Unusual panel parts
gstopp at fibermux.com
gstopp at fibermux.com
Wed Oct 11 19:59:20 CET 1995
Hi all,
Just got finished designing and testing a state variable filter that
runs off of a 9 volt battery and is manually tuned (not voltage
controlled). It's real simple and sounds great but it requires a dual
pot for the tuning of the frequency. This brought up a question -
where do you get dual pots these days? I have many junk drawers so no
problem for me, but what advice would I give to other builders?
Here are the possible sources:
1. Buy it new and pay through the nose. One of my local stores will
put together any pot you want using their TRW pot component selection.
This costs between $5-$10 per unit.
2. Find them surplus. You gotta take what you can find this way.
3. Go to garage sales and buy old stereos.
The garage sale option is a great source not only for dual pots, but
for concentric-shaft dual pots and center-tapped pots as well. Not
only that but there are even some cool switches, meters, and other
panel thingeys to be had. Usually you can use these parts and find
your own knobs, but for the dual concentric pots you may have to use
the knobs they come with. The center-tapped pots are useful for
two-source attenuators like the modulation pots on the Oberheim SEM.
Dual concentric pots can be used to save space on fine/course tuning
controls for VCO's. Meters can be useful for mic pre-amps. As I sit
here and type this I'm looking at a bag of dual concentric
center-tapped pots with cool knobs stolen from some junk stereo,
wondering what kind of noisemaker I can create with them. (Sick, huh?)
Anyway just a builder's thought for the day.....
- Gene
More information about the Synth-diy
mailing list