FCV100 expression pedal tweaks

shasha

Fractal Fanatic
Just got an MFC101...finally and needed obviously needed an expression pedal (or two). I have had this big old Behringer FCV100 laying around for years and while it felt substantial and there isn't some mysterious rocket science involved in a pedal that moves a pot I thought about just spending a couple bills on something "better." But I needed something to use now.

So I set it to CV mode and hooked it up to the first output.....and it didn't work.

Did some reading, saw a few posts saying the same thing. I measured the resistance and it's around 50kΩ which should have worked. I did some testing and it turns out that the only way it will work is if the tip and ring are swapped on one end of the cable. Plugged it in, calibrated it again and it worked very well. Better than expected to be honest.

But the big issue for this thing was the travel. It was way too long a sweep from toe to heel and you almost felt like you were going to fall over trying to get through the entire range of travel. This was fixed by going through the junk drawers in the utility room. There is a hole in the base of the pedal at the rear and so I decided to put a screw in there to act as a stopper. The screw by itself was kind of noisy and I was worried about it digging into the back of the pedal so I found one of those stoppers that you use on doors. This is the kind of crap that I find in my junk drawers.....Put a couple of nuts and a star washer on the end of the screw and the rubber sits right on it and works perfectly. It actually looks like something that was made from the factory....or at least not like complete shit.

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Then I added a little rubber stopper on the front side. This was just one of those stick on things you can get from anywhere. When I was finding the spot I watched the travel on the AxeFXII's screen to make sure that I wasn't going to cut into usable range. I noticed that there was more travel than range anyway so this actually got rid of the some of the dead travel at the end. It also makes it nice and quiet.

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Lastly I put a little fresh grease in the rear where there is this metal bar that goes inside of the housing that is clamped between a compression thing-a-ma-jig and adjusted the tension. Nice and quiet, good travel and its actually very smooth. Recalibrated it and it works great.

You can get these things for $25-30 all day long.

Now did I want to be cool and have the nice shiny red one? Sure. But I didn't want to spend $120 on one, let alone two of them. I'm not saying that it's the best thing ever made, but if you have one or need something cheap you can make this work and with a couple of screws and crap laying around the house you can make it work better.
 
Funny that you would respond since I spent about 2 hours last night watching all of your MFC videos. :) The pedal calibration one was great. I loved how you used the switch to make the pedal switch between volume and wah. Can't do that with this one (unless I put a switch on it, which I'm not interested in doing), but I think that when I do end up buying something substantial (because we always do) I'm going to have to have one with a switch.
 
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