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DIY Hot Foot

1/7/2000 2:38 PM
Mark Hammer	DIY Hot Foot Well the last time I looked was about 1980, but what the Hot Foot had was unremarkable, but still elegant. It's essentially the same flexible shaft that folks use for screw drivers that turn corners and such, and I imagine you can buy it in a decent tool shop or tool department. It's essentially an ultra-big gauge flat-wound string with some vinyl or rubber around the outside. A hole was machined in the side of the pedal for one end of the flexible shaft to be inserted and attached to the pot shaft with a thumbscrew (or whatever you call those set screws with a flared end that you can turn by hand). In the absence of the flexible shaft, it could have been a volume pedal or wah, which tells me that you can adapt any run of the mill pedal to this end. The length of the flexible shaft is probably somewhat critical, since it is somewhat stiff and is coming out of the pedal parallel to the ground, and will generally be used to turn pots that are pointing upwards. So, the shaft needs to be short enough to maintain torque, but long enough to effectively bend 90 degrees. I think the original was about 2 feet long. The free end of the flexible shaft had a collet/collar with another set screw. The female socket was a bit bigger than standard pot shaft diameter, I suspect to accommodate as many different pot shaft sizes as possible. The set screw was fairly diameter to provide a solid attachment, and again to accommodate a diverse range of pot shaft types (e.g., the half rounds). Worse comes to worse, you get a tall control knob, machine a little hole in the top to accommodate the free end of the shaft and epoxy the end of the shaft to it. Tap a threaded hole in the side for a thumbscrew, and away you go. What I liked about the Hot Foot was that even though you COULD mount an effect in a foot pedal and put one of the FX pots under foot control, the connect/disconnect aspect let you control whatever you felt like controlling, whenever you felt like it. Some of us used to use it as a whammy pedal before there were whammy pedals. Simple hook it up to the delay time of an analog delay, set it for a moderate delay, and change output sample rate on the fly. Personally, I wish I had one to use with the resonance control of a decent envelope-controlled filter. Chemical Brothers, here we come!! The only down side I can think of is that most big name commercial pedals have tiny knobs and tiny pots these days. Even if you had an original Hot Foot, I don't know how on earth you could use it to work anything on a BOSS or DOD pedal. Maybe that's the saving grace of the boutigue pedal makers - they use big sturdy pots, spaced well apart. If you could get one of these up and running Paul, I'd be curious to know how it runs out.

1/7/2000 2:38 PM

Mark Hammer

DIY Hot Foot

Well the last time I looked was about 1980, but what the Hot Foot had was unremarkable, but still elegant. It's essentially the same flexible shaft that folks use for screw drivers that turn corners and such, and I imagine you can buy it in a decent tool shop or tool department. It's essentially an ultra-big gauge flat-wound string with some vinyl or rubber around the outside.

A hole was machined in the side of the pedal for one end of the flexible shaft to be inserted and attached to the pot shaft with a thumbscrew (or whatever you call those set screws with a flared end that you can turn by hand). In the absence of the flexible shaft, it could have been a volume pedal or wah, which tells me that you can adapt any run of the mill pedal to this end. The length of the flexible shaft is probably somewhat critical, since it is somewhat stiff and is coming out of the pedal parallel to the ground, and will generally be used to turn pots that are pointing upwards. So, the shaft needs to be short enough to maintain torque, but long enough to effectively bend 90 degrees. I think the original was about 2 feet long.

The free end of the flexible shaft had a collet/collar with another set screw. The female socket was a bit bigger than standard pot shaft diameter, I suspect to accommodate as many different pot shaft sizes as possible. The set screw was fairly diameter to provide a solid attachment, and again to accommodate a diverse range of pot shaft types (e.g., the half rounds). Worse comes to worse, you get a tall control knob, machine a little hole in the top to accommodate the free end of the shaft and epoxy the end of the shaft to it. Tap a threaded hole in the side for a thumbscrew, and away you go.

What I liked about the Hot Foot was that even though you COULD mount an effect in a foot pedal and put one of the FX pots under foot control, the connect/disconnect aspect let you control whatever you felt like controlling, whenever you felt like it. Some of us used to use it as a whammy pedal before there were whammy pedals. Simple hook it up to the delay time of an analog delay, set it for a moderate delay, and change output sample rate on the fly. Personally, I wish I had one to use with the resonance control of a decent envelope-controlled filter. Chemical Brothers, here we come!!

The only down side I can think of is that most big name commercial pedals have tiny knobs and tiny pots these days. Even if you had an original Hot Foot, I don't know how on earth you could use it to work anything on a BOSS or DOD pedal. Maybe that's the saving grace of the boutigue pedal makers - they use big sturdy pots, spaced well apart.

If you could get one of these up and running Paul, I'd be curious to know how it runs out.

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