Things to Make & Do

One of the fun things we do in Jookyland (?) is spend time trying to find interesting and unusual ‘enclosures’ for the amps or pedals.

(By enclosure, I mean the boxes you put the electronic gubbins in, by the way. New one on me too, to be honest, but there we are, every civilisation has it’s own alphabet.)

Now generally, if you are making guitar effects pedals, you will probably buy some metal boxes and either paint or powder coat them, and then screen print some kind of logo on the top. Doing this means that you can buy in bulk, and generally have a ‘product’ that is easily replicated, making you lots of money.

All good stuff.

As you know, our approach is a bit different, in that we are only ever really interested in making one of anything, and as a consequence probably never making enough to feed the termites.

So quite often we’ll be scurrying around and finding, for example a tobacco tin, and then try to decide what to do with it. Not a world of limitless opportunities, but the conversations tend to be along the lines of:

‘I just got a tin’
‘Cool, what shall we do with that?’
‘Dunno, maybe an amp?’
‘Nah, too small.’
‘A Pedal then?’
‘OK’.

And that is when I’m on me tod.

From there on in, we generally just play around until we find something we like. And as you will see over the next few months, we do quite like old (pre-WW2) tobacco tins, and Cigar Boxes, so you will see them pop up quite often.

We have also come across some modern, but fun tins that I think will either end-up as small amps or groovy effects, but basically anything goes and whatever we find is fair game.

The reason I mention this, is because I recently got hold of some wooden tobacco ‘pots’ (for want of a better name) that the seller tells me are from the Sixties. All very nice, but probably more interesting because they are each covered with genuine (apparently) snakeskin. This looks real to me, for what it is worth, and I’m thinking maybe a pair – an amp and a pedal of some kind. I'll put some fotos up sometime, about time we had some on this site.

Cool, cool & cool.

And me a vegetarian.


Still, I promise not to eat them.