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While I'm sitting here putting various label designs onto a couple of sheets ready to take to the print shop in the morning, I've had a thought with the labels, that may have been some of the cause of the bad transfers. They couldn't take the designs on the SD card so they photocopied the ones that I printed. I only used normal plain paper, so the print quality wasn't as good as it could have been. Also, the first sheet got printed on the black and white setting and there was much more toner on the decal sheet then when it was redone on the colour setting (for the black colour at least). I had a quick look at the enclosures earlier, I'm the ones that had more black toner on transferred really well. The back plates transferred well as well. I'm going to get the new labels printed on the black and white setting to see if that helps as well.

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Thanks for the more info there.

With the powder coating and acetone, I know it's a lot more resistant then spray paint but still need to be a bit careful with it. If you've used sandpaper, then it probably needs fully stripping before it can be reused properly. I've had enclosures soaking in acetone for 24 hours and the powder coat in still a complete PITA to remove (Although it's completely messed up by then). If you look on eBay you can find 99.9% pure acetone quite cheaply that should work better then nail polish remover, although make sure you wear gloves, when I didn't my nails were trashed and were breaking just by looking at them.

That's good that it's worked so well for the polished enclosure, although I'm surprised the normal water slide decals didn't work too well. The instructions say to dry it using a hair drier, microwave or oven, so I used the oven, I may try the hair drier method next though, especially if it gave you great results.

I've come up with a theory on why the imprint of the plastic part of the decal is in the paint, and that's because the paint had started melting slightly in the oven. The powder I use is done at 180'C, and the instructions say to use 100'C, but like I said in an earlier post, I think the over was set just slightly higher then that. Maybe putting the enclosure back in the oven after the decal is removed will solve that issue, I'm not sure but I'll try it, and I'm also going to set the ovens using the thermometer that I've got rather then the dial on the oven as that doesn't make 100'C clear on it.

Most likely tomorrow, I'm going to try the above improvements, putting a decal on top of one that didn't transfer right and removing a decal, just to see which method is best for re-applying them.

Also, one point of interest, I had 5 enclosures and their base plates in the oven for 10 mins, and all came out near great. I then had 5 enclosures and 10 base plates in the oven for 10 minutes, and on those ones the transfers weren't very good, especially on the base plates. I'm going to try 5 enclourses and 5 base plates for 10-15mins at a set 100'C and see if that makes improvements.

I'm on call with work tomorrow, so if I'm not called to go in then I'll be trying these again. If great, consistent results can't be achieved, then it's a easy way to label enclosures. That's the only thing that's stopped me building the VFE Rats and I've got a PedalPCB D3lay kit coming today that will need labelling.

I didn't manage to get any more done today, a friend came round unexpectedly and then I managed to lock myself out the house. The issue is my key was in the door lock on the inside so I couldn't use a spare key. On the plus side, my neighbour came out of his house on the phone to the police as he thought someone was trying to break into my house, so at least I now know that he keeps an eye on my place!

Bio77 - with the label removing, I've got 99.9% pure acetone, so hopefully it will remove the toner before it starts eating into the powder coat.

When you say about redoing the labels, did you just soak a new decal in water, apply glue, then line the new decal up perfectly over the original decal? Did that work quite well? Did it cause any ridges on the transferred toner or anything?

With the way that you've done yours, I did mine a different way. After applying the decal to the enclosure, I didn't dry them with a hair drier, instead I put them in the oven at approximately 100'C (Google says that works out to be 212'F) for 10 minutes. When the enclosure had cooled down I then removed the decal.

With the decal, did it leave any marks on the enclosure from where it was? And did you use bare, spray painted or powder coated? Have you got any pictures of your results as well?

I've just looked at the instructions again and it says 10-20 minutes in the oven so maybe they needed slightly longer. I'll try that, and also the technique that you did and I'll post my results. I've got a fair few bits to do over the next few days but I'll try and fit it in somewhere.

UPDATE!

I tried using these yesterday and had massively mixed results.  Apologies for the lack of pictures, but I was getting far too annoyed when they weren't working correctly.

Two things I'll mention first. Their YouTube video says to soak the decal for 30 seconds, but the instructions that came with them says 3-5 seconds. If you do the 30 seconds the decal falls off of the paper in the water, so around 5 seconds is about right. Also, I didn't have a paint brush to put the glue onto the enclosure with, so I used a squeegee type thing, and tried various amounts of glue.

On my acoustic pedal enclosure, I put the decal on the back plate first, then I did the front ones individually, but the ones on the front became all wrinkly after a few minutes even though the one on the back was fine.

On a fair few of the back plates, the decal didn't transfer properly, I'm not sure why. I'm going to strip them off later today and redo them.

The yellow label for the Peewee Booster (Beans modified EP booster from the DIY page) didn't show on the red paint, so I'll have to redo that in a different colour.

