I should have thought of that in the first place. Excellent for mass production.
I’m also thinking of producing plain mignons à boîte with trimpots and dip switches on the outside. I haven’t the confidence to properly seal such instrumentation so as to avoid flooding with resin during construction of a mignon à vitrine, so I’ll have to stick to simple uninstrumented mignons for potting. Perhaps I’ll revisit such challenges once I have the basic trick right.
Also, heat shrink? Maybe that could work.
Anything with mechanical components will seize. I can tell you from experience, i tried to secure some pots a bit better with hot glue, just on the base, and they just were never the same. It gets in there.
I’ve ordered a couple of silicone ice cube trays and some glass measuring cylinders for low volume.
This new photograph was taken at noon the day after potting, when some 15 hours had passed. This is backlit so you can see the quantity and size of bubbles. In normal daylight the bubbles are barely visible, though it’s not jewellery standard by any means. I’ll want to see if the presence of these bubbles has any effect on the mechanical, thermal or electrical properties. My initial feelings are that this is good enough for my needs, but we’ll see.
I’ll remove it from the mould this evening after 24 hours, which is supposed to be long enough for curing. The room temperature, by the way, is in the vicinity of 20C.
My heat shrink idea is to enclose a configured circuit in a short length of large calibre heat shrink. This would be, inevitably, mignon à chaussette. I think the power cables should come out of one end of the heat shrink and the other wires should come out of the other end.
A black sausage with electronics inside. That’s not french that’s the Lancastrian martial art of Eckky Thump! (Google it, there’s always time to waste)
Cloth electrical binding tape should preserve any pot through epoxy. But it looks ugly 
I keep meaning to experiment more with this for a casting idea.
One idea from guitars is to dip the pot a few times in hot wax. Just to build a layer a pot could slide in and out whatever you cast it in.
That sounds very feasible. The wax would solidify before it could ooze into the innards. Then it would shield the moving parts from the resin. Or I could just use all wax. Mignon à cire.
I remember that episode of The Goodies.
Mignon à saucisson noir
Edit: apparently the correct French name for black pudding (blood sausage) is boudin noir. The English word pudding is believed by some to be derived from the French boudin. That meaning seems to be evident in Robert Burns’ Scots language description of the haggis as “Great chieftain o the puddin’-race.”
Mignon-crayola! A rainbow of signals 
That needs a warning label.
New thoughts for knobs and resin working.
Enjoy
A quick look for wax throws up two main candidates: bees wax, which is prized for its colour and scent retention, and soya wax, which is recommended for container candles. The latter is worth checking on, I think.
And behold, after a twenty-four hour wait, my very first potting. At first sight, it seems to be a complete success.
There are teething problems. I was a bit cavalier with the mould after about two hours, and my tilt test caused a thin vertical crust to form on one side of the resin. I was also very messy during potting so the wires are coated in resin making it hard to make a reliable electrical contact. It’s been a tiring day so I’ll leave it like that, but tomorrow I’ll sand the surplus resin away and give it a good test. For now I’ve just about managed to read the resistance as 990 ohms. Maybe it’s a 1K, maybe it’s not. I’m colour blind but maybe some of you can tell.
Another thing to do during potting: protect all electrical leads into and out of the mignon from resin.
It’s very difficult to tell the colors in the pictures, but it doesn’t look unlike a 1K.
In 10 million years when future archaeologists find it, they’ll try to extract it’s DNA and bring the long extinct ARP 2600 back to life…
I installed a resistor band scanner on my phone, and it decided that that band sequence means 1K ohm, 5% tolerance. I’m in no position to argue with that.
This exists? I’ve been doing it the hard way. I learn several things daily on this forum.
I’m using Android so it’s this one:
Beware, it gets a lot of 1-star evaluations. It worked for me the only time I’ve ever tried it.
You guys are still reading color codes? I thought everyone stopped doing that back when they for some utterly obscure reason decided to use a blue background for metal film resistors…
