[sdiy] easy turn pots

[jhaible at t-online.de]

> 	I am on the final stage of assembling several ASM-1's 
> and have not 
> yet figured out what pots to use. My biggest concern is 
> that they are easy 
> to rotate. I have seen some pots made by bourns that fit 
> this description 
> but the cost was close to $10. That would be several 
> hundred bucks for my 
> ASM-1's (ouch). $1 to 2 would be great. Does anyone have 
> a suggestion? 

Bill,

don't make a compromise on the quality of front panel components.
You will certainly regret it later. From my experience, you can
learn to live with circuit flaws to some degree (make a feature
of certain shortcomings), but *never* with pots gone scratchy.
If you have a module where the turn of a knob or touching a plug
causes ugly noise in th emidst of a performance, most fun with
your instrument is ruined. 

Now whether a pot is easy to rotate or not will also depend on
the diameter and surface of the knob you're using. 
I found the Alps 11mm pots have a nice feeling with large knobs,
but they are a bit too stiff (for my taste) with 15mm knobs.
That's why I used bigger knobs for filter cutoff, LFO rate
and similar parameters on the JH-720 (which uses 11mm pots).

The Burns cunductive polymer pots in the DM 10,- range (that would
be 5 Dollars, not 10) are my favorites. They are very easy to turn
even with a plastic shaft (easy to cut!). The Spectrol pots
in the same price range are harder to turn (in the plastic shaft
version), but the ones with metal shaft are fine.

Recently I've bought some wonderful pots on ebay. Cermet pots,
1Meg log ! I've never seen 1Meg log in Cermet in any shop.
I've used them for my (almost finished) "Moog-style" JH-5A.
No fancy VC envelopes here - straight 1Meg log pots (;->).

JH.