Pedals

Years ago, literally, I told Colin I was going to make him The King Of All Chorus, a totally awesome Katamari themed, hacked up, custom designed chorus pedal for his birthday. Well I have finally started making it! Making a pedal from the ground up with a kit can be simple, or extremely difficult. Its simple if you just follow instructions, solder it all together and throw it in the unpainted plain gray box. It will only take you a few hours if you choose that route. But half if not most of the reason people buy guitar pedal kits is because they can customize and paint the pedal any way they want. This means adding mods to increase its functionality and painting some truly incredible designs on it. I chose the harder route, but hopefully it will be worth it. Because of all the mods I am adding I had to get a new enclosure and drill it myself. This is the first, and one of the harder steps about this process. Most people who do this a lot use drill presses for straight drills, templates, nice drill bits, and a good garage or basement to do the work. I had none of these, and because its my first time drilling an enclosure I had several mistakes.

This is the enclosure with all the wholes I could do at the time.


Of my many mistakes, the obvious ones are that my wholes are not in straight lines, and that I did the wholes on the left side backwards from the other two.


What sucks even more is that by this last whole my drill bit was completely eaten way. I had no mineral oil to lubricate and protect the bit and while I tried to use corn oil, it did not help at all. So as you can see the drill slipped, because of the corn oil, and messed up the enclosure. To add insult to injury, I actually ended up drilling the small whole to far away from the big one and have to get my dremel out and make it oblong so the pot can fit.


Here you can see wild and futile attempts at accuracy.


Also, even after drilling out the window of my apartment and getting aluminum shards everywhere I couldnt even finish the job in one shot! I needed to drill 2 half inch holes but the drill bit wouldnt fit in my drill! So bummed.


Once I find a drill or a drill press to finish drilling the enclosure I can get on with the fun, but tedious, part of painting and decaling. I got a few months before Colins next birthday so I think I can finish it by then!


On the topic of pedals, I had this Tremolo pedal that I made the easy way, with no decaling or painting, and decided one night to do something with it. So I covered it in shiny sticker stuff I found in the trash at MTV.