Creating Your Own
DIY Guitar Effects Work Bench

By Paul Marossy     

Last updated 5/26/05     




If you are an electronics hobbyist, chances are you will need a work bench at some point if you are serious about it. I worked on the floor of my hobby/music/office for the first two years of my new hobby, DIY guitar effects. Your work area doesn't have to be very large or expensive for that matter. It is well within the reach of most people to have an adequate, organized and efficient work area.

Here is what I did, and hopefully, it will give you ideas as to how to make your own work bench.


Here is my workbench area. It doesn't have to be a very large table, if you use some organizers to optimize your workspace. I bought the table on the right at Costco for around $35. It measures 48"x24" and has folding legs. The cabinet to the left contains various digital FX units, EQ's, a four track recorder and other things. These items allow me to do testing with headphones, so I don't wake up the neighbors and annoy my family... On top of the cabinet resides some of my test equipment.
This is some of the test equipment that I have - A Tektronix 453 oscilloscope that was given to me, a function generator which can produce sine, square and triangle waves at frequencies which can be varied from 10Hz to about 1mHz. I also have a DIY audio oscillator , which is housed in a recycled computer A/B box. These items are not an absolute must, but they sure will help you to see what is happening in an audio circuit.
This is a nifty pen/pencil organizer that used to sit on top of a drafting table. When my boss retired, I inherited it. I don't know where to get one of these, but it sure makes things nice and neat, and it can hold many hand tools in a small area.
These are some little parts bins that I purchased at Lowe's for $6.97 a piece. They hold most of my commonly used resistors, capacitors, diodes, LEDs, pots, trimmers, etc. This is A LOT better than my mounds of baggies in several shoeboxes method I used previously!
Another useful thing to have is a Benchtop Power Supply . It is adjustable from 1.5 volts to 30 volts, will supply up to 1.5 amps and will accept an AC or DC power source.
One of the most useful things to have is a Guitar Effects Prototyping Board. With this gadget, you can easily prototype or tweak circuits.
I relocated my workbench to another room in the house after I created this page. It has been evolving with the passage of time and I think I have found the optimum multi-purpose work area for me. This area is proving to be pretty effective for me.


Among other things you should have is a DMM (Digital Multi-Meter), a manual ranging one is fine, but an auto-ranging one will sometimes be more useful. I have both. Another very handy tool to have is a Dremel Tool, for drilling PCBs, grinding, polishing, etc. And a little table top vise or Panavise is very useful for holding your work in place while soldering parts on your circuit board. And of course a hand drill or drill press for drilling enclosures, with various size drill bits and I would highly recommend a Uni-Bit/Vari-bit. I bought a Uni-Bit about six years ago and I am still using it to drill all sorts of stuff, but mainly aluminum enclosures. If you do quite a lot of PCB etching with ferric chloride, consider making an etching fixture like the ones that use an aquariam heater and bubbler to heat and agitate the etchant to produce several PCBs in a short amount of time. If room allows, you could create and etchant station in a spare bathroom or at a laundry sink.

 

 

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