A MIXED BAG OF JOBS

Welcome back! Or, just welcome!

Today's post is about the work done on the 24th of April. We start with a mixed bag. Actually a basket. I tend to be working on multiple DIY jobs, and small projects, all at the same time. Really helps to keep parts for each in separate containers. All of this lot needs to be mounted in the cabinet at some point.

A closeup of the control panel paint finish. At this stage, it has had three coats of acrylic primer and the orange peel is strong. Its not a terrible finish to have, but I did intend to paint directly onto the control panel - something that got scrapped towards the end. So this would need sanding.

After sanding most of the texture has gone. Could probably go all the way down to completely flat but I was under time pressure, this would do. The final coat would be an acrylic lacquer, but that would have to wait until the art was on.

Fed up with dust and sanding I decided to fix the speaker and get the cables sorted.

The line in cable had been partially cut through when I hacked off the plastic casing. The cable is way too long, and the ends are easily accessed on the board so I decided to cut it to length and solder the cable on the board.

Cut to length with some heat shrink ready. Been a while since I soldered, and this went fairly badly. Had to repair a few mistakes, and discovered a broken joint on the board which I repaired. 

Little MP3 player at the bottom for testing, no way I would plug my phone into something I had repaired! Works fine. 

I used to be able to solder to the legs on a chip on a PS2. Probably best not to ask why. Not so neat these days but it seems to work.

Splattered all the fragile parts in hot glue to protect them from ham fists during installation.

And there it is installed. Screwed the power housing down using its original screws. It is very secure in there.

And finally hot glued the volume control in place. Hot glue is messy. Its the back. *shrug*

After this day's work I took a few days to have a breather, had been working really hard on this. But now I knew all that was stopping me putting all its insides in was finishing the paint job. That would mean CUSTOM PAINTING! Art was about to get real.