I’ve got a saved search setup on eBay where I keep an eye on cheap guitar pedals in case anything interesting comes up cheap. A couple of weeks ago an Ibanez Soundtank DL5 Digital delay came up for under £15 delivered, “untested”. This translated to works fine but the foot switch is broken so it’s stuck on.

The soundtank range was a budget range by Ibanez in the 90’s with a distinctive black plastic case. One promblem with them over time is the foot switches tend to die on them.

After some research I found replacements on SmallBear in the US. Given the current climate (2020 for future readers) I wanted to avoid ordering internationally and used the part number (ALPS SPPB512300) and found them on RS Components and I could collect 5 from a local branch.

In theory anyway, these actually came direct from Japan 🇯🇵 so were not ready next working day when I arrived. Kindly the store offered to send them on on arrival and save me having to go back. This was done free of charge and was most appreciated.

The ALPS switches are tiny and so it’s not overly surprising that they fail. RS describes them as a Detector Switch, so more in line with a micro switch than the 3PDT footswitch used by boutique builders.

The repair

The first job is to remove the knobs. These just pull off from the top, just pull straight up from the pedal. It’s not too hard and I didn’t need to use any pliers. Other repairs seemed to advise removing the small rings around the knob holes. I don’t think you need to do this but if they come out easily or fall out then put them aside somewhere safe.

Next flip the pedal over and remove the base. This is held on with 4 #1 Phillps screws.

Under the base plate is an insulating plastic sheet and a ground strap from the PCB to the base plate. The ground strap will gound the base to act as a sheild so don’t lose it. One more phillips screw to remove.

Before you can remove the board you will also need to feed the battery clip from the compartment, just carefully feed it through into the case. The foam inside the battery compartment may have gone bad, mine had, so be careful to try avoid it if you can.

You also need to remove a small sub PCB holding the LED to the case. One more phillips screw holds this in place.

With the PCB out I located the 4 switch pins on the solder side of the board. To make things easier I put a small pen mark with a sharpie, though there is also a small hole in the board in the middle of them.

I used a PCB holder from Amazon for this repair. This was the first time I have used one but it was certaily a helpful purchase. These are cheap so I do recommend getting one if you ever work with PCBs.

I wanted to be as gentle on the PCB as I could removing the switch so tried to keep temps low. I started at 300ºC but I ended up turning up to 350ºC to get the solder to reflow. My iron takes a Hakko style replaceable tip so I swapped to a medium pointy tip. This allowed me to get the tip into the reasonably dense PCB and heat just what was needed.

I also tried to use solder wick to minimise wear and tear to the PCB, as it acts like a heat sink. Even with a bit of extra solder on the tip I struggled to remove the solder, so swapped back to my solder sucker. This worked great and inside a minute the switch was free.

After double checking the switch orientation against a photo, always take photos before you take stuff apart, I put in a new one. To help hold it in place I bent one leg out slightly. I then soldered in the new switch with some 60/40 solder, though I probably should have used lead free but I struggle with it.

You can see the 1 bent leg here, top left. This was enough to hold the very light switch whilst all legs were soldered into place.

Before reassembely I cleaned the housing with some window cleaner and blue shop towel. I also scraped of the perished foam in the battery compartment and used IPA to remove the glue.

This was replaced with some self adhesive 2mm craft foam. This was a nice thickness and seemed to work well.

With that done reassembly is the reverse of disassembly as the Haynes used to say. Just be careful to try thread the screws back into the plastic how they came out and not cut new threads. Also make sure you don’t forget to put the battery clip back through and the earth strap.

Once back together I tested with both a 9V and a power adapter and the pedal was back up and running and ready for years of more service. Once I get some non-pancake patch leads anyway.

I don’t normally post about my troops but this weekend was MCM Comic Con Birmingham. During our first patrol we were out near the entrance by the escalators from the trains. An MCM employee asked me to pose for a short video, and after a quick practice he took the shot and moved on.

When the end of day video was posted I figured I’d missed the cut.

However today they posted the end of con video and about halfway on is a very familiar trooper.

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That’s a wrap on MCM Comic Con 2019! ✨ #mcmcomiccon

A post shared by MCM Comic Con (@mcmcomiccon) on Nov 17, 2019 at 9:37am PST

One of the tools commonly used for wood working is the handplane. These come in a variety of sizes from only a few inches long to 60cm monsters weighing several kilos. Their purpose is to level and straighten wood and prepare it for jointing. It’s generally thought that some of the best are actually old vintage models made by Stanley or Bailey. These are readily available used and usually have plenty of life left in them. Once you clean them up that is.

This was my Dads plane. It’s a Stanley number 4, which is a middle size and a very handy one to have. It also had seen better days. The rear handle (called the tote) was broken, the metal work was all very rusted and the finish on the handles was flaking badly. It was time to restore it for use in some projects I have in mind for the future.

