DIY Synth Enclosure

I originally bought this electronics kit to check the viability of using it for a big music project. I don't know enough about electronics to modify it for my purposes so I abandoned the idea, put the kit in a drawer, and forgot about it. Then the other day I remembered and thought "hey maybe I'll try record something with this" so I added an on/off switch, volume knob, and an output jack (the limit of my modding skills). Of course, the organ is hard to use as a bare circuit, so I modeled and 3D printed this nifty enclosure. Turns out this synth kit is way more fun than you might expect.

My enclosure design is efficient to print and easy to assemble. I originally thought I would use screws to hold the grill and keyboard in place, but I didn't think carefully enough about how that would work, and it didn't, so I had to glue all the parts together instead. The keyboard works amazingly well, and lifting the back cover changes the speaker airflow making the sound brighter and less boxy. If I knew more about electronics I would add some kind of tone control or vibrato like on a Stylophone.

The only annoyance is tuning. This thing is difficult to tune and nearly impossible outside of a two octave range, but still that's totally usable for musical applications. To making tuning a bit easier I quickly designed a tuning key that awkwardly fits into the back of the enclosure (had I thought in advance I would have made some kind of tuning key holder). And even when it tune it slowly falls out, but I think that's part of the character of such a simple analog device.

I designed this in Blender 4. Here are the files for remixing (Note: I'm kinda bad at 3D modeling). The printing was done on a Prusa MINI using Galaxy Black filament. This project was fun and I might do it again with a different design idea I had the other day.

🖺