The Dad Joke

[mjg]

It's a well known fact that the best pedal concepts are based on Dad Jokes.  This is a drive pedal, inside a hard drive. Get it? A Hard Drive. Drive. Ah ha ha ha.   Sorry. 

This one has been a long time on the bench, but finally finished it this week.  The effect is a Klon into a Blues Breaker, but to be honest, any drive would have worked for the joke.  Those two were selected as I had not built either yet. 

Over a year ago, I posted the first efforts at fitting jacks into the space.  What followed over 12 months was a lot more excavation of the metal, to give me enough room to fit the electronics. This was done with a drill press, angle grinder and rotary tool.







The vertical space was just enough to fit the pots, PCB and a bit of 1mm foam underneath to prevent shorting.





Crazy shaped PCB was done to fit around the screw mount points in the enclosure:




Switching had to be soft touch switches, as 3PDT switches were too big to fit in the height. I've used an ATTiny chip to control a bank of optical switches to do true bypass for the Blues Breaker, and buffered bypass for the Klon. I did find a low profile relay that would have done the job, but I had the optical chips already so went with that. Two colour LED to show status of each side.

Dip switches sit in a recess at the bottom, to control two clipping options for each effect. 



Test fit.  I was super happy that it all fit in without too much crowbar needed: 



I tried metal stamping the lettering, but that didn't work out very well - the top is two layers of steel, and it didn't stamp well unfortunately. To save it, I went over things with the rotary tool, then some paint to finish. Pretty happy with how it came out - the dints around the letters I could have done without though. 



And the final photo shoot: 

[mjg]

Ahh dammit, I just noticed how dusty one of those knobs is.  I stole it from another build to take the photo.  I can't unsee that now.   

[mattc]

Very cool!

[Jakes Dad]

Seems a lot of work for a joke, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.  And THAT IS REALLY FRICKING COOL!

Chuck

[midwayfair]

Hi, pedal, I'm dad.*

*not actually a dad, but a great fan of dad jokes

[thomasha]

Very nice!

[gordo]

You, sir, are completely f**king bonkers.  In the best possible way, of course.  That looks like so much work but the wacko factor is off the recordable charts.  Hats off to a seriously cool effort.

[alanp]

Hehehe. That is brilliant!

Maybe you can hunt up an old 20MB hard drive, one of the ones that take up a whole 5 1/4" space (and I do not mean the Bigfoot drives.) Then you could jam a ADA Flanger in it.

[Tremster]

Tehehe.

[mjg]

Thanks all.  It certainly was a bit of fun to build. 

Hi, pedal, I'm dad.*

Ok, that was the best possible response. 😂

[Willybomb]

Dude, you got any more of those pcbs?

[jimilee]

Did you hear about the man who sued the airline cause they lost his luggage? He lost the case. -Dad Jokes.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[mjg]

Dude, you got any more of those pcbs?

Yep, got a whole stack of them.  Wasn't going to offer them for sale due to postage to US or Eu costing so much these days, but happy to send one down to Tassie, give me a PM?