DIY Synth Enclosure
The Chaney C4736 8 Note Tunable Organ Kit is surprisingly musical, but I didn't know until I made this cool enclosure to put it in.
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.
![enclosure front](enclosure-front.jpg)
![enclosure back](enclosure-back.jpg)
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.
![3D printed tuning key](tuning-key.jpg)
![3D render of enclosure](render.jpg)
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.