Rehousing cheap pedals?

[Alistair6]

Im pretty new to the pedal world so please excuse me if im totally off on this.
Im in the process of building up a pedal setup and have 2 older pedals that were given to me in trade deals. They both sound pretty decent and i would love to have them in the mix but...
the delay is in a very cheap box and im worried about it. Ive opened it up and the input/output, led etc are all soldered (directly by their pins) onto the board. Its not a green board.. its an orangey/brown colour. If i buy a simple blank piece of board for making a pedal can i use the parts off this one all in the same order but upgraded the pots and input/output plugs? or will this totally mess up my pedal and make it usless?

the second one's a phaser and uses better parts and is wired off the pots, input/output etc.. so i can easily rehouse that one without any soldering.

im capable with a soldering iron but know very little about electronics and pedal builds.
thanks guys.

[mhammer]

If they use momentary switches, rather than stompswitches with a defined click, you can very often leave the effect in its current box and simply relocate the momentary switching function somewhere else where a sturdier switch can be used in a sturdier chassis.

Kinda busy right now, but if you're interested, ask me how and I'll explain further.

[traynor_garnet]

If you can do the work yourself it won't cost too much. While you are rehousing you may also want to investigate adding true bypass.

If you need to pay someone to do it it often becomes expensive enough that it makes more sense to simply "upgrade" your pedal to a more expensive unit.

TG

[Alistair6]

ya i will be doing it myself.. thanks though

[iaresee]

Rather than go through the pain of rehousing them, why not just build two true bypass loop boxes (or a true bypass) strip and put them in their own loops? The build for a true bypass loop switcher is about as easy as it gets. Some wire. A resistor. An LED. It can all be done point-to-point, no perfboards required. Then you just run each pedal in a TB loop, leave it on, and bring it in and out of your chain with a reliable box you built yourself.

Dano at Beavis Audio has some diagrams: http://www.beavisaudio.com/techpages/PedalHacker/index.htm

You can get everything you need, including some nice pre-finished enclosures, from Small Bear Electronics: http://www.smallbearelec.com/.

I'm a big believer in Occam's Razor and it's oft paraphrased corollary: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best."

[zontar]

Rather than go through the pain of rehousing them, why not just build two true bypass loop boxes (or a true bypass) strip and put them in their own loops? The build for a true bypass loop switcher is about as easy as it gets. Some wire. A resistor. An LED. It can all be done point-to-point, no perfboards required. Then you just run each pedal in a TB loop, leave it on, and bring it in and out of your chain with a reliable box you built yourself.

Dano at Beavis Audio has some diagrams: http://www.beavisaudio.com/techpages/PedalHacker/index.htm

You can get everything you need, including some nice pre-finished enclosures, from Small Bear Electronics: http://www.smallbearelec.com/.

I'm a big believer in Occam's Razor and it's oft paraphrased corollary: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best."

I'm bookmarking these in case I wind up getting any of those Dano pedals mentioned in the Behringer thread!

[mhammer]

If posts until now have not persuaded you, a loop-selector pedal is likely to be the most useful thing you ever acquire. While those of us who live in the stompbox world tend to buy/accumulate pedals individually, we tend to create sounds that depend on blocks of pedals/effects. Changing from one sound to another can sometimes require bypassing or engaging clusters of pedals. One of the nice things about loop selectors is that they let you do that. I don't know about you, but my general experience with footswitches on wahs has been disappointing. Sweet to be able to leave the wah engaged, even set to a position for a sound, and engage/bypass it without having to move the treadle.

In many cases, inexpensive pedals from Behringer, Danelectro, Rocktek, Rogue, and other companies that have used plastic cases, are not terrible sounding. What people tend to dislike about them is their seeming lack of "roadworthiness". Of course, if your furious 200lbs, capped by Doc Maartens, comes landing on a cast aluminum chassis with a sturdy and replaceable stompswitch, then the plastic pedals become very roadworthy...if they are situated where they won't get hurt.

A few words of advice concerning wiring up your own switches....

