Calling all Pedal builders

Zoolooter

I need a pedal building with a simple delay and a single hall reverb setting. as hall is the only one I ever use. The size and layout of the earthquaker dispatch master would be perfect.   

Anyone up for that?

simonk

Keeley Caverns?

Edit: ah, now I understand - I thought you were rejecting the DM as you wanted separate verb and delay. The DM is a good pedal, and not dear when you put it into perspective.

DesVegas

@4114Effects ??

juansolo

Do you want separate switches for the reverb/delay or as a single effect?

Are you applying reverb only to the repeats or to the whole output of the delay?

Asking for that in a 1590BS (super tight) or a 125B (less tight but bigger) is a bit of an ask as you've got to get two PCBs in there, one which will be quite busy to start with and the other will have a reverb brick on it.

It isn't financially viable to do all the design/layout work for a one off PCB (unless you want to pay me something in the region of £400 for it...).

You could just buy a Dispatch Master... It's not exactly expensive and for the amount of work and parts involved, I'd want around £135 to do it *if* I could make it all fit... EDIT - Which now I've thought about it, I reckon I could get it into a 1590BS, which would be comedy to get it into something that small. But I'd do it the same way I did the tight metal with a decimator in there. Board stacking FTW!

...and it wouldn't have top mounted jacks

Zoolooter

juansolo said:

Do you want separate switches for the reverb/delay or as a single effect?

Are you applying reverb only to the repeats or to the whole output of the delay?

Asking for that in a 1590BS (super tight) or a 125B (less tight but bigger) is a bit of an ask as you've got to get two PCBs in there, one which will be quite busy to start with and the other will have a reverb brick on it.

It isn't financially viable to do all the design/layout work for a one off PCB (unless you want to pay me something in the region of £400 for it...).

You could just buy a Dispatch Master... It's not exactly expensive and for the amount of work and parts involved, I'd want around £135 to do it *if* I could make it all fit... EDIT - Which now I've thought about it, I reckon I could get it into a 1590BS, which would be comedy to get it into something that small. But I'd do it the same way I did the tight metal with a decimator in there. Board stacking FTW!

...and it wouldn't have top mounted jacks

I wanted it to work in exactly the same way as the Dispatch Master - Delay only or reverb only, or a blend of both. Also what I like/want is it just has 4 knobs and one switch. I thought £185 for the DM was a bit pricey, hence asking if someone could build one. But, if your saying the DM is value for money as it is because its got a lot packed in there, maybe then I'm better off just waiting for a used one, they just don't come up very often.

jonnygreentrees

Zoolooter said:

juansolo said:

Do you want separate switches for the reverb/delay or as a single effect?

Are you applying reverb only to the repeats or to the whole output of the delay?

Asking for that in a 1590BS (super tight) or a 125B (less tight but bigger) is a bit of an ask as you've got to get two PCBs in there, one which will be quite busy to start with and the other will have a reverb brick on it.

It isn't financially viable to do all the design/layout work for a one off PCB (unless you want to pay me something in the region of £400 for it...).

You could just buy a Dispatch Master... It's not exactly expensive and for the amount of work and parts involved, I'd want around £135 to do it *if* I could make it all fit... EDIT - Which now I've thought about it, I reckon I could get it into a 1590BS, which would be comedy to get it into something that small. But I'd do it the same way I did the tight metal with a decimator in there. Board stacking FTW!

...and it wouldn't have top mounted jacks

I wanted it to work in exactly the same way as the Dispatch Master - Delay only or reverb only, or a blend of both. Also what I like/want is it just has 4 knobs and one switch. I thought £185 for the DM was a bit pricey, hence asking if someone could build one. But, if your saying the DM is value for money as it is because its got a lot packed in there, maybe then I'm better off just waiting for a used one, they just don't come up very often.

From my experience the markup on overdrives/fuzzes/distortions is ridiculous and DIY/clones make a lot of sense, same with some discontinued stuff (I just built myself a CE-2 for around £50).

