Not sure why I didn’t think of this method before as its simplicity is only over shadowed by its brilliance! By simply painting the casing a different solid color from the base material and then engraving it, the effects really just “POP” out at you! Though this was slightly misaligned, the effects still came out acceptable and I’m quite happy to move on to the next stage with this. This is also the first time I’ve ever used Blue as a color and I’m quite pleased with the turnout.
It’s been nearly a month since this project has had anything done to it other than moving it from one place to another in my shop as I updated that. Now that that project is nearly complete, I decided it was testing time for the nearly completed controller. All in all, I like very much how this came out utilizing my first attempts at homemade circuit boards and CNC machining.
Though I did have to make a few adjustments with the homemade controller board, as in ripping it out and putting the official SNES controller back into it, I still can’t complain much. I will be hopefully starting the second controller shortly and will make every attempt to get this finished before the holidays! This will be for sale too and there will still be a bit of time to get it out for Christmas so if you are looking for that special gift for the retro geek in your family, send me a message!
As for now, enjoy the video and check out the build logs on the MBB forums! More info there as always!
Yeah I understand that this is not much of a feat and really taking almost 4 years to get there too is a bit long winded, but the past year has no doubt been my biggest with over 34,000 views of the 48,709 coming since January this year. Most of my modding buddies though have over three times the number of hits on just one video which is pretty amazing, but then again they make some really cool stuff!
2013 will be the year for me though with all the cool gizmo’s I’ve got cooking up right now! Will that illusive 100K hit video come my way, maybe but it’s all about the projects and all about being proud with your work at the end of the day.
With that said though, 2013 really will be the year this takes off for a number of different reasons. In working with some of the biggest names in the console modding scene, we’re going to bring to you a few fresh ideas and gadgets that have not been seen before. I’m already getting excited, but the prep work must continue. Speaking of which, I’ve got to get back to it!
If you live in the Central New Hampshire area, chances are more than likely that you’ve heard of singer/songwriter “Jim Tyrrell”. He and I go back just about a decade, back when music was a huge part of my life. We met at an open mic at my favorite home town bar called “The Lucky Dog Tavern and Grill” and we found that he lived just up the road!
Anyway, making a long story short, during that time I had quite a bit of equipment to complement my shows, but mostly guitar FX pedals. To help manage them and to give me a quick and easy set-up each time I played out I constructed a powered pedal board with many nice features, including a custom carrying case I had made up. This was very nice because I had two separate guitar set ups. One for my acoustic and one for my electric.
Jim is now a full time musician, playing over 100 shows a year now and making a pretty good go of it. However, in this he’s finding that his gear is taking quite the beating. This brought to his mind an old memory of the pedal box I made and he asked me if I’d be able to build him one.
His set-up is much simpler though which made this a quick build to this point, using only three pedals which are independently powered by separate AC plugs. Though I’m going to assume that the current probably get’s changed to DC inside the pedal, without breaking into them I wasn’t going to be able to power the in an effective manner. No worries though as like I said, he only has three pedals, two of which need to be powered.
But because this was quick, I decided to put my router to use and made a built-in Advert for him. By cutting out his website’s address into the front of the board and back-lighting it with some extremely bright LED’s, it’s sure to grab a bit more attention! More pics and a build log can be found over at the Made-By-Bacteria forums where I will continue to update as I go.
Hopefully this helps Jim make people a bit more aware of his site as it will now certainly stand out on stage!
The business end of my hobby now has a face! Though this is just the first run and Beta test and is not 100% completed yet, the site is live. The plan is to have a much more interactive site with some pretty nifty features that will help less experienced modders with their projects and provide them with the assistance and products they need.
Right now the site is based around just a few of the services I offer which is heavy on vacuum-forming and CAD design/milling. In the future though I plan to add a store though which will not only allow me to sell the services but also be a parts and component supply house mainly geared at console modding.
So with that said, there is a great deal more to do, but for now you can have a look at the basic layout and get a feel for what is to come in the future. Just click on the pic above to have a look!
Enjoy. The video tells most of the story.
Downing's Basement 