First Ever Build - Mudbunny.

[Timmo]

First up, a big thanks to everyone on this forum! Each and every post has been enlightening, exiting and inspiring. Such a great community here!

This is my first ever pedal and technically my first ever non-kit (although I used a fabbed board) electronics project: The Mudbunny.

I built it to Green Russian Spec's and I have to say.. The sound that comes out of this thing is amazing! I might be a little biased because it came from my own soldering Iron but I've not played a nicer sounding pedal! Not that I have played anything except for BOSS and cheap Behringer's mind you..

I had a couple of issues which I thought was my soldering job on the switch wiring and I kept trying to fix odd things so its a little frankensteiny inside. Turned out that I forgot to earth the output jack and that the tip pins on the output jack were behaving weirdly so I had to connect both together even though it seemed they were already connected?
It also turned out that the guitar cable I was using had a short tip and wasn't sitting in the input properly; which led to much confusion when it wasn't working... But after a cable changeout everything was fine!

I etched the enclosure for what was probably too long, the darker bits are where pnp blue was, with the very clean spots being the areas I touched up with nail polish... The effect was not intended but it made for a very 'muddy bunny'  and I could probably get it out with a proper sander or something as it is not very deep. But I won't as I really like the look. Now I'm just looking for some very small knobs as none of the ones I have will fit! Any suggestions?

Big big big thanks to madbean and everyone and I'm sure I will be around here alot more Cheer's guys!

[Bluestrat]

Man I love the control labels! Some of the most creative I've seen. Good work!

[gtr2]

Congrats on your first non-kit.  It's all down hill from here... 

[DutchMF]

Man, I love the way that looks! Bunny-theme is much appreciated, THUMP! Don't know where you're located, but Banzaimusic.com has a large selection of knobs. There are a number of different suppliers that stock similar items, just browse this forum to find some more. I Like to know how you exactly got your enclosure to look like that......

Paul

[Timmo]

Thanks all! 

The enclosure was etched with Copper Chloride in Aqueous Hydrochloric Acid Solution (Pool acid and hydrogen peroxide) there's a step by step tutorial here:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-etchant!--A-better-etc/?ALLSTEPS

But any etching fluid works, the only reason I didn't use Ferric Chloride is because this one can be renewed and was much cheaper to buy!

There are a few tutorials around on how to etch enclosures but I used this one as a basic guide: http://www.aronnelson.com/gallery/main.php/v/MarkMs-Gallery/album24/

I drew the design by hand into corel painter on my girlfriends pen enabled touchscreen laptop (great for digital art, but I'm no artist! She was too busy to do a design for me this week..) and that's why the text is all in my handwriting . Inversed the colours and reversed the image for transfer onto the enclosure with PnP blue. (The image I used is attached here)

Once the resist layer had been transferred to the enclosure there were a few spots where the resist had not stuck, so I put some sharpie and then nail polish in those areas to touch it up (You can just use paint if you don't have any nail polish lying around). Now you can see on the finished enclosure those shiny / clean spots; that's where the nail polish and sharpie was.

What I think happened was that I etched for much much longer than was necessary, and the etching fluid ate away/ wore off some of the pnp blue resist but couldn't get under the nail polish which resulted in a very messy look for the enclosure! Not what I intended, but still not too bad for the first time! Once the etching is done you sand it back, spray some paint into the cracks and sand off the top layer!

[nzCdog]

Nice build and etch... super sounding pedal too

[bigmufffuzzwizz]

I really like the final look!! What a great first pedal to have built!