Stop the Slide: A Custom No-Slip Base for a Roland KT-10 Kick Pedal

Every electronic drummer with a kick pedal on a hard floor or thin carpet knows this fight: hit the pedal hard enough, enough times, and it walks. A customer of ours plays a Roland KT-10 kick pedal trigger, and his fix up to this point was duct tape - wrapped around the base and stuck to the floor before every session, pulled up and re-applied every time he practiced. On carpet it barely held at all, since tape has nothing to grip onto pile, and pulling it up afterward meant picking adhesive residue out of the carpet fibers.

He came to us with a concept already modeled in OnShape and a hand sketch of how he pictured it working. What we ended up building went through two real design directions before landing on the final part, and the turning point came from a detail that was sitting on the pedal the whole time.

The Problem: A Pedal That Would Not Stay Put

The KT-10's stock base is smooth on the underside with nothing to grip a floor. On hardwood or tile, the pedal slides forward with every kick. On carpet, the problem flips - there is no flat, non-porous surface left to grip at all, so adhesive and suction both fail, and only real mechanical anchoring into the pile works. Two different floors, two different physics problems, and he needed one pedal that handled both without being retaped before every session.

Concept One: The Sandwich Plate

The starting point was the customer's own design, modeled in OnShape and shared with us as a link, along with a hand-drawn sketch showing a top view and side view of the idea: a plate sandwiching the existing pedal base, with wings extending out to the left and right. Each wing would carry a screw-down mounting point, either an electric suction cup for hard floors or a 3D printed cylinder fitted with a carpet spike for carpet, spaced roughly 108mm apart based on his sketch.

We opened his file and started working through it, pulling in details from a few of our own earlier bracket designs to speed up the geometry. It was a workable concept, but a true sandwich plate meant adding a second plate under the entire base and finding new places to anchor it - more hardware, more material, and a part that wrapped around the pedal rather than working with it.

The Realization: Use What's Already There

While iterating on the sandwich-plate geometry, we noticed something the original concept had worked around instead of using: the KT-10 already has thumb screws at the front of the base, at the hinge, originally there for cable and mix-in jacks. Those thumb screws are solid mounting points built into the pedal itself. Instead of sandwiching the whole base in a new plate, we could design a pair of wings that bolted directly onto those existing thumb screw points - no new holes drilled into the pedal, no hardware beyond what was already there, and a mechanical connection straight into a point the manufacturer had already engineered to hold weight.

That single realization turned the project from building an enclosure around the pedal into building a wing that clips onto what the pedal already gives you - simpler, lower profile, and far less material.

Scanning the Pedal for an Exact Fit

Thumb-screw mounting only works if the wing geometry matches the pedal's hinge area to a tight tolerance, close enough that the bracket seats flush and the screw threads line up cleanly on the first try. Rather than working from calipers and estimated measurements, we 3D scanned the pedal base and hinge directly, capturing the real contour of the housing and the precise position and spacing of the thumb screw bosses. That scan data became the reference geometry we modeled the bracket onto, so the final wing fit the actual part instead of a close approximation.

With the scan in hand, we modeled a custom bracket wing in CAD that picked up both thumb screw points and extended outward to carry the foot, the actual point of contact with the floor. We test-fit an early printed version directly against the pedal, clamping it in place to check alignment and screw engagement before committing to the final geometry.

Designing the Interchangeable Foot

This is the part that actually solved the two-floor problem. Instead of building a separate bracket for hard floors and another for carpet, we designed one wing with a single mounting interface on top, and two interchangeable feet that drop into that same interface:

• Electric suction cup, for hard floors. We repurposed a magnetic-base electric suction mount, a Ulanzi SK37 originally built for camera and phone mounting, as the hard-floor foot. Its magnetic coupling locks cleanly to the printed bracket, and the suction pump gives real mechanical hold on tile, hardwood, or any other smooth surface. No adhesive, no residue, and it releases with the press of a button when it's time to pack up.
• 3D printed spike puck, for carpet. Suction does not work on carpet at all, there is no smooth surface left to seal against. For that case we designed a printed puck that holds an injection-molded spike pad on its underside, the same idea as a cleat biting into turf. The puck drops into the identical bracket interface the suction cup uses, so switching floors is just a matter of switching feet.

A thumb screw through the top of the bracket locks whichever foot is currently installed. Swapping from the suction foot to the carpet spike, or back, takes a few seconds and no tools - back the screw out, swap the foot, retighten.

Putting It Together

With both wings printed and fitted and the feet dialed in, final assembly came down to three steps: bolt each wing onto its thumb screw point at the front of the pedal, drop in whichever foot matches the floor he's playing on, and lock it down with the top thumb screw. Both wings mirror each other left to right, so the pedal sits centered and planted instead of pulling to one side under a hard kick.

The finished bracket sits low and tucks in close to the pedal's own lines rather than looking like something bolted on as an afterthought - it reads as part of the KT-10, not an accessory hanging off the side of it.

The Result

No more duct tape before every session, and no more peeling adhesive residue out of the carpet afterward. On hard floors, the suction feet lock the pedal in place through repeated hard kicks. On carpet, the spike pucks bite into the pile and hold just as well. Switching between the two is a few seconds with a single thumb screw. What started as a sandwich-plate concept ended up as something simpler, lighter, and sturdier - once the pedal itself turned out to already have exactly what we needed built in.

Got a piece of gear that will not stay where you put it? Tell us what you're working with - scanning, custom brackets, and fit-specific parts like this one are exactly the kind of job we like taking on.