Building a Custom Boutique Guitar Pedalboard – Part V

After a few revisions, my pedalboard was ready! It was just bare wood at this point, but I already had all of my finishing materials purchased and ready to go – tolex, glue, piping and tweed.

If you notice, the top of the board, the pedal area, looks metallic. That is actually a formica that I had my woodworker apply. There are various ways you could go here..plain wood painted flat black would be another good option. My original idea was carpeting – I figured I could put the hook end of the velcro (I think that’s right) on the bottom of the pedals, and just stick them on the carpet. This WOULD also work, but I had a very specific carpeting picked out – the type you would see in a home theater, with all kinds of crazy flourescent shapes – very cool looking. I bought a sample from an online carpet retailer, but low and behold..the vecro would not stick to it. Yes, I probably could have just stuck the other side of the velcro to it, but maybe carpet wouldn’t have been the greatest idea anyway – it would probably get sort of dirty and mucky after a few months of club gigs.

Once I got the pedalboard home, I immediately dis-assembled it, which was my plan all along. This way, I would be able to apply the tolex, piping and tweed, and re-assemble when complete:

The tolex application went WAY better than I expected. I found a great tutorial online that explained how to cut around corners etc. The glue I used is a new kind that doesn’t have very bad fumes and can be used indoors. The outer, visible portion, is all that really matters when applying tolex. The inside doesn’t have to be pretty or exact. You just basically measure enough to wrap around, or loop over the edges:

If you remember, I purchased a classic car logo to put on the front of the board. I had an oval cut out of the main frame, so I could apply the tweed to the secondary frame underneath. (The design actually allowed for me to remove the entire outer shell, leaving the middle wedge in tact. This probably added some weight, but it is a very sturdy design.) This oval cutout REALLY added some difficulty to the tolexing. It was very tricky trying to tolex around that curve, and although I’m sure a seasoned pro could do it no problem, I sort of botched it. I wound up gluing a strip right around, overlapping the initial attempt. You can’t really tell from looking at it, and probably only a real pro would take issue with it at closer inspection. Had I left this piece solid, the tolex would have been flawless. I could have just mounted the logo to the tolex, and it probably would have looked just as cool. The tweed does look decent, but I’m not sure it was worth the trouble:

I also had some problems with the piping around the inner edge of the board (you can sort of see this in the photo above on the top edge). This was really just a decorative touch, and I basically just stapled around the edges with wood staples. When I pressed the 2 pieces back together, some of the piping got sort of jammed down inside, because it was such a tight fit.

Other than that, I think the project came out great! It wasn’t cheap after all was said and done, but it was a lot less than comparable boards I see for $700 and up. I did keep all of the receipts, but I don’t really have an exact total. I’d say it was somewhere around the $400-500 range, including all wood, fees, tolex, glue, tweed, piping, jacks, power supplies, and case:

(Sorry about the quality of that last one – I need to snap some current pics of the completed board). I also removed the handles from the surface of the board, because I was having trouble getting everything to fit comfortably. They really weren’t needed though, because I leave the board in the bottom of the case, and just pop the top off. I usually get a “WOW” from the stage techs at the clubs – either their impressed or horrified..I’m not really sure.

Could you buy something that would do the job for less? Yes…a lot less. But this was just one of those things that I got in my head. Guitarists are known for this. By the way – the case I’m using is actually a pedalboard case – the interior is covered with a material that velcro WILL affix to. As I said earlier, I think it was around $80, so if you don’t want to get as extreme with your setup as I did, you could grab a case and some velcro and have a great board.

Share on Facebook

Bookmark It

Hide Sites