The Art of Stompbox Wiring

[Steve Mavronis]

As I'm starting to wire up my first pedals, my desire is to do as neat a job as possible. Being a computer tech by profession I hate sloppy wiring that ends up looking like a rats nest or a pile of spaghetti. I'm really impressed and inspired by the pedal wiring jobs I've seen in the Pictures section here at DIY Stompboxes! They really are a work of art. Has anyone done a guide or have some tips to share on what to think about to do a neat wiring job that's a pleasure to look at?

[R.G.]

Has anyone done a guide or have some tips to share on what to think about to do a neat wiring job that's a pleasure to look at?

Do a nicely wired pedal, then put it under a piece of plexiglass and mount it on the wall.

Do a less nicely wired pedal that works well and reliably even if the wiring is "only" functional and reliable if not so pretty, and seal it up in a metal enclosure. Look at the one on the wall, and play the one with the solid metal enclosure.

[Steve Mavronis]

Do a nicely wired pedal, then put it under a piece of plexiglass and mount it on the wall.

Well since I'm making twin pedal copies I might just do that.

The primary concern is always to build a functional pedal that sounds as intended. My wife's cousin Jimmy says about me making a pedal, "Just build something. Who cares what it looks like as long as it sounds good." But to me at least being sloppy while at it is no excuse because it's my creation and reflects something about me. The following isn't pedal related except to illustrate the issue. For example 3 years ago when I got my PC it came from Gateway looking a sloppy mess inside like this:



So I replaced the ribbon cables, re-routed wires and used velcro tie straps where possible so now at least you can see the components inside and they are easier to replace if needed. It's not the best PC gut shot or wire dressing out there (and there are some stunning ones to look at just like some pedals here are) but at least it's improved considering what I had to work with and there is better cooling air flow inside:



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:

[deadastronaut]

  funny....and practical too...lol...

personally even when i do as neat a job as possible, i may find that i have miss wired something
and have to pull apart that lovely shiny solder joint...arghhh...or turn the led round ....arghhh...
and thats a real bummer when its got heatshrink etc...and that can put a blemish or two in there...

but hey as long as it works ....and its not squeeling etc...who's to know..apart from you...

i think the general way to go is wire the jacks /switch/led the 9v socket in ya box....then add ya pcb..
thats how i go.

rob.

[Steve Mavronis]

funny....and practical too...lol...

but hey as long as it works ....and its not squeeling etc...who's to know..apart from you...

Except if someone else take the bottom cover off to change the battery. You're right though. Maybe the point or rule of thumb is to generally try to be neat while wiring but don't go overboard making the whole thing look just like water plant plumbing!

How about some minimum things you should do? Middle or end wired 9V battery snaps? Is is good practice to braid the battery snap wires for example? How about twisting the other power and ground wires routing their way to the PCB from the DC jack to help reduce possible line noise?

[deadastronaut]

i dont use batteries..so i wouldnt know about that...

but i would make sure that my input to the circuit is a shielded! cable...

and keep any wires as short as possible....i take it its the dod ya doing?...

rob.

[philbinator1]

As I'm starting to wire up my first pedals, my desire is to do as neat a job as possible. Being a computer tech by profession I hate sloppy wiring that ends up looking like a rats nest or a pile of spaghetti. I'm really impressed and inspired by the pedal wiring jobs I've seen in the Pictures section here at DIY Stompboxes! They really are a work of art. Has anyone done a guide or have some tips to share on what to think about to do a neat wiring job that's a pleasure to look at?

I can't offer you much help, my wiring is still far from perfect (is there such a thing?)...but I do appreciate where your coming from.  It's nice and kinda fulfilling to be able to look at your freshly made pedal and think, "Yip, it looks as good as I can get it".  It's called craftsmanship, and I think it's something of a dying art.  Of course there's the 80/20 theory (only putting 80% of the total effort into any given job, the theory being that the other 20% would have taken as long as the initial 80% anyway), and I do get to a point where I think "Ok I'm being OCD now, it's good enough", but I still think there's nothing wrong with having pride in your workmanship.  Just look at Slades stuff!  Pure craftsmanship, and a pleasure to look at..not to mention the inspiration it gives others to excel at etching, me included.

But I digress.    I look foward to your next neat gut shot, Steve    

[philbinator1]

Just another thought, on my last build I started grouping component wires...eg dc power/ground, pots, jacks, and misc pcb.  
Also colour-coded wires (until I ran out of a particular colour).  Oh and I braided them too...for the Celtic touch...  

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/zz13/philbinator1/ISPreverse.jpg

not the prettiest, but it did help reduce the 'spagetti juction' effect a bit.  

[R.G.]

But to me at least being sloppy while at it is no excuse because it's my creation and reflects something about me.

That's cool, and laudable. I'm all for functional artwork as an endeavor for art's sake. The best engineering has an elegance to it that may rise to the level of art.

However, when there is a conflict between art and function, choices have to be made. These come down to cases where the artistic nature interferes with or limits function, or the functional nature interferes with the artistic side. If that never pops up, great! If it happens, and is unavoidable by design/effort choices have to be made.

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.

As a matter of fact, I can imagine trying to troubleshoot it. Back when I went to work for a Giant Computer Corp., initial prototypes were built on 12"/300mm by 18"/450mm "logic pages", of which eight were assembled into "logic gate" mechanical frames, so called because they were actually hinged on one side into a tubular steel frame. The interconnection between gates went to the hinge side so the gates could be swung apart for access to the wiring side or the component side of the pages/gates.
The metal frame held up to eight (as I remember, it's been a while!) gates, and each frame had holders/clamps, covers, cooling fans and power supplies to run the gates/pages it held. Multiple frames could be tied together with cables.