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to win a Boss Katana 50 amplifier. One of the features of the amplifer is channel presets which can be switched via a footswitch. The default option for this is a 2 button item, one switching channels the other swapping banks. This means sometimes to change to a given channel you will need to push 2 buttons to swap both bank and channel.

For the 100W versions a 4 button footswitch is available allowing direct access to 4 channels on each bank, this is my DIY attempt to build my own 4 button switcher for the Katana 50.

My idea was to use an Arduino to read the inputs of 4 momentary switches, and then use this to set the appropriate connections for the channel switching and also an LED to show which channel is selected.

An initial design was prototyped on a breadboard. I didn’t have enough switches at this point so wires were simply shorted together to act as switches. This needed some tweaking but after a while I had a working design. The Arduino firmware was also written at this point.

Once I had a working design I used a free application called KiCad to first create a schematic, and then a PCB design. This took a few attempts but the docs where pretty good and after following a few tutorials I was able to pick up enough to bumble my way through. I really enjoyed this stage and I hope to be able to use these skills again and build upon them in the future.

I’ve used Schaller strap locks on a number of guitars and basses now. With the S-lock updates almost all my past issues were fixed, but one still remains: a 10mm thread doesn’t really fit in a 6-7mm strap hole. A bit of a shove gets it to fit, then cranking down on the nut works but the strap always ended up warped with the slot splayed open.

Rather than just put up with this I decided to do something about it and ordered a 10mm leather punch.

The idea was to enlarge the strap hole so the lock fits neatly removing the need to force the leather. This should make it look nicer and also stop the small splits you normally get.

On Friday we went to London Film and Comic Con to meet a few actors and add to our collection signatures.

Number one on my list was Lucius Malfoy aka Jason Issacs. After a bit, okay lot, of queuing we got to have a nice little chat with Jason who signed a Lucius Mask for me and also told me a brief story about the mask.

I’ve spent a lot of time on these masks: but there was no mask on set. For the 11 seconds the mask was on screen it was all CG! Jason was directed to just wave the mask away and “there will be a mask there or something” “they’ll make it work”. Which to be fair, they did and it was good enough to capture my imagination.

There are some beautiful hand made pewter Deatheater masks in the studio tour, which is what this one is trying to replicate. All I can assume is they were made and just not used on set, maybe used to help with the CG.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on how I made these masks. It’s rather involved so I keep putting it off, but I will do it soon.

The other week we went down to visit my Dad for lunch as we often do. After lunch, we decided to pop over to Andertons Music Co for a look for something for Middlest™ to earn as a reward over the next few weeks/months.

She’s been showing interest in guitar so we picked out a few Squiers and Epiphones for her to look at. She liked a pink Squier 3/4 Strat but ultimately picked a turquoise Epiphone Les Paul SL.

I was about to put the guitar back on the rack and give her the whole speil about she could have one once she’d earned it when “I can play a D chord”….

Sure enough she did, which was rather surprising as I didn’t teach her and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Turned out she’s been using her sisters guitar and watching JustinGuitar.

I submit the following as evidence of the D chord.

The guitar came home with us that day. The story doesn’t end there though.

Recently whilst tidying up I found a 2 things I though I’d either lost when moving or binned by accident. My 2 Danelectro pedals I bought when I was still at school (and played a Squier P-Bass¹). I had a T-Bone distortion and a Surf & Turf compressor.

Sadly I had left a battery, a danelectro 9v, in the T-Bone. There was no signs of any leaking so I was happy all was well and plugged in.

One of the worst things about playing guitar is changing the strings. Specifically spending what feels like a million years winding the strings off of and on to the post. Even with a winder it’s still a chore meaning I don’t change them as often as I should.

The solution: Locking tuners.

These allow you to feed the string through, a mechanism locks the string in place ¹ and then you just tune to pitch in less than a single turn of the post.

After a lot of careful checking I chose a set of Gotoh SG381 Chrome Magnum Lock tuners from WD Music. These looks near identical to the factory tuner with the same shape and size key, and they should fit the factory holes for the original tuners. Chrome was chosen to match the factory fitted items. Whilst the PRS Specs say nickel hardware it was clearly chrome but with nickel screws, you can see the screws are more yellow when you look closely. Though check your own guitar first, don’t just take my word for it.

Late last year I started re-learning the guitar. I’ve been learning using online lessons by Justin Guitar. I’ve been slowly upgrading my equipment, buying a small practice amp and a nice PRS SE Standard 24 as rewards for my progress. But the time came to start playing with effects pedals!

Being the sort of person who I am I decided to build a DIY one. After a period of research online I decided to build a basic Fuzz, but using NPN transistors rather than the more traditional PNP transistors to allow me to use a mains adapter. This turned out to be a smart move.