An Alternate Enclosure Experiment failure for share

[The4455]

So a while ago i asked about alternate enclosures for guitar pedals. I also found a perfect opportunity to try it out. My electronics teacher from last year also plays Bass and helped me a lot with my pedal building and gave me about $35 in parts. So I decided to build him a pedal. Because he is also the auto-shop teacher and is a certified engineer I thought it would be cool to build the pedal into an electrical switch box. Here is what happened, see pictures, luckily both enslosures and back plates only cost $4 total, so no huge loss. But I thought I'd share for the record of using these things.

[Gone Fission]

Gotta be careful with those easy punch-outs. If they had non-punch-out versions of those boxes at the local hardware store I would be all over them.

As an alternate, I've seen people use the squarish boxes with the screwed-on flat plate lid used as the top for DIY -- no punch-outs on the plate so the stomp switch and knobs won't go through. Maybe I need to just do that. (Gotcha on those is you really need to secure that top plate to drill it or it'll take a journey.)

[The4455]

Yah, I could have drilled into the plate but then the in and out jacks, and dc jack wouldn't work either the punch out things are on the sides too. I'll continue to look though, there has to be an alternative to $5 an enclosure.

[Gone Fission]

I'm thinking the bigger square-ish boxes could work with all drilling to the plate. Wouldn't be the prettiest thing and top mounted jacks would be atypical.

[McSpunckle]

Hey! The little pop out things pop out.

FYI.

You could still use it if you could find two washers that were wider than that hole, with a .5" inner diameter. Or screw a metal plate or something underneath and mount the switch on that.

Maybe you could fill the little holes with some JB Weld or something to keep it from popping out in the first place, but that might not be the most reliable thing ever.

If you had a bandsaw and bending brake, you could make small sheet metal boxes. The raw material would probably be pretty cheap. But it's harder to work with.

[Gone Fission]

I've used the washers trick before when I measured once and cut once a too-big hole for a power jack.