Oh my word, this is really frustrating. I took too long writing my post, so I had to log in again and lost my message. Grrr. Here goes again...
So I got my FCB8N yesterday. Initial impressions: this thing is nice and light and compact, yet has enough spacing between the foot-switches for even my size 15s. Best part, it fits perfectly in my laptop bag with room for my expression pedal on the side. YES!
The front right corner wasn't bent quite all the way, but I am not super picky about cosmetics. I am going to be stepping on this thing. It was packed very well, double boxed and padded, so no shipping damage to speak of.
After plugging in some random wall wart that happened to fit the jack on the back of the axe and plugging a 7 pin midi cable from the axe to the board, it powered right up. The lights are nice and bright, but not blinding. Changed patches on the axe right from the get-go.
It only took a few minutes with the manual to figure out how to change it from 12 preset mode to 4 preset mode (32 banks of 4 presets with 8 IA switches). I do need to turn on the IA switches and expression pedal for each patch and assign the pedal from its default of ch 15 to ch 1. That will take a little time, but is not difficult and should be a one time thing.
On the expression pedal, I am using a Mission Engineering EP-1. Upon first using it with the Peak, it only gave me a sweep of something like 0 - 110. After realizing the board had no calibration feature, I looked to see what I could do with the pedal. Mission has a document for adjusting the rack and pinion in the pedal, but no matter how I adjusted it, I was short about 20 on one end or the other.
I realized that there are bumpers that stop the pedal at the toe position, and if I removed those, I might have enough travel to get the full sweep. So I took them out and that did the trick. However, now the rack traveled too far down in the pedal, and would hit the bottom plate when re-attached. So I filed off the length of one tooth on the rack so it would clear.
After putting it back together, I added a couple little rubber bumpers I had under the side of the pedal, to stop it just before the metal hit in the toe postion, yet giving it perfect range from exactly 0 - 127.
Overall I am happy with my purchase. Did take a bit of tweaking on my pedal, but that is all solved now, and I can use just one 7 pin cable run from my foot controls to the axe. Just got to go through and turn everything on for each patch.
Oh, and I love how simple it is to set which effects are on for each patch. Just hit the appropriate IA switches, then hold the blinking patch footswitch for 3 seconds, and you're done. Simple as that.