Justus

[Justus]

Hi all, my name's Steve.  I've made a couple posts here now, and have been lurking for almost a couple weeks (I think - easy to lose track of time when you're reading topic after topic after topic and learning this stuff).   I've been playing guitar since I was a sophomore in high school, having picked it up to start a band.  That band fell through.  Started another band, split off and merged with yet another band, and played for some church camps for a couple years.  That's where I met my future-wife; and now I'm 33, married, full time job, father of a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter, and I just picked up guitar again to play with my church praise team.

In my getting back into guitar again, I started looking into effects again.  When I started I was playing a Peavey strat copy through a Peavey 15-watt solid state combo unit that was just awful.  So I picked up a Grunge pedal.  Eventually I sold off that Grunge and picked up one of those old blue Digitech RP7 multi-effects units.  I had fun with that.  It was relatively inexpensive and could do all kinds of effects, no matter how bad they sounded.  (haha)  The Peavey 15w combo turned into a 100w solid state head on a 4x12 slant cab (again, yuck) and the strat copy turned into an Epiphone SG.  My band disbanded because everyone went their separate ways for college, and I pretty much quit playing.  But not before selling off that Digitech RP7 and the half-stack, and lucking into a Mesa F-50 1x12 combo amp as part of a charity auction. 

So, fast forward through 10 years of basically playing nothing but acoustic to back up my wife's singing, and now I'm part of my church's praise team where we play a lot more modern stuff.  I recently picked up a TS-9, and then started looking into delay pedals, when I stumbled my way through the internet and into the world of DIY guitar effects through Chromesphere's YouTube channel (thanks Paul!)  I've worked with small electronics before and have done some modifications to things, but have never really made anything from scratch.  But last summer I finally picked up a nice Hakko soldering iron (don't know how I got anything done with those crappy box-store pencil soldering irons that never got up to temp), and as of yesterday I picked up some HCl and H2O2, ordered a sheet of copper-clad board, and made a project list including a Green Bean, which will probably be my first pedal to replace that TS-9 I just bought.  It's probably overly-ambitious, but I like learning these things and completing projects.  Wish me luck!  Before it's all said and done I'm sure I'll have a ton of questions.  But, like I said, I've been reading the forums and scouring all the tutorials to hopefully answer most of those questions before they arise.

[midwayfair]

Welcome to the forum! Good luck, and lots of us are here to help if you need it.

[Leevibe]

Welcome Steve! If you have early frustrations with board etching, try building on a couple fabbed boards to get into the groove. Looking forward to seeing your builds!

Lee

[Justus]

Thanks!  I kinda view etching as a second, separate project.  One, can I make a PCB by etching it myself.  And then, two, can I make a pedal work.  I'm probably going to buy a couple prefab boards too.  That's probably the safer route on project two, lol.  But for now I'm still trying to put together a spreadsheet of all the different boards I want to make and see how many of each component I need to order, to know which quantity price break makes the most sense.

[Leevibe]

I've had great luck etching using blue press and peel I bought from smallbear. Scotchbrite to clean/polish the copper. I also found liquid tin to be worth the investment. I never could get magazine paper to work. Have fun and buy extra drill bits!

[muddyfox]

If you've been lurking for a while then you already know that there isn't a place like this anywhere. Nice folks, knowledgeable folks, funny folks, and not a bad apple among them.

All that I can say right now is welcome and don't be a stranger...