When you start looking at delay/reverb stuff the amount of options available in commercial pedals vs DIY where you're basically limited to PT2399 and Belton Brick and the cost of the parts and making them in a small form factor means that commercial stuff ends up looking pretty good value for money

Zoolooter

No problem then, thanks for the input. I've put a wanted post up on here for a DM, also my HOF is for sale. 

juansolo

Zoolooter said:

juansolo said:

Do you want separate switches for the reverb/delay or as a single effect?

Are you applying reverb only to the repeats or to the whole output of the delay?

Asking for that in a 1590BS (super tight) or a 125B (less tight but bigger) is a bit of an ask as you've got to get two PCBs in there, one which will be quite busy to start with and the other will have a reverb brick on it.

It isn't financially viable to do all the design/layout work for a one off PCB (unless you want to pay me something in the region of £400 for it...).

You could just buy a Dispatch Master... It's not exactly expensive and for the amount of work and parts involved, I'd want around £135 to do it *if* I could make it all fit... EDIT - Which now I've thought about it, I reckon I could get it into a 1590BS, which would be comedy to get it into something that small. But I'd do it the same way I did the tight metal with a decimator in there. Board stacking FTW!

...and it wouldn't have top mounted jacks

I wanted it to work in exactly the same way as the Dispatch Master - Delay only or reverb only, or a blend of both. Also what I like/want is it just has 4 knobs and one switch. I thought £185 for the DM was a bit pricey, hence asking if someone could build one. But, if your saying the DM is value for money as it is because its got a lot packed in there, maybe then I'm better off just waiting for a used one, they just don't come up very often.

LOL, you think £185 for a full digital effect with 1.5 seconds of delay is pricey?! It amazes me that people can think this but not think twice about throwing £250+ at an overdrive.

£185 is a bloody bargain!

I'd be building it at £135 because it'd be an interesting challenging build, I'd be making nob all money out of it considering the time it would take me to get it into a tiny box (which is how we get exploited I suppose). But if all you're wanting is a cheap knock off of an already very keenly priced effect in production effect, I suggest you wait until you can pick one up 2nd hand for less. I don't like doing that anyhow.

Wow...

Zoolooter

Just to be clear I know zero about what goes into building a pedal and costs. But, there are so many used clones sold on here for £50 or £60 or even less, I assumed there was a high mark up by commercial manufacturers on most pedals, so assumed again this applied to delays and reverbs. Thought I could get one built for about £100, obviously not the case as explained.

juansolo

FWIW, Chinese clones are mass produced using an industrialised process, cheap parts, and when labour is involved it's stupidly cheap. This is why you can buy pedals for £30 that are clones.

You cannot expect a custom, hand made, one off effect to be made for the same money.

I've done a delay board recently. I suspect the schematic I had up to10 or so hours in (it wasn't a ground up job it was a mash up of a couple of different ideas). Obviously that was 'free' because I was doing this for me. The PCB layout work, prototyping and testing cost around £280 and again, a lot more time (it didn't work first time so needed a lot of fault finding and tweaking).

In parts the actual pedal costs around £50. We have to get the delay ICs from Germany as skimping on them with Chinese ones has bitten us in the arse before with substandard ICs. The stomp we don't skimp on because I don't actually want my pedals to fail on people so we spend cash on making that robust. The rest of the parts are actually quite cheap because once you've done all the work on the PCB they're at this point, very cheap. As are most of the other components. To assemble a delay consists of:

Populating the PCB - I can do that in about 30mins because I'm fairly experienced at it.

Prepping the box, which consists of marking, drilling, decalling (if I'm designing a decal from scratch you can throw up to 3hrs of so in Photoshop), epoxy coating, re-drilling the epoxy - That takes maybe an hour and a half of actual time, but spread out over a week (curing times).

Installing the effect, because ours are designed to be very quick and easy to build and work on, about another 30 mins.

For that delay I charge £100. I haven't sold one yet because it's too expensive. I won't sell one for less because it simply isn't worth my time.

