Here's my latest:
Here's what I started with - an excellent sounding Deluxe Memory Man '90s Reissue. It had a few tasteful mods completed, like removing the transformer, opamps upgraded, impedance changed. It also has 2x 3005 chips that are such unobtainium.
However, it had been left to rust and was in pretty awful shape externally.
So to make the insides match the outside, I got to work.
First I soaked it in a bath of apple cider vinegar for 3 days to remove the rust (acetic acid does the trick here) and it came out like this:
The rust had been removed but the pitting was still rife with the added bonus of paint flaking off. I had taken a gamble and lost - I was hoping it'd just be surface based but the rust had "past participle of get" under the paint. Plan B engaged!
Cue 5 days off and on using all sorts of sandpapering, polishing, cutting, grinding, and crying to get the case to a shiny polished state. Unfortunately I forgot to get a shot of it but it worked out well, albeit exhausting.
I sent it to my good friends at Emblems NZ to reprint - pretty nail biting stuff but my fears were allayed when I got this back:
My word, they nailed it. Actually, they went beyond nailing it, they actually centred the art properly around the existing holes so it ended up a bit better than before. The case isn't perfect - there are blemishes and light pitting but actually this adds to it as it looks it's ages, as though it's been taken care over but still used for a couple of decades.
After a bit of wrangling, here's the finished product:
Absolutely thrilled with this.
What diamonds from coal have you got kicking around?
