building the channel strips - pots

This covers the upper section of the channel strips - the pots. I decided I didn't want to mount my pots on the front panel and saw another user design where he used clear perspex to internally mount layers of components - I liked this as it added a challenge and should look nice and be easy to work on. Therefore I needed to drill 64 holes (plus another 64 guide holes) for the 8 pots per 8 channels. I gave this a shot myself as I had the perspex sheet ready to go.

*doofus alert*

I cut and sanded the piece to size and marked out my gridlines with a ruler. What I failed to do was use a set-square instead. Perspex can sometimes grab and crack when tooling and I had good drill bits but you need a proper bit (dowling bit) to do this the pro way, which I didn't have. Therefore I had to clamp the bastard for each hole - a grueling task that took me 2 nights to finish and a sore back. When I drilled the last hole, brushed it off and held up a set-square the holes were all off - some up to 2mm off in random directions - not very happy at all, but had learnt some lessons. In the end I decided to outsource this part as the cost was not too high and I wanted to keep things rolling. A few days later my plates were ready and it was time to drill the smaller guide holes and bolt in the pots.

My pots (and most do) have a small tooth that juts out so it can be fixed and will not slip or spin around when you turn the knob to it's extremes. I drilled these myself with a 3mm drill and it didn't take long after I ruled my gridlines, this time with a SETSQUARE! Again the fangled laser guide feature on this drill press came through as quite a cool feature - go Ryobi!

All drilled and ready to bolt in the pots. The upper plate seen is for the master section which I'll do later.

Crap - that's a lot of pots!

I followed these instructions for wiring the pots. I used wire-wrap for the 5v and ground connections and made this little module to act as a connector mount.

Advanced soldering techniques :-)

You can see how I did the wire-wrapping here and get an idea of what a sizable task this was to complete - an entire weekend worth - thankfully the 3 day test cricket was on so I kept my brain awake by listening to Australia kick the Kiwi's asses.

I'm convinced that I chose the WORST possible solution for connectors, but anyway, you live and learn. Don't use these they are so laborious - use IDC headers or others.

Fly cables made and fitted and we're done and dusted - again I was pretty stoked with the end result, but I seriously thought this one through and took my time with it.