[sdiy] Emu Vintage Keys Pro encoder issue

[synth at oldmail.charlielamm.com]

At a rehearsal yesterday to my horror I discovered that the rotary encoder 
(the big knob) on my VKP Emu module had gotten knocked loose. Not sure how 
this happened, as I don't recall bumping or banging it, but there you go.

Upon opening the thing up, I found that the encoder itself was incredibly
cheap and whoever did the hardware design, (hopefully not someone on this
list!) or engineering or whatever at Emu, did a horrific 
job--incredibly fragile and stupid how the knob/encoder is held onto the 
unit.  The encoder had split into two parts--a front part and a back 
part....and things looked grim indeed!

Turns out....

The encoder guts are soldered to a daughterboard that sits behind the
front panel. Nothing unusual there I guess.

The encoder is 2 pieces, that are held together by 4 flimsy little metal 
tangs.  If these get bent or messed up, the encoder falls apart and the 
knob lands on the stage.

I managed to fix it by putting the encoder back together and using needle 
nose pliers to reattach the tangs...but this won't work too many more 
times (eventually the tangs--which are some kind of cheap metal--will 
break.)

The big knob sits pretty far out from the actual encoder (about 1/4" or
more) and the unit itself, so if you accidentally bump it, it puts all
that leverage on the crappy metal tangs (see above) and breaks them.

It looks like if the knob sat flush to the encoder, it would be more 
robust, since there wouldn't be "dead air" behind it.  But the knob 
doesn't fit onto the encoder correctly--it requires a 1/4" shaft and the 
encoder has a detent type. Emu's solution?  Put electrical tape on the 
shaft (really!) and hope no one notices.  

And it looks like you'd need a special knob to fit...something with a
large hole to accommodate the encoder's guts, plus a detent type
receptacle to fit onto the end of the encoder's shaft.  Obvioulsy Emu
didn't get this together, as the knob and the encoder were never meant for
one another.

Anyone know of a way to mod this to get it to stand up to normal road wear
and tear? Was there two versions of the knobs, and I got the "bad"  
version?  Any ever have to deal with this before?  Anyway this is as much
to rant about the #@$%#$% hardware....Emu used to make pretty good
stuff...never again will I buy anything Emu that I use on the road.