148 PREMIER GUITAR NOVEMBER 2009 www.premierguitar.com
The parts and materials are covered clearly and
listed on the schematic, which is easy enough
to follow for anybody with at least some experience at this. It did turn out that a few parts
were missing from the shipped kit (a toggle and
a resistor), but that’s not very unusual for a project of this nature, and Steve took care of it right
away. I should say right off the bat, though,
that people who have relatively little experience with following schematics or building on
perfboard—or those whose skills may be a little
rusty (like me)—should be prepared for this to
go somewhat slowly, at least to begin with. The
instructions provide a good deal of explanation about the design of the circuit, reasons for
choosing particular components, and the how
the different functions of the pedal operate, so
a basic understanding of electronics is going
to come in handy. The instructions also include
some notes and technical info on potential
variations for the more experienced who are
interested in going further afield.
The first part of the build is tooling the unfin-
ished case, using the drilling template (down-
loaded from the website) and making holes for
the pots, toggles, 1/4" jacks, power jack, bypass
switch and LED bezel. Though this isn’t the most
crowded enclosure, marking the centers of the
holes accurately is important. Small Bear recom-
mends using a Unibit to drill the holes to the
proper sizes; not having one, I drilled pilot holes
using markings from the template and then
widened them with a Dremel tool—this method
requires care, so it takes time and makes a big-
ger mess (wear gloves and safety glasses!). Next
up was cutting the appropriate holes in the perf-
board for the jack flanges and switches. Tooling
an epoxy-glass board creates lots of fiberglass
dust and small pieces, so I added a facemask to
the gloves and glasses. Small Bear has lots of
good suggestions for tooling the housing and
the board, installing switches and for making
sure you get everything right the first time.
From there, the majority of the work involved is
creating the circuit on the perfboard, which can
be a challenge. Mounting components is simple
enough, but there’s no etching here, and making
connections from scratch is a precision business.
If you’re new to it, go slowly, double check your
work and do plenty of continuity testing. You
should also make a spare copy of the layout
diagram and track your completed connections
with a highlighter, especially if you’re spreading
the build out over many days, so you’ll know
where you are at any given point. This kit uses
a large pad-per-hole perfboard, but you’ll still
need respectable soldering skills to keep things
clean. Once the board was complete, it was
just a matter of wiring up the jacks, pots and
switches. Keep in mind that the pedal will work
if you do everything correctly, but may not if you
do only one thing wrong.
I discovered I had done a few things wrong
myself, despite my cautious approach, when
I plugged it in for the first time. Steve Daniels
has a good deal of experience helping kit
builders at this stage, and he offered some
solid advice. After some troubleshooting and
a few “D’oh!” moments, we were up and running. It’s a very cool trem, very versatile and
capable of a lot, from choppy, percussive beats
to subtle textures and even some weird but
musical noises. One thing I learned for sure was
that it’s less fun to build a pedal on a publishing
deadline, but I did learn some other things too,
and I did enjoy myself. —CB
smallbearelec.com
