Updating a pedalboard (part 2) – bike chain link method

I wrote yesterday about updating my pedalboard and thought I would share a couple of tricks I’ve come across in the last year or so. The first one is about attaching pedals to pedalboards.

I’ve been using pedalboards for more years than I care to relate and in all that time the classic has always been velcro. Fortunately there’s some really ‘grippy’ velcro available but even so it’s not always as effective as I would like.

A year ago one of the team at the Flight Case Company showed me a pedalboard on which the pedals were attached by what I discovered were bicycle chain links.

Bike chain tool

So I bought myself a bike chain and a bike chain ‘cracker’ and set about dismantling the chain.

Bike chain links

It’d been a while since I looked at a bike chain up close and it turns out that the links work in pairs – so what’s pictured here is a complete link, the two open pieces on the left connect to the next link.

Bicycle chain cracker

Once you’ve removed the pins (which is what the bike chain tool is for) you should end up with a load of chain link pieces.

A bicycle link screwed to the bottom of a pedal


The base of many fx pedals is held in place with a screw at each corner. Providing those screws are close enough to the edge of the pedal you can unscrew them, put the screw through the hole at one end of the chain link and then re-assemble the pedal, leaving you with a chain link sticking out from the bottom of the pedal at each corner.

P1010106

Then, when the pedal is turned the correct way up, the chain link can be used to screw the pedal to your board.

Although, a few pedals still have to be attached to my board the ‘traditional’ way with velcro, for the most part this has proven to be a more secure solution and I highly recommend it.

In my next post I’ll be talking about patch-cables.

With years of experience playing bass in a wide range of situations a dear friend once said that if you were to cut me in half you'd find the word 'bass' written all the way through - yes I know that's so cliche - but that doesn't make it any less true! Like so many people I have more than one 'day' job - but most of my work-time these days is spent working for Interconnected Solutions.

One comment

Comments are closed.