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Writer's pictureandreahywong

Building My (First?) Pedal Board. Part 1: Pedal Surface Planning

Updated: Feb 11, 2022

So, I finally got to organizing how to build my pedal board! #pbj I ended up making a slideshow to plan it all out and figured I’d blog about the actual building process here!


And some notes-to-self 📝 to accompany my slides...

A. Pedal Surface

  1. (See Slide 24 to 27) Purchase plywood with correct measurements and cutout (this first step already messed some things up for me as I was looking for a sheet at Home Depot.)

  2. Sand surface – because I purchased Melamine, I didn’t need to sand it yay!

  3. Paint black – with the finish on the Melamine, it seemed easy enough to leave it white.

  4. (See Slide 28) Lay out pedals

  5. (See Slide 29 to 43) Attach pedals with Gel Tape - this took some time as I ran into a few obstacles and discoveries!

    1. I learned that this type of gooey tape was best cut quickly. This would lead to the least mess, and cleanest/straight cut.

    2. I learned that the gel tape truly removed very well without leaving any residue or taking off any labels/paint!

    3. (Slide 39 to 41) I had to redo the taping on the DL4 because the height of the screws was greater than the thickness of the tape to reach and adhere to the board’s surface.

    4. It was very difficult to remove if both surfaces were completely flushed and flat. E.g. The underside of the Quintessance and the Pocket Metal Muff were very difficult to take off for re-adjustments! I had forgotten to insert a patch cable before taping down the Pocket Metal Muff and needed to take it off in order to connect it.

  6. Connect patch cables – As previously mentioned, with how tight I ended up laying out my pedals, I needed to attach the pedals with gel tape onto the board’s surface with patch cables already connected. Otherwise, there’d be no space for the patch cables to wiggle in between to connect! These flat patch cables are amazing. Look how flush the pedals are! There’s hardly any space between them! Great space-saver.

  7. Patch Cable Management – despite having a slightly different layout than what I first intended (with the PLUS on the left side, the TU-3 to be the rightmost pedal on the bottom row), it ended up that I had the perfect amount and length of patch cables. Of course, I intend to add a Lester G between the DL4 and PLUS pedal, so that’ll require some change to how my patch cables are currently set up.


To be continued...

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