The logic pages themselves were brick-walled with about 200-300 sockets on each page for 14 or 16 pin DIP sockets which had wire-wrap pins sticking through the PCB substrate of the page. The PCB substrate contained only the power supply routing and power decoupling for the chips which sat on it. All logic connections were made by wire-wrap wire from pin to pin on the wiring side of the page. Each pin could accept a maximum of three wire-wrap connections on the (about) 1"/25.4mm long pointed rectangular gold plated pins. The pages were initially wire wrapped by a CNC wire wrap machine, which tested each connection against its connection table as it went. The ICs were the very best we had at the time - which is to say, each 14 or 16 pin package had from four to six logical AND/NAND/OR/NOR gates in each package, or some slightly more complex equivalent, such as a three-to-eight decoder, four bit latch, etc.

The bottom of each logic page was about 1"thick in black wire wrap wires running from pin to pin. The appearance was random, of course, but it was actually rigidly ordered, by the logic design and its translation into pin-to-pin routing for the CNC machine. But it looked like a mess of random black wires 1" thick.

This was a prototype, of course. So there were bugs in the logic design, and places where the CNC wire-wrap machine ran a wire past the edge of a square pin and it cut the insulation. So us human types had to fire it up, test it, then find an fix the places where wires were either wrong on the wire list or accidentally shorted. Then we got to do the logic debug with scopes and meters to fix the logic design that was under way. Realizing that a flaw found after a fix is most likely a result of the "fix", we made corrections to the wires in bright yellow wires so we could see them. Over time, some pages had only a few yellow wires, some more or less completely replaced the black wires with yellow and we had to start using bright blue for fixes.

These things were mechanico-electronic marvels if you thought about it. To me at least. It's amazing that they ever worked. And they were vastly simpler than the massive mainframes prototypes that the greater company did. We were in a toy-computer division by comparison. The univac in that picture, by comparison, was pretty simple.

Here's what the similar thing looks like today:

There's about 200 million transistors in it. It's from 2005. Today's CPUs use about 500million to nearly a billion transistors. There's art there, but it's at the submicron level. 

My point here is that the apparent randomness is actually highly ordered. And beautiful if done well. I find chip pictures almost as interesting as I find maps. I find well executed layout artistically satisfying to my taste at least. But I often get a reality lesson from an effects builder who can't get one of my artistically and functionally satisfying PCB layouts to work because they can't make a good solder joint.

But I'm wandering. Although the univac, logic gates, and chip layouts are by some measures expressions of art, they would have unceremoniously dumped into the trash (and many logic gates were!) if they were not also functional. Art and function are not mutually exclusive, they are orthogonal. We humans choose pure art, pure function, or some mixture. Pick and enjoy your mixture. Remember that function is independently assessable, but art is in the eye of the beholder. And make them as pretty as you want/need to. And braiding/bundling wires can cause crosstalk that impairs or prevents correct function.

[deadastronaut]

[/quote]


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

[Steve Mavronis]

Well said R.G.

[MikeH]

A recent discussion on this topic- some very good info in here.

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=83751.0

To sum up; sometimes the most elegant looking wiring isn't necessarily the best for optimum sound/durability.

[Steve Mavronis]

To sum up; sometimes the most elegant looking wiring isn't necessarily the best for optimum sound/durability.

Yeah good thread on this subject. Guess I was perverted with all the sexy wiring jobs in the pictures forum thread!

Maybe the most I'll do is spiral twist my power + and - wires together and the rest just have nice graceful looping wire routing point to point and avoid any 90 degree bends.

[joegagan]

But I'm wandering.

that is the best wandering i have read in a year. great story!

[CynicalMan]

Actually, that's this:



Note that the man is there to open and close the switch really fast. 

[Paul Marossy]

I'm all for functional artwork as an endeavor for art's sake. The best engineering has an elegance to it that may rise to the level of art.

However, when there is a conflict between art and function, choices have to be made. These come down to cases where the artistic nature interferes with or limits function, or the functional nature interferes with the artistic side. If that never pops up, great! If it happens, and is unavoidable by design/effort choices have to be made.

I agree. I'd rather have a rat's nest inside the pedal with it fully functional & problem free than a beautiful wiring job with everything at right angles, many wires running in parallel and only one setting on the pedal that doesn't squeal like Charlotte's pig going to the slaughter.

It's not so bad in guitar pedals, but all that stuff really matters in a tube amp. I've scratchbuilt a few of them, learned about some of that stuff the hard way even though I thought I was doing everything the right way.

[stringsthings]

As I'm starting to wire up my first pedals, my desire is to do as neat a job as possible. Being a computer tech by profession I hate sloppy wiring that ends up looking like a rats nest or a pile of spaghetti. I'm really impressed and inspired by the pedal wiring jobs I've seen in the Pictures section here at DIY Stompboxes! They really are a work of art. Has anyone done a guide or have some tips to share on what to think about to do a neat wiring job that's a pleasure to look at?

what is more important to you?

a) wiring that's pleasant to look at
b) a pedal that functions as designed

[hday]

[John Lyons]

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.

[philbinator1]

Beautifully done John.  I'm interested to know, do your jack wires 'point' inwards as you solder them, or do you bend them almost 180 degrees, so they point back to the sides of the enclosure?  This is something I've been wanting to correct for a while, I have been pointing my towards the centre of the pedal...doesn't seem 'right' to me.