Making your pedals robust

[ORK]

Just make sure the foam is not of the conducting type!

[tubelectron]

Interesting that so many are using packaging foam. The stuff being sold currently is marketed as being biodegradable. Only mention it as my experience of foams (and plastics) degrading is that it appears to happen suddenly. You know the kind of thing, one day the poly bag holding a million bits is ok, the next you're looking at a pile of bits and thousands of little shards of white stuff. I have a rack case which is lined with foam. It's a few years old now but in the last 3 months the foam has turned to powder. Might be worth making regular checks or does someone have a source of good old fashioned, bad for the environment, last forever stuff?

Yes, you're right. That's the risk. So a regular check is worth, indeed, to avoid the crumbly and glueing foam degradation often encoutered in old MXR's... As an example, I have built this pedal in 1996, and the "undulated" foam I have put inside at that time came from any cheap packaging material.




You can see that 16 years later, this white foam is still in good shape, only marked by the place of the components.

A+!

[Paul Marossy]

I have found that different types of foam last longer than others. That grey stuff seems to fall apart after a certain amount of time, it literally starts to just crumble. But that white stuff shown above, that seems to last indefinitely.