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This blog documents the production of my Kaoss Pad 1 Guitar Modification. The posts appear newest to oldest, so it may be easier to go bottom to top if using it as a guide or reading the whole thing, or just go off the archive navigation below.



Cheers for stopping by, hope its in some way interesting, please feel free to comment!

Monday, 19 March 2007

blue peter styley extra supplies

Heres the blue peter side of things, the idea being you should get some idea of how feasable your own ideas are, or how to do this without any extra bits and pieces:

Guitar Woodwork
Small Disposable stanley blade / scalpel / knife to cut plastic shell neatly
Flatbladed Screwdriver - the wannabe chisel
Hammer - Just to get the 'chisel' into the first bits of the wood, after that didnt really use it much

Guitar Touchpad Finishing
Black Video Case - Cut a square, made adjusments, made a hole, screwed it on.. an it did the job.
Long headed drawing pins - Great for temperarily fixing anything that would usually need screws to mount (PCB, DB9 connector, even the cover I guess but I had screws handy).
Black Felt Tip - Given the state of me guitar, a decent way to cover the odd scratches

Electronics
Solder - YOU NEED THIN SOLDER for the PCB mods - Really, unless youre really good, I used probably the thinnest I could imagine you can get it on a wire with (by hand anyway). For the LED circuit, i just fished up big dollops of this fat stuff and dumped it on. Not very professional but hey.
Cardboard - PCB's are a bitch to make properly, and really unneccesary for a few LED's. It'd probably work just as well without any sorta board, just loose components secured down somehow, but I prefer the card PCB, tis also handy for writing on the card your circuit diagram so its not confusing.
Elastic Bands - These were handy for securing stuff down that couldn't be easily mounted. Electric tape did little since its all hacked wood, so I just double looped the bands tightly, and pinned either end down with the pins. Like the battery, or wiring.

Some sandpaper helped, along with various implementations of electric insulation tape.
It depends what you're going for. Personally, I think the KP Body benefits from looking throwntogether and cut down. I mean, a window showing the divine korg circuitry, nicely lit looks pretty good, then with a clearly homemade computer serial port shoved on looks pretty neat no matter how dossed together it is.

Lesson calls, cya.