There is much ballyhoo about stompswitch quality. This type of switch sucks. Should I buy from this switch-distributor? I heard this colour of 3PDT is better than that colour. And so on. Let's set the record straight. You have to ask yourself, if you had invested millions of dollars in a factory, and development of products, and relied on having satisfied corporate customers who would buy these things in the thousands, could you afford to market a product that failed even 2% (1-in-50) of the time and resulted in returns from angry consumers to those corporate clients who would then cancel their orders from you? I didn't think so. So what's with all the rumours and folk-legends about this stompswitch being unreliable, that one having a 1-in-12 failure rate, and all the other crap one hears on forums? My sense is that much of it stems from folks simply not giving the inside of the switch a chance, because they have no idea what goes on on the inside.

If you were to take a stompswitch of any quality apart, you would find the same things inside. At the bottom of the switch, there would be some contacts that extend through the bottom of the plastic/bakelite switch chassis to form the solder lugs on the outside. The middle, or "common", contact on the inside serves as a kind of fulcrum for a "see-saw" type of rocker contact. It always remains in contact with the middle, and each push of the switch moves the rocker contact so that what was up is now down and touching the contact in the other direction (hence the term "alternate action switch").

During assembly of the top and bottom halves of the switch, a small dab of thick grease is placed in the middle where the rocker contact sits. That serves to hold the otherwise free-floating rocker contact in place momentarily while the switch is assembled (at which point pressure holds it in place). It likely also provides some damping after assembly so that the rocker contact does not jiggle around inside and make intermittent contacts. It isn't absolutely critical to the switch functioning, but it makes the manufacturer's life easier.

When soldering is fast and efficient, the grease poses no problem. When amateurs apply too much heat to a solder joint on those switches, however, the heat from the outside solder lug is conducted internally, via the rocker contact, and the grease that was once thick starts to liquify and flow along the rocker contact. The result is that the grease prevents contact, and people report this as a "switch failure" on the various forums. I know. I've opened up switches that had "failed", only to be confronted by rocker contacts that were evenly coated from one end to the other. I remember the first time I opened up a roller-ball computer mouse. Not knowing any better, I thought all the dust and crap that had gathered and been compacted inside was some sort of "felt pad" that the mouse needed for the ball to grip. Took me a little while to realize that was just dirt that needed removal. Same thing with the switch. I didn't realize at first that the grease had originally been isolated to the middle pivot point and heat had "redistributed" it. Cleaning off the grease, and reassembling the switch yielded a perfectly "rehabilitated" stompswitch.

How can you avoid this? The key is to reduce heat in all the ways afforded you.

1) Tin the leads of the wires you connect to the switch and tin the solder lugs on the switch too, before you attempt to solder one to the other. A bit of liquid flux dabbed onto the lugs does wonders for speeding up solder flow.

2) Thermally insulate the solder lugs on the switch. How? Remember I said heat was conducted from the outside solder lug up through the internal contact to the rocker contact? If you take your continuity meter and verify that the 1, 2, or 3 outside solder lugs are electronically isolated from the centre contact, that will mean they are also thermally isolated. You don't want to apply so much heat that you melt the plastic too, but at least you can apply heat for a little while and know that you will not melt the grease. Once one set of outside contacts is soldered, let it cool for a bit, and press the switch to isolate the set of outside lugs on the other side of the switch. You can now safely solder those. Once the switch has cooled down, you can now solder the middle contacts. It is a good practice to provide some heat sinking by using an alligator clip or something to draw excess heat away from whatever set of outside lugs the middle contacts are electronically connected to at that moment.

Now, it is only fair to say that commercial pedal-makers do not go to all this trouble. But then they probably have better, and more efficient soldering equipment than you do, so they get in and out fast before excessive heat build-up. Most people will not face switch failure in most of their builds, but beginners are more likely to create problems for themselves in this way. So, while it is a bit of overkill, following these practices will assure that EVERY switch you buy and install will work as intended, without intermittent functioning or outright failure.

[Alistair6]

thanks so much mhammer.. very very informative. I will trying a rehouse for kicks in a little over a week (when back from vacation) and will post before and after pics.. appreciate all the info.