Octagon Volume Control
Continuing on a previous post , I managed to do some more work into this.
Basically, the process of cutting off the knob on the octagon port from the inside turned out to be quite difficult.
The small diamond cutting wheels I had was not optimal for aluminium, in fact, they does give a small, clean cut, but the edge also becomes smooth after just a few minutes, making nothing else but heat after that. It took me a while to realize this.
I could also not use the normal dremel cutting attachments, as they were too weak and broke off immediately when applying a bit of pressure.
So, off to the hardware store, and pick up some of my old, trusty cutting wheels with the speed click, the wheels I used (and ran out of) when cutting up the domes last summer. These are 1.5″ in diameter, or 38mm, for all countries in the world except three…
The problem was, that in order to get the cutting disk inside the hole, I needed to make it smaller somehow. And quite a lot smaller, too.
I first tried and used the cutting wheel on one of my files. Unfortunately, I forgot I had an old file laying about. It created a nice rain of sparkles, and a groove in my file, but nothing really on the cutting wheel.
Anyway, I found that by running it against one of the diamond-laced cutting wheels (that had useless edges) grinded the cutting wheel down very quickly, to the point where I could actually fit it inside the knob.
After a lot less time than I had already spent trying to detach these, this is what I was left with:
The old volume knob was glued in place with E-6000 inside the knob, and it was time to desolder the volume potentiometer from the amplifier.
I added pins to the holes where the amplifier was to be able to attach a cable.easy attaching/detaching.
I also built a breakoutboard for the volume pot itself, with a row of pins for the same cable.
So far so good. Next step was to build a holder for the pot to reside behind the octagon port. I have decided to add a matte black background to the port (still to be added), but I used a piece of thin, perforated aluminium board in the mean time.
Making the cable was fiddly, since I didn’t have a multi-cable with more than 4 leads, so I had to use two of them.
When assembled, this is the end result:
The volume pot rotates without issues, and I’ve tried switching the amp on, and nothing exploded..
All in all, a good upgrade. One of those things that cannot be seen, but the less I need to be reaching inside the droid to do anything in public, the better!
Now, I can easily fix the volume in case he needs to be quiet when there’s a talk going on, or crank up the volume for the parades!
