The Dad Joke

It's a well known fact that the best pedal concepts are based on Dad Jokes. This is one such project that I've been working on for well over a year, and it's finally done. It's a drive pedal, inside a harddrive. Get it? A Hard Drive. Drive. Ah ha ha ha.

Last year I'd started on fitting the jacks into the enclosure. What followed was a lot more excavation of the metal, to give me enough room to fit the electronics. This was mainly done with a drill press, angle grinder and rotary tool.

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

The effect is a Klon into a Blues Breaker. I'm still not sure why people pay thousands of dollars for a Klon, but I hadn't built one yet, and this seemed like as good an opportunity as any.

Switching had to be soft touch switches, as the normal switches were too big to fit in the space. I've used an ATTiny chip to control a bank of optical switching 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. Two colour LED to show status of each side.

I've put in several clipping options for each effect, and that is controlled via dip switches on the underside.

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An early test fit - looking good. This was a relief to see the lid go on and no shorting.

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I tried metal stamping the lettering, but that didn't work out very well - the top is two layers of steel, and it warped 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.

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Final shots:

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