I am finishing repairs on a couple of boomboxes, both of which are missing knobs on the volume and tone sliders (who does this?!). There's almost zero chance of ever finding correct replacements so I'm looking for something simple and generic with a small circular or elliptical or rectangular form. Most commercially available slider knobs are quite large by comparison and seem oriented towards use on mixer decks etc. The other difficulty here is the sheer volume of things called "slider knobs" on the usual selling sites. Does anyone here have suggestions? Thanks in advance, Nick.
We used to have a member in Ireland that would mold them for you but I can't remember his name, are you familar with resin molding? Here's a video on YouTube showing how this guy makes really old knobs but it's the same idea. I haven't done this yet but to seems to be the best way and the resin kits are fairly cheap so you can mess up and still make more. Let us know how you do, I need to make a million knobs.
Thank you Mister X. It's always a delight seeing someone do things like that in such a confident and successful way (on first try too! ). Thinking on this, the items I want to create need to be quite small (5-6 mm max in any dimension) with accurate millimetre-wide ventral slots to take the slider shaft without glue. The run-out on my drill press is wider than that already so I doubt that I could machine those out, even if I could create the parts to begin with - and lack of originals for the pattern is another hurdle. Our local rubber parts supplier has some silicon tips which I'm going to investigate next week. Thanks again and sorry I can't lead the charge on this.
I think you need to either find some flat bar stock and make it the same size as the slider bar or remove the whole switch and hang it upside down in the mold so you get that tight fit. I'm hoping to have my shop fully operational this winter to experiment with similar parts and methods. You might also want to try finding some sticks of thermoplastic, carve or machine them to size, heat up the metal slider bar and press the pieces on until they are snug. Most thermoplastics will start getting gooey around 130 degrees F.
