Nick Glover

I finally got my pedalboard finished, though I haven’t gotten around to actually attaching the pedals yet. I need to go buy some velcro before I can do that…

After all the paint dried, I glued some carpet onto the top. The point of the carpet is that my pedals need something to stick to and the velcro+carpet idea allows me to move them around fairly easily if I want to.

While I was waiting for that to dry, I put together my input/output box. For that, I just screwed two 1/4″ jacks into a small project enclosure from RadioShack and then soldered cables to the jacks and ran them out the other side. This picture isn’t totally accurate, though, as I wound up attaching the jacks to the longer side on the bottom of the picture. There wasn’t enough room for them the way they are in the photo. I used some glue to keep the cables from pulling on the jacks when they get moved around.

Once the carpet glue dried, I stapled the edges down, just in case, and did some more cutting. I also stapled around the holes I cut because I really don’t trust the glue. You probably can’t tell from the picture, but there are quite a lot of staples holding that carpet down. Carpet, by the way, is really annoying to cut. What I wound up doing was starting the cut on the bottom with a razor blade, then flipping the board over and finishing the cut on top. Carpet seems to cut better from the top, but I couldn’t see the holes through the carpet, so I needed some guidelines.

You can also see that I used some zip ties to keep my power bricks in place. I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be losing power in the middle of a show because an adapter fell off. The final step was to attach the input/output box. I did that just with some glue, so hopefully that will hold it. It isn’t flush against the corner because the metal corner brace is in the way, but I think it still works fine where it is.

And there you have it! I was originally going to put sides and a bottom on it, but I decided against those. The sides were going to make it harder to pick up and carry, and the bottom ended up being unnecessary. The original point of the bottom was to give myself a flat surface to attach rubber feet to, but I found a big roll of that stuff they sell to keep your gadgets in place on your dashboard and that works pretty well as a mat that I can just carry with the pedalboard and lay out under it.

Ok, I managed to get my Dremil to cut the rest of that hole, so I got everything cut and sanded down. Here you can see that I also screwed some braces on to attach the rear support thing. Really, I should’ve put glue in between the boards, too, but the board was warped, so I was going to push it out when I put in the last support in the middle (and glue would have made that harder). Oh well, it’s pretty secure.

Then I attached a power strip to the back, which wasn’t really very smart because I just had to take it off again to paint. I thought about all the different places I could put it, and the back seemed to be the best place, so that’s where it’s staying.

And now, here it is all painted up:

I still have the last couple steps left, which are to put something on the bottom so it has a flat surface that I can put rubber feet on so it doesn’t slip around on stage, then put some panel board on the sides, then wire input and output jacks on one of the sides. Oh, and I have to put something on the top to attach pedals to–probably carpet, but I haven’t totally decided yet.

I started building a new pedalboard for all my guitar effect pedals the other day. It might be a while before it’s finished, though… Here’s where I’m at so far:

That’s the plan I drew out for it. I wanted to figure out what the angles were going to need to be to get the support in back to be at a right angle to the ground. Then I went to the store to get some materials and started drawing the pattern on the wood:

The Xs are the places I don’t want to cut. I wanted a grid pattern so that I could move pedals around and add more later, but still be able to route all the cables underneath. I based the idea on an SKB board I saw online (Stagefive, I think). Here’s what it looks like with most of the cutting done (the jigsaw crapped out on me after this point):

And that’s where I’m at right now. I want to put some bypass switches on the bottom and input and output connectors on the side with a signal buffer on the output, but I need to figure out how to do all of that first. So far, so good!