An Easy One - The Acapulco Overdrive Kit

So I figured I'd start out the blog with a simple one, the Acapulco Overdrive kit from Das Musikding based on the Acapulco Gold from EarthQuaker Devices. I included links in case you want to go searching for this and forget to include "guitar pedal" in your Google search (insert winky face emoji here). In the interest of full disclosure, this is not the first pedal I built, or even built successfully, but it is an awesome little afternoon project!

This kit comes with everything that you need to finish the project including all of the resistors, capacitors, IC sockets, ICs., etc. It also includes the daughter board for the 3PDT switch and lengths of wire in multiple colors to help you keep direct traffic within the enclosure. It doesn't include a 9V battery clip, so if you want the option of battery in addition to the 9V, you'd have to add that. You'd probably also want to go with a different input jack as well. The only critical piece missing is a knob, which I picked up separately. 

As you can see from the image and photo above, the circuit itself is really very simple and only has one potentiometer. If you're looking for a variety of complex tones and a wide range of options, this is really not going to be the pedal for you. With this one you get distortion, more distortion, and then maybe even more distortion past that.

I kept the exterior design for this pedal fairly simple. You get a standard 125B aluminum enclosure which I painted gold using Alclad II metallizer. I then printed out some black decals on my laser printer on clear waterslide transfer paper. The Earthquaker version has a treasure chest on it, so to pay homage to it I decided to name mine "Aztec Gold" using a couple of the cursed doubloons from Pirates of the Caribbean movie series as graphics.

I've also made up several of the "Steggo" logos and tend to put them on the front of any enclosure I've built. There are also markings for In, Out, and a DC9V on the other sides (not pictured). I'm finding that despite my background in model-building and miniature painting, actually completing the enclosure and getting the finish right to my satisfaction is one of the more time consuming portions of the project. Going forward I may try to use UV printing options more often.