The Art of Stompbox Wiring

[John Lyons]

All of the jack, switch wiring is done in the box as you see it.
( bend the wire and then solder it. )

All the pot wiring to the board is done outside the box with
a jig that is just a piece of plexi glass with the pot hole pattern
drilled just like the box. If I do a one off I use a piece of cardboard
with the one off pot spacing on it. I drill the box just as I want it and then
transfer the holes to the cardboard so I can wire everything up without
the side walls of the box getting in the way. Then I drop the pre wired
pots into the enclosure and wire to the switch and jacks where the side
walls don't really get in the way anyway. It works for me. 

John

[stringsthings]

nice wiring John Lyons ..... 

.... are you letting the cases act as ground for the output jacks?

[G. Hoffman]

Of course you can disregard all of this and wire things up to your heart's abandon and have a fully functional Univac supercomputer like this back in the day but imagine trying to troubleshoot it:

There's a difference in perspective here. To me, that's actually an aesthetically pleasing picture. The guy in the picture is troubleshooting it, at least for the (artistic) purposes of the picture; there's a meter in his hand. And it pleases me that order results from the apparent chaos that is actually highly ordered in it.

I think a distinction must be made between a large number of wires and a messy wiring job.  I'm looking at that, and I'm seeing some nicely laced wire bundles, the bends all have an appropriate radius, the swag is even between bundles so any strain on the wires is shared by every wire in the bundle - it looks like an exceptional wiring job.  Which I would expect, given the time period.  I mean, all the guys who worked on it were guys who had worked on military decoding stuff during WWII.  I'm not saying I could comprehend the organization, but I'm betting it is exceptionally well organized.


Gabriel

[maarten]

Steve,
back to your question: I think it helps in debugging and in modding if you start out doing a neat job in the first place. I found it helps to be consistent in colors of the wires (red - positive, black ground, yellow negative, white or grey for signal, etc. Another issue is to use only dual op amps, not the quads, as the quads will force you force you to deviate from the path of the signal through a schematic.

Maarten

[Steve Mavronis]

Steve, back to your question: I think it helps in debugging and in modding if you start out doing a neat job in the first place. I found it helps to be consistent in colors of the wires (red - positive, black ground, yellow negative, white or grey for signal, etc. Another issue is to use only dual op amps, not the quads, as the quads will force you force you to deviate from the path of the signal through a schematic.

I still plan to be neat and orderly with the wiring and color coding. I'm using black for negative, red for positive, yellow for input, green for output, blue for bypass. Where do you use a ground color vs negative wires? The jack sleeves themselves will be the ground that I was going to have black wires going to.

[Paul Marossy]

I prefer a pedal that looks good and works without issue.
There is not a problem running wires parallel and at right angles
as long as you route wires together that don't affect each other.

I group input and ground wires. Output is on the other side of the box
directly from the volume pot to the switch.

Yeah, but the sad thing is that some "professional" builders out there think pretty wiring is where it's at, but their products can have oscillation problems. One pedal in particular had the input and output wires running parallel for a good distance, along with some wires from a gain control. It was not a recipe for success, but it was pretty to look at. I like how you do your pedals, though. It's neat and functional. That's a win-win situation.  

[maarten]

Sometimes you will work with dual supply (+ 9 and - 9 volts, + and -12 or 15 volts). Craig Anderton did this in a lot of his projects. You still will see it in the more complicated schematics; also in many transistor amps.

Maarten

[Steve Mavronis]

I'm a big fan of John Lyons' work.  

[pedalgrinder]

Hey John Lyons that is the neatest stompbox wiring i have seen. I looked closely at the pictures but i couldn't work out what your mounting your pcb boards down with. They look as though there sitting on the pots maybe glued iam not sure as to how you've done it any chance on letting a trade secret out. Cheers

[Jdansti]

I am impressed by some of the neat wiring jobs I've seen in the forum, but I usually find myself carefully cramming everything into the enclosure without breaking any leads or shorting anything. So far I've had good success, but will strive for better wiring.

This topic reminds me if when I was a kid in band playing trumpet. A French horn player from the symphony came to our school to give a workshop and his horn was very tarnished and ugly. A kid asked him if he ever polished his horn. He replied that some people polish them and some play them-and he could really play!  I guess that is an extreme position and a person could do both. Personally, I'm more for function. I rarely was my truck, but some people I know flip out if they have a speck of dust on their vehicle. To each his own...

[chromesphere]

thats obviously a dr boogie with all the mods....wonder what size enclosure he'll use...

LOL!  He has a similar look on his face as i did when i was fault diagnosing my dr boogey "i've biased at 4.5v, it still sounds crap..."

Obviouvsly I'd perfer a functioning pedal over a neat pedal, but i find with experience, i can just wire this stuff up neater (depending on how complicated the build is / small the enclosure is of course)...I think its a sign of experience. I dont fuss over it though.  As long as its "neat enough" im happy!  I know there are some ninja's with solid core (probably john lyons is one of them, tell us John, are you a ninja in disguise?) but i personally wouldnt start using it for neatness sake, i just cant use it reliably.  An example of where i personally choose 'function' over 'aesthetics'.  That all said, the pedal has to look decent when its done.  It takes some of the joy out of building it in the first place ( personally) if it looks like sh*t.  It's all in the balance i guess you'd say...

Paul

[pedalgrinder]

the first few pedals i built i went for all the cheapest's parts boxes etc etc. But you soon learn a few extra dollars spent gives you a unit your proud of rather than a crummy plastic box with all crappy parts that  looks like shit.