The new pedal board

Hi there!

I told you a little about my old pedal board before and that I have built a new one. This is how that came to. 

My old pedal board was quite nice, but there where some issues about it that bugged me. Somehow I did not get my pedals to stay in their places. At first I thought it was some problem with the material in the pedal board, but then I realized that I have used too small stripes of velcro and that dust and gravel seemed to creep in under the velcro and impaired the glue on the velcro. Another thing I was not happy about was that I somehow tended to change presets or set my rig in tuning mode, i.e. no sound, when I used my wha-wha or the whammy pedal. Either the board layout was bad or my feet was to big :-). Finally the cabling took up too much space on the board and was to stiff to handle nicely. Here is my old board:

My old board

I looked around for a new pedal board but the size of most of them where to small to fit my pedals and the boards that where big enough where way to large instead. Hmm. What to do??

I then discovered be a coincident a post on a guitar forum that some guy talked about a project to build an own pedal board from an IKEA shelf :-S. I read the post and realized that this was not a bad idea, so I planned a little and then I went ahead and bought myself an IKEA shelf called Gorm. My wife's brother was kind to purchase a shelf for me at IKEA in Karlstad in deliver it to me. Thanx!! 

Gorm from IKEA

It was enough shelf for a couple of pedal boards if I wrecked the first board. I decided to go for a pedal board in two levels. That way I would not accidentally change anything on the pedals on the ground level when maneuvering the pedals on the balcony. Here's how the design turned out!

The new board without velcro

The new board with velcro

The design now was the smallest size possible for my pedals and to be able to do the wiring, I used two Lava Cable solderless kits. It worked great, but it was a little painful for my fingers during the assembling process. I'll use more tools the next time. It was also sometimes a little bit tricky to get good contact when assembling the contacts, but after a while it got easier. This was my first time I used the Lava Cable solderless contacts and it was probably therefore I had some problems, but it was all worth it. The space on the board taken up by the cabling was incredible small. Look at the picture below and compare it with the picture on my old board above. A much nicer result on a smaller total size and with a little more gear. Misa like!!

The new board

Bye for now!

Rock on!!