This is why the effects, amps and guitars market here is so hard to do anything in. You simply can't compete with mass produced Chinese stuff, yet people use that as their benchmark for what things are worth. This is why the likes of MJW shut up shop and we all lose a massively talented custom amplifier builder and his creations.

Sorry for the rant, but this whole thing gets me down.

dindude

The Zcat here ticks a lot of your boxes, it has a hall reverb and a delay for 119 euros. Can't vouch for the sound but they have a decent reputation.

http://www.zcatpedals.com/?dir=view&id=delay-reverb

dindude

juansolo said:

This is why the effects, amps and guitars market here is so hard to do anything in. You simply can't compete with mass produced Chinese stuff, yet people use that as their benchmark for what things are worth. This is why the likes of MJW shut up shop and we all lose a massively talented custom amplifier builder and his creations.

Sorry for the rant, but this whole thing gets me down.

Is this really true? There's huge evidence (I.e. the whole boutique pedal market boom of the last 10 years) that people are willing to pay £100 - £200 for a single effect pedal rather than a £30 rip-off / crap, and there's LOADS of companies doing such in sizeable numbers (I.e. 10's of thousands of pedals per year, although mainly USA based granted).

juansolo

dindude said:

juansolo said:

This is why the effects, amps and guitars market here is so hard to do anything in. You simply can't compete with mass produced Chinese stuff, yet people use that as their benchmark for what things are worth. This is why the likes of MJW shut up shop and we all lose a massively talented custom amplifier builder and his creations.

Sorry for the rant, but this whole thing gets me down.

Is this really true? There's huge evidence (I.e. the whole boutique pedal market boom of the last 10 years) that people are willing to pay £100 - £200 for a single effect pedal rather than a £30 rip-off / crap, and there's LOADS of companies doing such in sizeable numbers (I.e. 10's of thousands of pedals per year, although mainly USA based granted).

Your last sentence really summed it up as to why. Things are much easier in the US. Other than Thorpy and Fredrick here, who is actually making a go of it on any sort of noticeable level? There are a few much smaller names who I suspect aren't making 10's of thousands of pedals a year... They might not be breaking into the hundreds. I suspect most of those have an alternative source of income because there's no way it's sustainable.

Cornish are an established brand that's been doing since the 70's and can charge a huge amount for their products. I stand by to make money in pedals here you either have to build loads and sell them cheap or massively mark them up. Likewise DAM now turning out Coloursound pedals.

What most people doing who are hobbyists is taking a clone of something on either tag/vero or if they're feeling swish, etch/fabbed PCB and sticking it in a box and selling it. For that it's unlikely that many of them are using their own designs, so you're essentially paying them to assemble a pedal for you. If you cover costs and a bit extra a lot of people will make you a cheap knock off. I used to do it. It's a nice way of funding the hobby. But it is in no way enough to quit work and do it full time because per hour you'll be making less than minimum wage with no paid leave/sick/pension.

In my opinion a lot of hobbyists sell their skills short. Even if they're just skilled assemblers, you often get a better made pedal than a lot of boutique shit for a fraction of the cost. I wish that didn't happen in all honesty because it means that hobbyists, even very good ones, all get bunched up into this group that'll make you a cheap knock off pedal of a production effect for someone who CBA to buy a Chinese knock off, and wants something custom for not much more.

Zoolooter

dindude said:

The Zcat here ticks a lot of your boxes, it has a hall reverb and a delay for 119 euros. Can't vouch for the sound but they have a decent reputation.

http://www.zcatpedals.com/?dir=view&id=delay-reverb

Cheers for spotting that, I'll have a listen.

Zoolooter

dindude said:

The Zcat here ticks a lot of your boxes, it has a hall reverb and a delay for 119 euros. Can't vouch for the sound but they have a decent reputation.

http://www.zcatpedals.com/?dir=view&id=delay-reverb

Cheers for spotting that, I'll have a listen.