Tag Archives: knob

Heat blued and stainless amplifier knobs

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on July 15, 2012 No comments

It’s been a while since I made my last amplifier knobs and it was nice to come back making them. This time I had interesting challenge ahead – I had to heat blue 3 knobs. Material was regular mild steel, which blues to very nice deep black. In the past I’ve had several projects, where bluing worked out fine, but also sometimes it didn’t. Let’s just say the process wasn’t quite worked out yet.

Long story short – I had to reblue these knobs about 10 times, before I got it perfect. Fortunately it seems that I got the process worked out and with next projects I wouldn’t have to mess around so much.

Heat blued amplifier knobs

The other lot of knobs was 7 stainless ones, but also with a quirk. The top part of knob had to be concave. Not having CNC lathe and making them by hand was quite an interesting challenge. Fortunately client didn’t need them as 100% identical and slight variation was OK.

The result is here:

Stainless amplifier knobs

Stainless amplifier knobs

Stainless amplifier knobs

Amplifier knobs

Posted by Viljo Marrandi on February 18, 2010 3 comments

One of my (too many) hobbies is also fiddling with electronics and audio stuff. I built a gamma2 DAC kit from AMB a while ago and soon I’m going to build tube headphone amp too. In the mean time I got an idea to make amplifier knobs, because there didn’t seem to be very many options to choose from. Mostly factory made aluminium knobs. What if I wanted titanium, stainless or bronze knobs? Didn’t find them anywhere.

So I made some myself.

Amplifier knobs

Here is short video of how the engraving of that map knob was like. Source for engraving was some old simplified version of Earth’s map.