The labels for the Creamy Dreamer (Beans Dreamtime) were originally in blue, however, I ended up using a baby blue on the enclosure and that colour wouldn't have worked. The print shop accidentally left the copier on the black and white setting so there was a lot of toner on the transfer, and apart from 1 enclosure, they turned out great. Having the copier set to black and white and not on colour allows for more black toner on the decal.

When cleaning any excess glue off the enclosure using isopropanal alcohol, it does remove a very small amount of the toner. Not sure if it's noticeable or not, but there was some toner on the kitchen towel that I used. You can also faintly see where the decal sheet as been applied. I'm assuming it's where the powder started melting slightly.

One last thing, I'm not sure if my overs were set slightly too high or not. The dial marks are 70, a load of notches, 120, a load of notches, 180, a load a notches, etc. Between 70-120 there are more mother then the 120-180 range, so I'm going to take a temperature probe with me today.

I'll add the results of round 2 either tonight or tomorrow, along with more pictures.

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Yeah, I'll be doing that next time, just need to get a USB stick.

I'm hoping these will be good for if you're only making a few pedals. Being in the UK, the postage and import charges of the UV printed enclosures from PPP is just too much, and normal decal sheets with the clear coat on top is just a complete PITA the get right.

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EBK - I'm not sure on the glue type, the glue pot just says W1. W2 is the glue you use to dry nataurally without using an oven.

I've just got a bunch of enclosures painted up then I'm going to use the decals on either today or tomorrow, I'll let you know the results when I get them done.

As for the glue residue, here is what the instructions say, hope this helps a bit.

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Thanks for your input there.

With regards to you trashing your basement, have you seen those little spray booths you can buy? It opens out to create a spray capture area, it has a fan in the back that's attached to a long outlet tube, and had a little turn table so you can spray what you need at all angles? Those little toaster ovens are great aren't they? I've got 2 then I run when I paint up boxes, can get 4x 1590A, 1590B and 125B enclosures with their base plates in them, or 2x 1590BB with their base plates.

That's one of the issues with my current gun, so much powder is coming out of it, more goes on the makeshift work bench then on the boxes! If I was doing it inside, then I would have trashed my dad's barn! Luckily, I had 2 stands with some wood across the top of them to use as a table just outside the barn as it was a nice day, albeit a bit cold.

I found another gun, apparantly it's rated at semi professional, for about £100 more then the Eastwood. However, I've read a few horror stories about it, and apparantly it doesn't have any CE or other safety marking on it. It's the Redline EZ50.

Due to the above mentioned issue with the powder, I'm thinking the variable voltage of the Eastwood is worth paying the premium for. When I powder coat the enclosures, I use a block of wood covered with foil, then place the enclosure onto that using screws in the screw holes to lift it off the wood. I've always struggled to get a decent coating on the sides, and after watching a load of YouTube videos I think it's because of the faraday effect, which I'm hoping the Eastwood gun will minimise.

I've found 1 UK company that sells the Eastwood and they are hoping to have it in stock on Tuesday. The other 2 options both mean import tax, and since our mail service got taken over a lot more packages get hit with the import tax.

I've got 24 more enclosures that I need to get painted up so that will be a good test for the new gun when it arrives.

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After a bit of an eventful time trying to get a bunch of enclosures painted up thanks to work and being called in for what ended up being a 26 hour shift), I finally managed it today. However, I knew my powder coating gun has had issues for quite a while, but I think it's getting to the point of being unusable soon, so I'm currently looking for a decent replacement.

My current one is by a company called Electrostatic Magic and doesn't have a need for an additional power supply, which is a big plus. However, the trigger had been playing up for a while and now doesn't seem to do anything, and the only way to regulate the air flow is by the air flow screw in the base of it. Also, I've found coating the lower part of the sides hard with this gun, and I'm assuming it's either because of the faraday effect, or more likely, because it works by generating x amount of electrostatic electric which isn't powerful enough (I think this is the most likely answer).

I'm currently looking at either the Harbour Freight one or the Eastwood Hotcoat dual voltage. I'm leaning towards the Eastwood, but they won't have anymore stock until the 10th Feb, I'm not sure if the UK stockist will be the same date or not though.

Does anyone have any experience with either of these systems or any other recommendations?

Update, found the missing box hiding under my coffee table! When I was marking the drill points and using the centre punch I was watching TV.

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I've managed to get over to my mum's house today to drill a bunch of 1590A enclosures and the multi effect enclosure. I was worried about it being hard to drill, but I used the drill press on a low speed and it went straight through it.



I'm going to get it painted up tomorrow when I goto my dad's as all my powder coating gear is in his barn. It's going to be bloody freezing so I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not sure how long it's going to need in the oven, 1590A enclosures I normally do for 25 minutes with 4 at a time. I'm guessing maybe 30-35 minutes due to the larger surface area. I can't decide which blue colour to use though, here is the 2 colours that I'm thinking of.




