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What's the minimum delay you can get with this setup - my guess is that the 'shaky ground' will add substantially to this?

Aron Nelson - the guy that runs DIYSB - is in Honolulu.
http://www.aronnelson.com/aron2/

This came up over on DIYSB last year: http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=110786.0

It got quite heated by DIYSB standards.

Also bump for knowledge! I d like to hear a word from the chemists in the forum on how to easily rust an iron enclosure (not aluminium) fast?

Heat, oxygen, acidic water and a little salt.
Put them in hot water with some acid (vinegar is probably a good cheap and easy option) and table salt. If you have an old fish tank pump, then you can use this to bubble the solution. If not, try a shallow tray with water just covering the enclosure and give the solution a swirl from time to time.

p.s. cool enclosures - the finish is very impressive, but you are not the first by at least 15 years:  http://www.geofex.com/article_folders/steelstud/steelstud.htm

Bummer, but at least it sounds it should only be a temporary bump in the road.

Does the injury prevent you playing at the moment and/or is the skin graft likely to do so (I would imagine it will be 'tight' for some time)?

Playing guitar is likely to be excellent rehab, but if you can't do that for a while there are options: I had an unintentional experiment with DIY amputation of my left index finger some years ago. It was unsuccessful, but required tendon repair and about a year of rehab. I went nuts after a few weeks of not being able to play anything - hand was in various bandages/ splints for a long time - so I bought a square neck dobro. I figured I could play improvised lap steel until I got my hand back. An electric lap steel is not necessarily a very expensive purchase (but they can be, or you could buy a pedal steel!), but allows a slightly new creative outlet, they are quite moddable, and play nice with pedals.

>doesn't this reduce the voltage going into the effects if they draw a lot of current,

Yes, but for many effects, the voltage drop is almost negligable (V = IR, and I is often only a few mA).
If you have a high-current pedal, you can achieve the same effect with a smaller value resistor - may have to have a higher power rating - and a proportionally larger capacitor.

In the UK, while there are a lot of folk clubs and venues that will book folk acts, it can be bloody difficult to get a foot in the door.
There are also a number of hard core folkies that don't like American stuff. They are in the minority, but you might get more traction by promoting yourself as a singer-songwriter and/or trying to ride on the coat tails of the success of Mumford et al. (which plenty of others seem to be doing).

These might be worth a read.
http://folkandroots.co.uk/home/venues/
http://britfolk.co.uk/helpgigs.html
http://www.jacey-bedford.com/helpfiles/from-outside.html

No problem, and happy modding.

I am working from the assumption that the 2nd op-amp doesn't have it's input drawn the wrong way round, as it would be an oscillator if that were the case.

The tone control works against C7 - which could be connected to ground rather than VR - to give you a low pass filter with corner frequency from:
470R vs 22n = 15 kHz down to (470R + 10k) vs 22n = 690 Hz.

The tone control will not have much effect on the second op-amp, which is an inverting low-pass shelving* filter with a corner frequency of ~300 Hz.
That's why it sounds dark. If you decrease the 1.5n cap to somewhere in the 100-470p range, it should sound like a guitar effect. The 10p is just there for good behaviour.

*Shelving in that at low frequency you have a gain of -6.6(ish) and at high(er) frequencies you have a gain of -3.3(ish).
The peak gain of about 6.6 might be enough to clip the rails. If it sounds fizzy, I would increase R7 to 220k or 330k.

A big part of that sound is the almost complete lack of sustain you get from an acoustic archtop guitar. You can only do so much with finger damping.
Once you have found the flavour of distortion you like, you might try adding a simple noise gate - series diodes bypassed with a variable resistor to see if you can get a bit closer.

On a different note, I recently read an interesting article about trying to emulate old bluegrass recordings. The idea that old instruments (it was about banjos, but argument stands) sound like their recordings is somewhat wrong. The instruments probably sound pretty similar to today's equivalent, but after recording with very limited bandwidth and headroom, we have come to thing of them sounding very different.

I would vote for a volume pedal over a Slow Gear.
For a violin effect, an Ebow and volume pedal with maybe some treble boost and mild distortion is probably as good as you will get.
Cello will require a bit more of a bass boost, but much the same otherwise.

The kits from das Musikding (in Germany) are also quite good, and they are also relative cheap. Shipping to the UK is cost effective and it usually takes about 1 week.

http://www.musikding.de/guitar-effect-kits

In any case, take a read through the build documents for anything that you are considering buying. If you can follow these, then you will probably be ok.

We used to have one of the cutters at work, but it seems to have gone walkies. If I come across it, I will give it a try.

^This looks like the right thing:
http://au.rs-online.com/web/p/tube-cutters/0722198/

This is for cutting soft plastic and rubber tubing - think miniature rubber hoses. If you can get the IC tube to fit within its 'jaws' - which is doubtful -  it will probably work.

Edit - having thought some more about it, at IC tube might well fit. I can try on Monday if you like?

It's definitely a one piece neck - see: "Is it true that GSG make a unique one piece maple neck with no 'skunk stripe'? If so, how is this possible?" here: http://www.gordonsmithguitars.com/faq/

^They might drill from both sides so the bit need only be 1/2 as long as the channel.

I expect this is the case as there is a plug on the headstock end of the neck. Whether this is for drilling or just fixing the truss rod, I don't know.

Regardless of how they make them, they seem to be pretty sturdy - I have flatwound 12's on mine - and it plays great.