A New Hope

After about a year of no activity, I've decided to start up this hobby again.

This time, I'm going to try to do some things differently:

1. Organize BOM in Excel instead of using paper like a loser
2. Practice soldering way more
3. Prototype circuit on breadboard before soldering
4. Understand circuit
5. Put decal on pedal somehow

This time, I looked around for an easier pedal to build. The OCD had a fairly large circuit board, three pots, and a toggle switch. I think building a simpler pedal, with only one pot, will just be simpler. Plus, I'll have more room for fitting everything into the enclosure.

So, I decided on a clone of the "Super Hard-On", a pedal made by someone named Z.Vex. Apparently there are a lot of different versions of this pedal out there. It's a simple boost pedal, which adds some juice to the signal when activated and gets some nice overdrive when turned all the way up. From here on out, I'll refer to the pedal as the "SHO", because the real name is weird.

Here's a demo video I found: SHO Demo

I found two blogs about building the pedal: Hot Bottles and TDPRI. I'll use them as a guide probably

Again, I'm going to be using a veroboard layout from Guitar FX Layouts.

I'm no longer at school, so I needed to buy myself a soldering station. I got an AGPtEK soldering iron along with a holder, helping hand magnifying stand, tip cleaner, and tinner from Amazon. I also got some velcro for fastening the pedal to my pedal board and some waterslide decal paper for adding a design to the pedal. We'll see how that goes. I found a website called Bitches Love My Switches, which is amazing and also has great prices on things like jacks, switches, and knobs. I got the rest of the supplies I needed for the circuit from Mammoth Electronics.

More updates to come later.