you put velcro underneath the stomps? The power input is a single 9V DC input?

[Fuzz/karl]

That looks great.Nice job.I new around here so sorry if its a redundant ? but whats the story on the amp?

[Fleetdog]

Yes, the pedals all have the non-fuzzy side of velcro on the bottom and the top of the board is covered in grey felt.  They sick pretty well to it.  Different brands of velcro seem to stick differently to the felt so some of them aren't quite solid enough to flip the board upside down, but they stay in place enough to not move around while stomping or carrying the board.

I did put a single 9V DC jack on the side of the board with daisy chains inside because that's what all my pedals want anyway and I was already powering them all that way with the one spot before building this.  I don't have any plans for pedals that need power other than 9V so it should be sufficient for quite a while.

The amp is a modified Blues Jr (green board).  I got just the chassis of the amp at a yard sale for $30 because it wasn't working and the owner had turned the rest of it into an extension cabinet for some other amp.  It turned out it just needed a new fuse, tubes, and a couple of resistors (a tube had shorted frying a few resistors before the fuse blew).  After I got it working, I did a couple of the Bill M mods including moving the reverb control before the master volume, tone stack, power supply stiffening, and OT swap.  Then I built it a new cab that is a good deal larger than stock.  It sounds really nice.  The only mod I would still like to do to it is to change the taper of the master volume knob from linear to audio.  I play mostly at very low levels and that knob just doesn't give much fine adjustment towards the lower end of it's range.  There should be a thread about the amp around here somewhere.

[lerxst88]

so how does it work with just one power input? any pics of the build? (i wanna do this too) very cool pedal board!

[ambulancevoice]

so how does it work with just one power input? any pics of the build? (i wanna do this too) very cool pedal board!

a daisy chain distributes the power supply across several effects
like this

9v in --------V-------V--------V---------V-----V-------V
                 fx1      fx2        fx3         fx4    fx5      fx6 so on
you can extend them by adding another daisy chain on the end of the first

also, you cant usually do this with just any supply
a recommended power supply would be one that is regulated
and has 1A or more of current, because pedals draw certain amounts of current from a power supply, so enough is needed to be distributed across the pedals, which is also why there is a maximum amount of fx you can power off one supply

[flo]

As an extra you can add some decoupling along the daisy chain were needed by putting a 10 ohm to 100 ohm resistor between the 9V and an FX and putting a 10uF to 100uF cap from the power supply input of the FX to GND. This provides the FX with a local supply voltage buffer as well as filtering out some of the crap that gets into the power-supply daisy chain. I did this on a booster that was really noisy powered via the daisy chain and after the "buffer-mod" it became quiet. Almost as quiet as when powered by battery but not quite...

[Fleetdog]

Unfortunately, I did not take any photos of the build.  Essentially, I just built a sloped rectangle frame of 3/4 inch ply wood with another 3/4 inches of poplar inside it that is 1/4 inch shorter than the ply wood frame.  That gives me 1/8 inch inset top and bottom for the masonite I used for the top and the bottom so it is roughly flush with the plywood.  This also allows me to screw the massonite into real wood instead of ply.  From there it was just a matter of mounting the jacks, wrapping it with vinyl and felt, and drilling holes in the top for wire routing.  I was originally going to have all the patch cords go under the top for a cleaner look, but it would take longer patch cables to do it that way so I only go under the top with the power and a couple of the longer runs of patch cord (like from the top row down to the bottom row).  Once I was 90% done, I realized there was a company called puma boards making stuff that looks just like mine except that their design looks a lot easier to build.