Hey. What’s shakin’? Not much I hope.

I’m awaiting the coin door for my Crystal Castles. In the mean time, I decided to put the service panel back together. To recap, here’s what it looked like:

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Here’s an after shot, with drippy paint job and all:

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I used hammered paint to hide the pits from the bad case of rust it had. I went a little too heavy with the Rustoleum and got the runs. No one wants the runs, but if you are by yourself and no one knows, no foul right? Well this is sort of the same deal. This goes INSIDE the cabinet, hidden away from critical eyeballs. No one will ever know that my Crystal Castles service panel has the runs except for you, and I know you won’t tell anyone.

Notice the new volume knob? Here’s the scoop on that…

The old volume control was so rusted, I couldn’t get it off easily. It ended up breaking into a bunch of pieces:

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I don’t think superglue or duct tape would have fixed this, so I had to find a new volume control. I wasn’t sure what the right replacement was, but figured I could get one from Radio Shack (and get pestered about my cell phone plan to boot). I did some research on RGVAC, and found a very helpful post from Ken Layton (who I believe knows what he’s talking about). Apparently this isn’t just a volume pot. It’s a “rheostat” which is a bit different. Google it.

I probably could have gotten away with a regular potentiometer, but because I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing I figured I’d take the advice of someone who does.

The original Atari part number for this is 19-9032. The replacement part number made by Ohmite is RES50RE. It’s a 50 OHM 12.5W Rheostat (volume thingy). I got mine at DigiKey.com. Their part number for the same thing is RES50RE-ND. Click here to find it on their site.

Here’s what the $25.96 (ouch) bad boy looks like in one piece (front):

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back:

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Now, my volume knob for this was also screwed. It had a big crack in it, and the metal piece inside fell out.

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I figured I could just grab any old knob at cellphone shack Radio Shack - WRONG. I made the mistake of just ordering the Rheostat. The shaft on it is 1/8″ in diameter. The only knobs I could find were for 1/4″. I bought one. No amount of hacking could get it to work right. I ended up having to place another order at DigiKey.com for the knob that was designed for this. The Digi-Key part number for that is 5151E-ND. Find it here.

Here’s what a $5.49 + shipping volume knob looks like:

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It fit perfectly. It looked different from the one that was there previously, but I don’t care about that. One thing that is interesting is that the exploded schematic for the service panel in the manual shows this same knob:

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I’m guessing maybe I had the wrong knob to begin with. If you’ve seen one knob you’ve seen them all (and I’ve seen a lot of knobs in my day). I think this one will suffice just fine, thank you.