Yesterday I posted about ripping the guts out of my favorite fuzz pedal, the Electro-harmonix Big Muff Pi. Today I show you how to do it.
The pedal has a really classic harmonic distortion sound- everything from woolly muffling to bee-hive droning. I must use the thing more than any other pedal on my board. But its sound might not be the only reason behind that; the thing takes up the space of two standard-sized pedals, dominating the real estate and sticking out like a big bully.
As I add more pedals to my board, the size of the Big Muff just gets more and more obnoxious. This is compounded by the fact that its electronics only take up about 40% of the housing! Look at the picture to the left- you can see all the free space that’s left after that tiny circuit board is installed. Electro-harmonix has themselves started housing their pedals in smaller, more manageable-sized enclosures, but I bought mine long before they ditched the nostalgia of these bread boxes.
So what was I to do? Well, rehouse it myself, of course. I wanted to share how easy it was (it only took me an hour or so, including drilling the new enclosure), in case you felt the urge to shrink down your own pedals. The techniques I use can be applied to a good bunch of the pedals out there, especially the ones in enclosures as easy to open as EHX’s.
The first thing I did was bring the guts of the pedal with me to Fry’s Electronics to find the right sized enclosure…
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I ended up with the Hammond 1590C, as it had just enough room along its widest side to fit the three potentiometers, which were soldered directly on the board. While I was there, I also picked up some 4″ clamps and a few different-size metal drill bits (also called ‘twist bits’). |
Drilling the holes
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I then used the original enclosure to measure the distances for the potentiometer holes, the LED (which I placed at the same spot relative to the controls), and the size needed for the stomp-switch hole. Once I had those marked, I used the 4″ clamps to secure the enclosure to the work table. Having a metal box spinning on the end of a drill is one of the least-fun things in the world, and more often than not, leads to a world of hurt. |
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The box was clamped down, and now it was a matter of (hopefully no) blood, sweat and tears as I carefully and patiently drilled through the enclosure. |
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Please make sure you wear eye protection and a mask for your nose and mouth. Drilling metal is pretty dangerous, and creates a lot of fine, sharp dust that can damage just about anything it comes into contact with. And yes, that is a broken drill bit next to the enclosure. Just be careful. |
Decaling the enclosure
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On the way back from Fry’s, I stopped in at Michael’s (a great hobby store) and picked up black and red contact paper, as well as graphite transfer paper. While not as permanent and professional looking as silk-screening the enclosure, it’s definitely a lot more inexpensive. |
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I still have the box the Big Muff came in- so I scanned it in, scaled it down, and with a little cut-n-paste, put together the outline for the black decal. Using the outline, I transferred the pattern onto the black contact paper. I did the same with the red for the pi symbol. The red stripes were just eyeballed. |
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You might notice the penny glued to the side of the enclosure; It’s covering a hole I drilled in the wrong place. I didn’t test the spacing of the input/output jacks with the circuit board in the enclosure before I drilled the sides. It ended up being kind of a neat mistake that will hopefully bring me luck- there’s one on the other side, too. |
Putting it back together
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Once I had it all gussied up, I place the guts of the Big Muff into the new enclosure. It’s a much better fit, don’t you think so? I would have tidied up the wiring (it has a lot of extra lengths to account for the original, larger enclosure), but I didn’t want to risk damaging the pedal and I wanted this to be just a quick day project. |
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A couple of tweaks to the design and I had a pretty sweet looking mini-Big Muff. Or as I ended up nicknaming it; “Muf”. |
Here it is on the pedal board:
And when I need to, it will comfortably sit the other way to make room for plenty of more pedals:
And a comparison shot to show you the reduction in size:
One day I might redo the whole thing to fit into an even smaller sized enclosure by detaching the potentiometers from the board and adjusting the other wiring. But for now it’s half the size of what it used to be, and that’s just fine by me.
Hello! Thanks for the detailed pics, I used a Hammond 1590BB which is about half as deep. You can’t fit a battery in it, but I run it off a One spot anyhow. It just barely fit everything in otherwise, works perfect, and is very small. It took less time than I thought, it only ended up taking an hour max from start to finish.
April 9, 2010 @ 2:51 PM