Previously, I have only played live in a band with another guitarist.  Now, I am working on a solo project which will involve lots of crunchy metal rhythm guitar.  Years ago, I spoke to a guitarist in a one-guitar band who said that he uses "a bit of stereo delay to widen the sound".  Later, I bought a Boss BR-8 which had a specific effect called the "doubler" to simulate two hard-panned guitar lines from just one input, the only parameter of which was a short delay (perhaps 5-50ms if I recall correctly), although it did not disclose if this was the only processing.

Now I am using a stereo delay on the HD 300 to "widen my sound", and the intention is to use this live.  However, it is not perfect because I have to turn the dry output to zero in order to avoid the drainpipe sound as the hard left and right outputs mix with part of the mono dry output, meaning that I am introducing an additional 20ms latency to my output!  It would be better if I could pan the output hard left and the single, 100% level repeat hard right.

I would be interested to hear people's opinion on this - both what I am trying to achieve (i.e. should I  bother? Are there any pitfalls when using this method live?) and on any other methods that I could use to achieve a similar effect (e.g. other stereo effects, or should I get an HD 500 and create two completely different left/right patches?).

Thanks in advance.