I seem to be missing one of my Dreamtime enclosures as I marked up 3 of them but only had 2 to drill. Really not sure where it could have gone to.

Got the labels printed out today! I've got 2 of each printed out so if I make a mistake then I should be fine.

I've put a more detailed post in the decal thread that I started, and although they couldn't use the PDF files, they could photocopy the ones that I printed at home. It does look like they have good ink coverage, although I'd have preferred it they could have used the PDF files.

The enclosure will be drilled tomorrow, going to get it painted as well, but that depends on a few other things and the amount of time I'll have. Labels will follow shortly after.

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Managed to get the designs finished up and taken to a local print company. Ideally I wanted to do it earlier this week but the acoustic multi effect label needed a bit more tweaking.

I took the designs on a SD card but they didn't have a card reader available, but luckily I printed the designs out at home and took them with me. I wasn't sure how well they'd copy across but looking at the decals they seem to have a good amount of toner coverage and colour.

The pedals I've done labels for are for my acoustic build, MB Dreamtime, green Russian, MBs Narosla (modified EP booster) and a Phase 45. I've also got a load of labels for the back plates printed. I'm going to drill the enclosures tomorrow, hopefully get them all painted up over the weekend as well, but that depends on work. For the acoustic pedal and the Dreamtime, I'm going to have 3mm pilot holes drilled and can line the labels up using that, for the other pedals, I've got absolutely no idea how I'll get the labels lined up correctly.

I've got high hopes for these labels!

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The real anguish comes when you have 95% of the parts for a project and have to order $1 worth of parts and have to justify $5-10 shipping. It especially bites when you find yourself needing to order the remaining items from more than one supplier and have to pay shipping from each.

Also, Learn to use the filters at Mouser. The Xicon metal film resistors are the way to go. Mouser part# 271-100-RC

Every. F**king. Time.

Did it 3 times, or was it 4 times, just on my current build. Missed an all important transistor off on the last build. One of the ICs off of a build before that. I've probably spent more on postage then I have components for quite a few builds. So on that note, definitely stock up! As said above, Tayda is a great way to get cheap resistors, capacitors and pots.

Welcome to the hobby though, it's so satisfying when you get a new pedal working straight away!

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Made some more progress, although I realised another slight error that I made. I know the Ping reverb board is a different shape to the other boards and doesn't have board mounted pots. The thing I didn't notice was the pot controls are an extra 4mm wider then the other boards.

Ideally I wanted the pots to all be evenly spaced on the effects so I didn't want to move the pots and labels for them (I know it's 4mm and I'm being a bit OTT on it). I can't mount the board onto the pots anyway so I decided to keep the pots and labels spaced the same as the other effects. If I've worked it out right, I should be able to mount the board the to enclosure between the foot switch and the pots and have about 2mm spare.

I've managed to adjust the labels slightly, have to move the effect name, graphic and foot switch drill point up by 1.5mm. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, but there is a ridge inside the enclosure that's already making it pretty tight to get the foot switches in the right place, and I really don't want to have to be going at it with the Dremmel.

On the plus side, I've used the centre punch and marked out all the drill holes so I'll get the enclosure drilled with the pilot holes before work in a couple of days.

Using the plastic paper pocket for folder things worked well in principle, but they were too flimsy. While I've been sitting here writing this, I remembered that I've got the overhead projector transparancy sheets in my parents garage, I should have gone round there and used them as they would have been perfect for this.

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Haven't been able to do much on this as I've had a bad case of man flu. But today I'm feeling a bit better so I've pulled my finger out and done a bit of work on this.

I've got my label designs done and marked the lines on the enclosure where I want the foot switch and top row of pots. I haven't got any transparency sheets here but I've got those A4 paper pouches for folders. Stuck the printout of the labels into one of them and marked out the drill points with a pen. It worked well, but the gap between the top pots and foot switch is a few mm too far apart. I'm going to adjust that in a bit and print it out so I can mark the drilling points.

I'm hoping writing this here will give me the motivation to get it all done, so today I'm planning on redoing the labels, marking out the new drill points on a plastic sheet and then transferring that to the enclosure. With this, I've also got to work out the spacing between each effect. This is providing work don't call me to go in. During the week I want to get the enclosure drilled, get to the print shop to get this new no film decal sheet printed on, then at the weekend I'm planning on getting round to my dad's to paint the enclosure and get it labelled up.

For lining up the labels, the plan is to drill the pilot holes at 3mm, then use the circles on the decals to line them up directly over the holes.

For the colour, I've got a lime green paint with sparkle bits in it. It's a bit bright, but I think it will really make it stand out.

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