Questions abut pedal kits

AustrianJohn

Having built a few guitars and an amp I now need to either move to a bigger house, or build something smaller - hence my interest in pedal kits. Before I built my amp (P1800) I was playing through a Fender Mustang (effects included) and also used a Zoom MS100-BT, which was a bit fiddly but did a job. I'm now planning a home built pedal board to use with the P1800. I can use the MS100-BT as a tuner(and possibly one effect in addition), then would use home-built pedals for: compressor, distortion, delay, chorus, reverb - possibly all sitting in a Harley Benton PB5.

Bitsbox and Pedalparts look good options. Any comments on these kits - or suggestions of anything better?

I've seen reference to Direct Connect, but Google doesn't help explain this in the context of guitar pedals - is this relevant?

As always - thanks in advance to the collective brains and experience on the Fretboard.

thermionic

I haven't built a Pedalparts kit yet but I do know that a kit with a pre-drilled enclosure makes it easier to get a neat, professional-looking and reliable pedal. The fiddliest thing is wiring the jacks, pots & switches to the board, and a lot of thought has gone into that aspect of the Pedalparts kits. I would also always go for a PCB over a veroboard build as it's easier to do a good job of soldering PCB imho. My veroboard attempts end up messy and problematic.

I keep looking at the Pedalparts kits and end up not buying any because I can't decide which ones I want to build first!

stickyfiddle

I've done loads of pedalparts kits. They're excellent. Good quality, clear instructions and happy to talk If you email him

Sporky

The only ones I've done were BYOC; they had good instructions, sensible component choice and the finished results sounded great.

Oh - and one 4MS one, which was rubbish in every respect.

Danny1969

I build a lot of stuff for people and although the kits make life easy for beginners they tend to work out a bit pricey, to the point of being not much cheaper than something pre built on Ebay. I recently built a clone of an MXR Distortion + for someone and it worked out about £14 finished, rather than £30 odd for a kit 

I tend to use Tripad board rather than normal stripboard. It's no less effective than a PCB electronically  and because you can use both sides you can get a good density as well. Bread board the circuit first, draw it out for the tridpad board when your happy with the circuit and then make it. 

I get all my enclosures from China now. They are cheap but great quality and easy to drill using nothing more than a cordless. I use a cone cutter for large holes like XLR cutouts and  ordinary drill bits for everything else. 

Fatfingers

Musikding.de do some really good stuff, including a cracking Tube Screamer clone that I've just built (they do a lot of clones). I've also built one of their clean boost kits (great for the P1800) and have just ordered one of their MoWah kist to build into an old Dunlop Cry Baby.

They reply to their emails promptly and their prices are excellent.

crunchman

A lot of the time I've just bought a PCB, and then sourced the components myself.  It's normally 20% cheaper that way.  You also get to choose what components you are buying.  Most of the places that do kits do put in decent quality components, but if you buy them yourself you know they are good.

You can also tweak component values if you want.  I wanted to build a tubescreamer type circuit, but with some different values for components.  What I ended up building was a bit of a hybrid between a TS and Fulldrive 2.  It had the assymetric clipping of the FD2 but some of the other values were from the TS, or somewhere between the two.  If I'd ordered a kit it would have been a straight clone of one or the other.

I've bought boards from Pedalparts, Madbean and Musikding.

Musikding are good because you can order the board, but also order all the other components at the same time.

Sarge

I've heard good things about fuzzdog, been tempted by a few of his kits too but I'm hesitant as the only pedal kit I've done so far was an eBay fuzzface breadboard jobby, its fine if I want no fuzz on 80% of the dial then radio Luxembourg and high pitch squealing for the remaining 20%.....

AustrianJohn

crunchman said:

A lot of the time I've just bought a PCB, and then sourced the components myself.

Where do you get the designs from?

crunchman

AustrianJohn said:

crunchman said:

A lot of the time I've just bought a PCB, and then sourced the components myself.

Where do you get the designs from?

Most of the PCBs will come with a circuit diagram, and a parts list.  Pedalparts and Madbean have the documentation available for download from their websites.  I can't remember if Musikding do.

If you are not familiar with it then spend a bit of time looking at the Pedalparts or Madbean websites.  It will be quite informative.