Making A Bottom Plate For A Wah Pedal

Created 3/15/14
By Paul Marossy

Once in a while I'll see a wah pedal on ebay that has a missing bottom plate. Most of the time it's not too hard to find one for a CryBaby or even a Maestro Boomerang. But try getting one for an old Schaller Bow Wow / Yoy Yoy - good luck on that one. Well I just got a Bow Wow / Yoy Yoy off of ebay the other day, and guess what? No bottom plate. But I made a reasonable offer on a very hard to find early one and they accepted. I knew I could make a bottom plate, it's really not that hard to do.

Below are some details about how I made a replacement bottom plate for my wah pedal.

	The first thing I did was to trace an outline of the shell onto a piece of paper and determine where the holes needed to be.
	The hardest part of it is finding a big enough piece of sheet metal of the right thickness to make a decent replacement plate from. In this case I used an old cookie sheet that my wife was going to get rid of. Here I am in the process of rough cutting the piece.
	Here is the piece after cutting roughly to size.
	A little bit of trimming here and there and it's ready for drilling the holes. Here is where that paper template comes in handy, it helps you get the holes in the right location when you drill.
	A little bit of light sanding and an SOS pad made it look like it has been on the pedal for thirty-something years. The original bottom plates on these pedals were apparently a semi-gloss black, but I may keep it this way because I think it looks kind of cool.

One thing to note is the rubber feet and screws. Rubber feet sometimes can be found at your local electronics store (a real one, not RadioShack), but your best bet is to get them online, many places have them for sale. More importantly, pay attention to the screws. In this case, the screws are metric threads, so I couldn't just use whatever imperial threaded screw fits, it would mess up the original threads and possibly strip out those holes - but not to worry, stores like Lowes will have these screws readily available for about one dollar total.

I didn't time myself on how long this whole process took but I don't think it took more than 45 minutes from start to end, counting going to Lowes and getting screws, etc. I hope this helps someone else out there who may need to do the same thing.