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Road Rage PCBs temporarily were unavailable last night due to an inventory error. This has been corrected.

So, things are going out of stock a whole lot more quickly than I anticipated. In just the past couple of days the FatPants, PorkBarrel, Cave Dweller, Hipster, Mudbunny all sold out. Re-stock on these may extend into January to allow for the new projects to get manufactured in December. We'll see.

I did do an inventory yesterday and noticed I had a couple Bloviators and Honey Dripper PCBs left. If anyone wants to add one to an order PM me and we'll arrange payment. There are 3 Bloviators and 4 HoneyDripper boards.

The EggHead PCBs got here really quick! I will start including them in orders shipping today onward. Documentation will be uploaded today or tomorrow.

This topic has been moved to December 2012 PIF.

http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=7222.0

So I took the plunge and ordered one of the Hot Coat powder guns from Eastwood. But, I forgot about the air compressor....any recommendations for moi? Preferably of the big box store variety and not terribly expensive.

I'm pretty burned out on bare enclosures/ordering painted ones so it seems like a good opportunity for me to try something new.

www.eastwood.com/hotcoat-deluxe-powder-coat-kit.html

Post a screen shot of your order history at your favorite parts supplier. Here's mine for Smallbear....probably about 30% of all the stuff I've actually bought (Mouser gets most of my monies, but my order history there is several pages long).

[Rather than giving away some left-over prototypes and a few free regular boards, this year I have decided to give away a free project.]

Since it is Thanksgiving here in the States, I thought I would take a moment to give thanks to all the members and customers here at the madbeanpedals effects factory of love. This has been a very successful year for me, despite some rough patches both professionally and personally in the first half of the year. So, thank you all for being here, for your contributions, your time and your energy. I'm so proud to be part of such an excellent community of folks and to call you my peers!

2012 Holiday PIF
As many of the long time MBP fanatics know, every year around the holiday I do a month long PIF. This year is no exception. Rather than giving away some left-over prototypes and a few free regular boards, this year I have decided to give away a free project. Starting sometime next month, all orders will receive a free "Egghead" PCB. The Egghead is a baby board version of the Clark Gainster. Super simple and super cheap to build. And, it is a really nice overdrive to boot!

I don't know yet the exact date these will be available. I placed the order a few days ago, and it will probably be 2-3 weeks before I get them. So, if you are planning on making an order in December, you might want to wait just a bit until the Egghead PCBs are in. Once they are here, I will starting adding them into shipments. It will be one per customer, while supplies last, but I'm getting 150 of them so there should be plenty to go around. The PIF will go on until they are all gone.

2012 Release Schedule
I'm running a bit behind for the November releases, so I think the dates will be modified some. I've got the last Zero Point Deluxe prototype in and I'm almost finished with it. So, I think the schedule will be this:

Next Batch: Zero Point Mini, Zero Point Deluxe, Aquaboy Deluxe, Leviathan (all delays), plus restocks.
Next batch after that: Harbinger One, Boneyard II, and maybe the Stage Fright or the Sharkfin. Not sure yet.

2013 Preview
The first month or so of 2013 will be dedicated to wrapping up some of the other outstanding projects, like the Harbinger Two (wah vibe), the Moodring, Phobos and hopefully the Loophole II.

After those are completed, I will move on to the next phase of projects which will be some of the EHX vintage stuff I'm working on like the Zipper, Polyphase, Frequency Analyzer plus some of the sub-mini tube designs. Of course, the order of things is likely to change as I get things prototyped and hopefully completed. So, just keep an eye out for announcements.

2013 will also be the year I finally launch a pedal company of sorts. This is something I've been planning for quite some time, and I'm still sussing out the development phase. Most likely, this will be a separate entity from MBP. I'd like to keep the DIY and commercial pedals stuff separate, although there might be some kind of DIY element to the new company. Anyway, I'm still figuring out exactly what the product line will be, but it will be completely different than the MBP stuff. Most likely just a handful or less of actual products: small run specialty stuff. And, unlike many boutique start-ups, I will actually be putting in a few thousand dollars to get it going!

I'm pretty stoked for this. I feel ready to expand my horizons a bit, and frankly my confidence is a lot higher now in my ability to pull off running two companies on my own. So, forward on to success (or disaster) in 2013

Lastly, I'll be pretty busy in the latter part of January making a new record with my sort-of sometimes band Radiophonic. We got some studio time set aside to do a little EP follow up. So, somehow in the next two months I need to carve out time to get my recording rig ready. How do you pick out ten pedals when you have fifty or more?

That's it for now. Enjoy your holidays!

[On Nov. 5th (or soon after), I will delete all member accounts that meet the following criteria:Account has zero posts AND, member has not been active (lurked) within the last 60 days]

We've got 1800 accounts on here with no posts. That's a whole lot of lurkin' and/or fake accounts. So, I will cleaning house on these accounts very soon.

On Nov. 5th (or soon after), I will delete all member accounts that meet the following criteria:

Account has zero posts AND, member has not been active (lurked) within the last 60 days

I picked this condition because it should not lead to the deletion of any lurkers that have been active recently (browsed the forum).

