Joben Magooch
Well-known member
If there's one thing I hate about pedal-building, it's finishing enclosures.
Probably 95% of my builds go into unlabeled prefinished enclosures. Out of the remaining 5%, it usually breaks down as follows:
- A few I try and do a polished aluminum look but I run out of patience and move up grits too quickly and inevitably leave some visible scratches...and then can't be bothered to go back down in grit to fix it
- A few I try to do the "stamped" aluminum a la Fairfield, Farndurk, etc...and neglect to support the enclosure well enough and either get a dent or a crack or the stamp "skips" and leaves some phantom impressions
- I don't want to pay shipping+tarriffs and have to wait on enclosures from Tayda so I'll buy blanks on Amazon and spray paint them and convince myself that no, THIS time will be different....and they always end up looking like a cheap spraypainted enclosure. I even got a little toaster oven at goodwill to try and "bake" the finish better and all it does is make my garage smell like mesothelioma and make me anxious that I forgot to unplug it and it's gonna burn my house down.
SO, many moons ago I bookmarked some tutorials on getting UV prints done thru Tayda, and about a week ago finally sat down determined to make it happen. I had literally zero experience with Illustrator and frankly "design" is just not something that I am gifted at whatsoever (As you can see, I have shameless ripped the original pedal's aesthetic).
After much frustration and a few rough drafts and a notification from Tayda that I'd somehow submitted a layer that would coat the entire face of the pedal in all white ink... I made a few more revisions and sent off one final draft and about a week later got my first print! With the help of Tayda's instructions, Steggo's tutorials, and some trial-and-error, it really wasn't too difficult.
I'm just tickled with how it turned out. I know it's an ultra-simple print in the first place, and as I said, it's a pretty blatant rip-off of the original aesthetic, but I think it looks nice. I wanted to work in "Joben" and figured it's close enough to "Benson" that it would work (Bonus points if you can identify where/what the name's from). I do think the "drive" label is maybe just the tiniest hair off-center to the left, but nothing too bad. it looked more off-center when I had the knobs off. Once they're on I think it looks okay. Maybe my eyes are tricking me.
I've said before that there are often moments in DIYing and the like where you'll make something and come away thinking, "Wow, I made that??" and this was one of those silly little moments for me. It's not my PCB, I didn't print it myself, it's barely my own design, but it was still a pretty cool feeling to see that all come together. I'm excited to try and get some more designs whipped up now.
Anywho, as for the pedal itself, I think it's pretty decent. I find the treble to be a little finicky to find the right sweet spot (but I do also feel that it works better at "stage volume" for me. It feels kinda bright at home practice but sits in a mix really nicely), and the bass knob is extremely subtle - but I gather this is pretty much to be expected. This is my second time building a Son of Ben; the first time I did the more "official" way of biasing the transistors (I don't even remember the whole process, you bias two of them to like 4v and one of them you tack solder a resistor to and adjust to some other spec and this and that)...and found it really fiddly and was not at all pleased with the results. Probably operator error. This time I just set everything to roughly 4v and it sounds really nice. Maybe that was wrong, I dunno. It's good at 18v too.
No gut shot, cuz....it looks pretty much the same as every other gut shot you would see of this pedal. Nothing special going on in there
Probably 95% of my builds go into unlabeled prefinished enclosures. Out of the remaining 5%, it usually breaks down as follows:
- A few I try and do a polished aluminum look but I run out of patience and move up grits too quickly and inevitably leave some visible scratches...and then can't be bothered to go back down in grit to fix it
- A few I try to do the "stamped" aluminum a la Fairfield, Farndurk, etc...and neglect to support the enclosure well enough and either get a dent or a crack or the stamp "skips" and leaves some phantom impressions
- I don't want to pay shipping+tarriffs and have to wait on enclosures from Tayda so I'll buy blanks on Amazon and spray paint them and convince myself that no, THIS time will be different....and they always end up looking like a cheap spraypainted enclosure. I even got a little toaster oven at goodwill to try and "bake" the finish better and all it does is make my garage smell like mesothelioma and make me anxious that I forgot to unplug it and it's gonna burn my house down.
SO, many moons ago I bookmarked some tutorials on getting UV prints done thru Tayda, and about a week ago finally sat down determined to make it happen. I had literally zero experience with Illustrator and frankly "design" is just not something that I am gifted at whatsoever (As you can see, I have shameless ripped the original pedal's aesthetic).
After much frustration and a few rough drafts and a notification from Tayda that I'd somehow submitted a layer that would coat the entire face of the pedal in all white ink... I made a few more revisions and sent off one final draft and about a week later got my first print! With the help of Tayda's instructions, Steggo's tutorials, and some trial-and-error, it really wasn't too difficult.
I'm just tickled with how it turned out. I know it's an ultra-simple print in the first place, and as I said, it's a pretty blatant rip-off of the original aesthetic, but I think it looks nice. I wanted to work in "Joben" and figured it's close enough to "Benson" that it would work (Bonus points if you can identify where/what the name's from). I do think the "drive" label is maybe just the tiniest hair off-center to the left, but nothing too bad. it looked more off-center when I had the knobs off. Once they're on I think it looks okay. Maybe my eyes are tricking me.
I've said before that there are often moments in DIYing and the like where you'll make something and come away thinking, "Wow, I made that??" and this was one of those silly little moments for me. It's not my PCB, I didn't print it myself, it's barely my own design, but it was still a pretty cool feeling to see that all come together. I'm excited to try and get some more designs whipped up now.
Anywho, as for the pedal itself, I think it's pretty decent. I find the treble to be a little finicky to find the right sweet spot (but I do also feel that it works better at "stage volume" for me. It feels kinda bright at home practice but sits in a mix really nicely), and the bass knob is extremely subtle - but I gather this is pretty much to be expected. This is my second time building a Son of Ben; the first time I did the more "official" way of biasing the transistors (I don't even remember the whole process, you bias two of them to like 4v and one of them you tack solder a resistor to and adjust to some other spec and this and that)...and found it really fiddly and was not at all pleased with the results. Probably operator error. This time I just set everything to roughly 4v and it sounds really nice. Maybe that was wrong, I dunno. It's good at 18v too.
No gut shot, cuz....it looks pretty much the same as every other gut shot you would see of this pedal. Nothing special going on in there
