Re: Show me pics of your pedal boards!
Rich_S how did you make your board?
I bought the case from some local fly-by-night sound company/custom case builder guy that charged way too little for it. Its inside dimensions are 12' x 18". I wish it was bigger.
The deck is a piece of 1/8" aluminum plate. It's drilled to match the screw holes in the pedals, and replaces their back plates. This gives a large common ground plane that acts as shielding, and also as the negative power supply connection. The Rocktron Short Timers sit up on a 3/4" MDF spacer painted to match the aluminum deck.
The bottom of the box is lined with thin aluminum sheet for noise shielding - the shield, deck, and aluminum frame are all tied together to form one solid ground connection.
Color-coded +9 volt, input, and output wires are soldered to convenient terminals inside the pedals, like the backs of jacks. They exit the pedals through grommeted holes in the deck, and are connected to terminal blocks mounted on its underside.
Power is provided by a homemade 9 volt supply, just a small Radio Shack transformer, bridge rectifer, filter cap, and 7809 regulator.
The recessed oval plate on the right side holds input and output jacks, and a ground lift switch for killing ground loops.
To use it, I just lay it down on stage, and plug it the power, input, and output cables. Lift off the lid, and it's ready to go. Back in my bar-band days, the lid came it handy - it would protect the board between soundcheck and gig time without having to disconnect anything. These days, there's very little beer flying around at my gigs (maybe a little bit of communion wine, but that's about it.)
Advantages of this design are clean appearance, reliability, and ease of setup. The downside is the lack of flexibility. It's fairly easy to swap Boss boxes around, but changing to different types of pedals (or changing the overall layout) is a hassle involving drilling and sometimes re-painting.
I'm working right now on a new version wherein one of the Rocktrons is leaving to make room for a DS-1 and a Phase 90. It took a lot of planning to figure out how to do it cleanly. I almost gave up and started over with a bigger board, but I like the compact dimensions of this one. However, I think I've taken this about as far as it will go.