No account will ever be deleted that has at least one post...so feel free to make your first in this thread!

Nautilus, KarateShop, Kingslayer, Smoothie, PastyFace, Afterlife and PepperSpray are in!

The Nautilus and KarateShop docs are both up.

http://www.madbeanpedals.com/projects/index.html

So, I'm sure people have noticed some error messages recently when trying to access the site. This is something that really has not been a frequent problem here in the past, so I got curious and started digging to find out what the deal is.

Turns out that my host has implemented a new restraint on shared plans involving "resource points" according to how much server hardware a particular site is exploiting. Each site gets a maximum number of "points" and once you go over that, you start down the bottleneck. Basically, it's kind of a crap deal...the bandwidth and usage for the website is about the same it's been all year, but now that they are enforcing the "point system" it's going to cause problems on a frequent basis since apparently madbeanpedals consumes twice as many points as allocated. This may cause them to suspend the account if it continues, which obviously I am not too happy about.

So, I'm looking into alternatives right now, including a different host and possibly a virtual server plan. I do not know yet how quickly this transition will happen but I expect pretty soon. In the meantime, if the site goes down now and then, it is only temporary (so I hope). Please try to refrain from constantly reloading pages if you get errors. Just come back after a while and hopefully things will be back to normal. Once I know for sure if and when a migration happens, I will let everyone know.

So, this image popped up a couple of days ago on TGP. It seems to be the real deal. While I do understand the motivation for the "blurb" and totally agree, I gotta say making that the gfx for the pedal is truly baffling. The old Klon is so iconic. This just seems utterly dull and narcissist. Opinions?

I'm happy to report after months of toiling away that the Nautilus and Zero Point Deluxe are finished! I made the final tweaks today and I am completely satisfied with both. The Aquaboy Deluxe is not far behind...a few more tweaks on that one and hopefully that will be completed as well. I should have some tentative release dates for these in the next few days.

Here's my build of the Nautilus.

I've had the parts for this for well over a year and started to put it together a couple of weeks ago. Both the body and neck are from BYOC members. The neck is a Warmoth conversion, so it's a Gibson scale...fat neck profile, too. It originally had a painted headstock which I sanded down and finished with Tung Oil. Body was also done in Tung. I will probably add two more coats to the pine back at some point.

The hardware and pickups are from GFS. The pickups are really hot and I'm not completely sold on them yet. I'm pretty used to weak single coils. I I used a sweet 22n PIO cap for the tone control and man is it smooth!

Overall, it's not a typical sounding tele. It's quite deep and resonant. I'll have to spend more time with it to figure out if I want to take it in a different direction or not. I LOVE the look, though---exactly what I was going for.

To do: all the setup (bridge radius, intonation, neck adjustment) stuff and I still need to put the strap buttons on. Right now it has a traditional cup on the jack, but I will be swapping that for an electrosocket type.

Total cost came in under $300 so you can't beat that!

The Sparkplug schematic and BOM incorrectly listed R2 as 1k. R2 should be 10k.

The doc has been revised and re-uploaded. Please make a note if you have already printed the documentation out.

Probably Monday or Tuesday these will be available: Road Rage, Kingslayer, Sparkplug and Retrograde. I'll be getting the new docs together this weekend and getting some demos done of the Kingslayer and Sparkplug. The Retrograde has been absent for a while, so I've been keen to get a new PCB done for it. It will still fit in a 1590B.

I expect the next batch of releases to be in a few more weeks and will at least include the Nautilus and new Auquaboy. Maybe some Sparklehorns, too and anything else I might get completely finished.

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/make-weekend-projects-optica.html

But, we could make this better with some internal circuitry!

Been getting back into these guys lately. I've been a fan since around 1990, saw them a couple of times, etc. It's amazing they've stuck around so long. Admittedly, I don't think I've listened to anything new from the last 6-7 years. But, oh man...it doesn't get much better than the sound of Pinnick and Tabor together. Gimmie a 12 sting bass and drop D and I'm a happy d00d!!

I did a little research on Ty Tabor's gear through the late 80's. It would be fun to put together a pedal project based around that gear (Lab Series Amp, Fender Elite)....not that it would come out sounding like Gretchen Goes to Nebraska. But, maybe some good tones could be found.

$75 for a friggin' mono jack? Can this be for real? I mean....c'mon....

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=1122772

I failed to mention that the Discontinued Projects are still linked on the forum, but were moved to a sub-forum part. Here they are: http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=5134.0

This is a temporary thing....I will be reloading all the projects on the Projects Page once I get the website re-design completed. I will be going through each project to update it to the current format so there is consistency across all of them. They were taken off the Projects Page a couple of months ago because 1) it was getting really really crowded on there and 2) too many emails asking about PCBs for projects I don't offer any longer.

On the new website, the delineation between DIY projects and PCBs for sale will be much clearer which should fix the problem.

The Double Flush boards finally arrived this morning and are available for order.