Make Your Own Pedal Board

So, I have found myself wanting a pedal board, but dang, those things are expensive for something to incredibly simple. There is not much to these boards, so, I figured I'd make a nice simple one, and document it it a bit. I am not making a fully road worth cased board, but that certainly wouldn't be a lot of trouble either. For the purposes of this project it's a simply velcro covered board that I can toss in my back seat and bring to jamming and recording sessions.

The easy part of the board, as shown in the first pic. I had a random piece of nicely sanded plywood sitting in the garage, seems a perfect candidate for the job. A quick dose of matte black spray paint covered it nicely. Of course, plywood sucks up paint pretty quickly, so a couple of coats are most definitely required.

After the paint is good and dry, it's time to acquire, and apply, some velcro strips. Velcro is typically not cheap to buy. I found a 15 foot (as I recall) length of 1 inch wide velcro at WalMart for around $12 or so. Cut those into lengths that go within 3 inches of so of the length of the board. You want to leave 2-3 nitches at one end of the board for the power strip, the velcro will lay as pictured in that first picture.

After the velcro is on horizontally, then put 2-3 strips vertically, for the power strip to attach to, it will then look like that first picture in this article. Of course, depending on your pedals, power strip, and such, you may want to lay your out differently.

After that is all in place, cover the bottom of the power strip with the opposite texture of the velcro strip, as shown in the second picture of the article.. This allows the power strip to be stuck down very firmly.

The final part of the project is putting strips of velcron on the bottom of your pedals. This needs a little bit of attention. Unlike some commercial medal boards, this board is not a single sheet of velcro that anything will stick anywhere on. We have strips of velcro placed a few inches apart. So, depending on where you want your pedals to be placed, the velcro on the bottom of the pedals needs to be placed accordingly.

From there, you can place all your pedals in whatever arrangement you desire, grab some cable ties and start neatening up your power cables, making or buying short signal cables to daisy chain everything together and boom! There ya go, a nice, neat, usable pedal board for a sum total of about $30.

Easy, huh?