First experiences in building a guitar effect pedal...why did I wait so long?

Now, Ive played guitar for some 15 years...shit, sounds a long time when you put it like that.
Ive always had shall we say a keen interest in guitar effects, and I still have a large boxload of them.
It wasnt until a few months ago that I put serious intention into building a pedal for myself.

Id often considered doing so in the past, but nothing really galvanised me into action. I suppose a lack of real hands on skills (despite being a proficinet lab scientist) always put me off a bit - it was typically my Dad and Older bro that were hands on mechanically, messing with cars and stuff.

Anyway, one day I was browsing TDPRI (Fender Telecaster forum) and found a thread called "Quick and Easy SHO Build" >>> Awesome Thread!

It seemed too easy to be true. Looking at the schematic there was all of a handful of parts, and a quick Google showed many sites with layouts available (ill get round to updating my links with these later).

A few noob questions from me, and a print out of some schematics, I was soon in thecar heading up to the large Maplins on Regent Road. Without any of the necessarily tools I hastily purchased a £20 "starter" kit for soldering. It included what I now realise to be roughly 87p worth of tools - less said about that the better(!) BUT it did manage to allow me to build this:

As you can see at this point I hadnt quite found out such lovely places as IvIarks effects layouts. I basically interpreted as the following as I best saw fit.

 Chances I did something wrong, but goddamn it, it worked.
Now, Footswitches from Maplins costs about £6, and it wasnt a decent looking one, so I spmply went with a (what I thought was) cheap DPDT toggle. I boxed it up in a £2 project box, and marvelled at my ingenuity (!)
Worth noting that all this took me about 12 hours, with the help of my girlfriend. The learning curve was steep.
Here is a gutshot, and outer shot. My gf named it, the translation is literally "Big Cock" in Romanian, her native tongue.

Note the use of blue tak, and Purple sparkle nail polish for the (ahem) graphics.

Lessons learnt -
Soldering is difficult
Its not actually impossible
This is really fun and rewarding!



To do list -
Buy a "helping hand" modelling device