I got my first Juno 106 in 1999 off ebay. It arrived with a broken bender, and in the years ahead I somehow lost the ENV slider — not just the cap, but the metal stem as well.
I got my second Juno 106 in 2002, when my friend and test manager at Microsoft gave me the one I had borrowed to put on a music show in my living room. It’s also missing a stem and cap from its LFO slider. As a side note, Stu also deserves props for most of the songs I’ve released since my two mp3.com albums, as they were made on the XP-30 he loaned and eventually gifted me as well.
Moral: Don’t let me borrow sound equipment from you, because I’ll do such awesome things with it you won’t want to take it back from me.
With the show coming up, it was about time to fix these things. I rallied a couple friends to contribute things like epoxy, Juno knowledge and paper clips, and all is now well in the land of my synths. At least.. I think so. I haven’t actually turned either of them on again yet. 😛
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Behold, the innards of the illustrious Juno 106 analog synthesizer. Isn’t it beautiful?
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More vintage hardware porn. Mmmm. Sassy.
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It turned out the bender on my original 106 was floppy because it wasn’t actually attached to the assembly anymore. It’s normally screwed into a metal bracket by two plastic tabs that were pretty thin to enable the vertical functionality of the bender to work. Those tabs were broken at some point. This is a photo of Lukes handywork: two tiny pieces of sheet metal epoxied across the break and clamped for drying.
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We also found that large plastic coated paper clips fit perfectly into the plastic divets of a broken slider on a Juno 106. That’s a red one in my mouth there as I’m taking apart the second Juno…
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And epoxying it into the divets of the plastic base.
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Ta Da. The yellow version on Stu’s old Juno. All that’s left to do is put the slider caps back on the rest of them and let that yellow hack shine in all its glory. I can’t even tell you how awesome I think this is.
The next fix, which may or may not happen before the show, is to replace the felt that sits along all the sliders. It’s so dry and stiff that it’s completely falling apart.
Super fun project.