KrisWillis.com

Although I hardly use my SD-1, due to my GT-8 having all of the overdrive settings I could possibly want, it was still annoying me that I had a faulty pedal sitting on my shelf. The problem I was experiencing was that the SD-1 was constantly stuck in its on position – Stomping on it did nothing but continue with the overdrive.

After taking it apart and hooking it back up to some power, a guitar and an amp, in its disassembled state it was working fine – Reassemble and the fault reappears. It was instantly obvious that something was shorting out against the metal casing. You’d have thought that there was some form of non-conductive coating on the base-plate – Maybe there is, but defective near the switching area of the circuit. Covering the base-plate with insulation tape fixed the issue and it’s now working perfectly again!

I was looking at adding some extra functionality to a couple of bits in my guitar set-up, in my case this involved buying some footswitches – One for my Vox AD30VT amplifier, and one for my Boss RC-2 Loop Station. Vox offer the VFS-2 and Boss has the FS-6 for a combined cost of around £60, which is quite a bit for what they actually are. Okay, the Boss has a few fancy features like interchangeable latching / momentary functionality, status LEDs and switchable polarity but I don’t need any of that. I was sure I could build something that does exactly what I needed for a lot less than sixty quid, so I did. (more…)