I’m taking a break from building modules to instead build a place to actually house them all! My case build has been an ongoing thing for a while now - something in parallel with the electronics. I’ll warn you now, this is going to be a long winded woodworking post!
Here we have it in its current state:
Sam mentioned in his case build video that the synth is a tool that is meant to be used and not to look pretty. In my personal case, I disagree. I figure if you are going to be starring at something all day long / using it regularly, aesthetics matter. Its most likely going to be sitting on the opposite wall of my office from me so it should spark joy, right? With that in mind I am pouring my meager woodworking skills into making a ‘nice’ case. Its going to take more money and for sure more time, but I think it will be worth it.
Keep in mind, I am by no means a master woodworker. I’m middlingly skilled at best. First, I let the materials I had available dictate the overall dimensions. Home Depot is my current wood supplier and they have 2’x4’ 1/2" birch plywood panels. They are a little pricey at 22$ a pop but I wanted something that I knew was not terribly warped, relatively standard so I could easily get more when the inevitable screwups start, and not full of flaws. I started off with two of them - picking up an extra just in case - as well as a sheet of backing material, the cost of which escapes me but was hopefully less than 10$.
The dimensions became “How big of a case can I make with one sheet?” So I cut it in thirds and then cut one of those in half to make the sides, giving me the general dimensions. From there, I could cut things down further to make it two panels high by “whatever I could squeeze out divided by five cm” long. So far so good.
As I worked with the wood I began to feel more and more that the 1/2 inch wood was going deflect more than I would like - especially in a case that could end up potentially being over a meter in length. This, coupled with my desire for pretty lead me down the road of laminating my wood - cutting down my extra piece in the exact same way and gluing them to the existing ones to end up with a 1" thick wall instead of 1/2". This is for sure going to double the weight of the whole thing - but I’m fine with that (I say that now - ask me again in year or so).
I decided to miter cut the corners - which turned out to be a bit of a problem because when I laminated the sides, I glued the wrong sides together, forcing me to re-cut them and loose 5cm - which I am cool with, but I still ended up having to go out and get a third board to cover my fox paw.
As usual I decided to make everything complicated and use a router to round the edges - which made me pause the whole build for some shop infrastructure work. I ended up making a router table from a leftover melamine desk that my sister-in-law was going to throw out. It was worth it though as now I have a router table, and it really made routing the edges a snap. Even let me do the corners as well.
Now the corners are all glued and nailed together. I’m pretty sure a moderate explosion could go off inside of the case and not damage it. My rails are off-cuts from shelving that I made a while back. Sadly, I’ve realized that they are about 1/4" too thick and will need to be cut down a bit. This is especially annoying as I already glued the top rail in. At least I thought to check before doing the middle or bottom one. We might want to add a “rail size” entry to the Kosmo standardization page!
The plan is to stain the whole thing and then attempt a “French polish” which I swear is not a euphemism. Its the glossy mirror type of finish you get on high end furniture - something I have certainly never attempted before.
in metal boats. haha.
