I’m guessing for a lot of people the thing that stops them from wanting to build their own effects pedals to actually doing it is not knowing exactly what is needed to get started.
Soldering Iron
This is the big one. An early mistake I made was buying a cheap soldering iron. While I thought I’d ‘saved’ money, the reality was I’d just made getting started a lot hard for myself. The cheap iron I bought didn’t have temperature control or thermostat so I never knew how hot it was. It wasn’t that strong so it took ages to bring the solder to melting point which probably caused me to ruin a bunch of components without realising it.
Early last year when I decided to get a little more serious about building I picked up a Hakko soldering iron after reading a lot of positive reviews online.
FX-888D Hakko FX888D-29BY Digital Soldering Station
FX-888D-29BY is the updated, digital version of the popular FX-888 analog system and includes several new features like digital calibrations to simplify the setup and operation, new password protection, 5 preset temperature storage.
Helping hands/PCB holder
Either helping hands or a PCB holder will come in handy to hold your board in place while you’re working on it. Helping hands remind me a little of Doctor Octopus from Spiderman, and usually feature a bunch of alligator clips that can be positioned to hold boards and other things in place. A PCB holder is really only good for holding a PCB, you can populate the board then rotate it over to solder everything in place.
Personally I just use a PCB holder plus a secret weapon.
Blu Tack
This might sound stupid but I’ve found Blu Tack to be one of those things that is surprisingly useful when building pedals. In the absence of helping hands or a PCB holder Blu Tack can fill the gap. It’s also handy to hold a bunch of parts in place if you want to turn your board over and solder a bunch of things at the same time.
Gloves
If you’re not using lead free solder then you may want to pick up a box of disposable gloves. It’s not mandatory and a lot of people won’t use them, but I like to sit on the side of caution and use them anyway rather than spend an afternoon holding lead in my hand. You can go as cheap as you like but I prefer to use something a bit more puncture resistant like Nitrile gloves (the kind you might see at tattoo parlours). There are a few different brands on Amazon for example, Hizek, or Ammex or Sysco. They all do the same thing, I’d just grab the cheapest.
‘Nice to haves’
Hot glue gun
This thing will come in handy every now and then, especially for holding down things such as those pesky plastic LED bezels! There are a bunch of cheap options on Amazon and you can grab the glue sticks cheap as well.