Hmm. I hadn't even really used the volume control seriously until reading this thread and playing with it a few minutes.

Now, its pretty much useless, after playing with it for a few minutes.

Its on my desk here at work at the moment, in an air-conditioned environment. The player has been running for about a half hour, and the steel rotary stalk is quite warm on its own. So it seems the heat generated by the system, communicated through the steel is sufficient to loosen the plastic.

Also, it might be a case of the plastic not being hard enough, not just a grip issue: it seems that once you get it to break friction once, it takes less force every time thereafter to break friction, as if the fins themselves wear down quickly. Looking at the steel shaft under bright light, it has a fine powder on it now, which I believe is probably the remains of the original contact-edge of the plastic fins.

As a waiting-for-new-button solution, how about getting a clamp or crimper that will leave splines or knurl marks on the steel shaft itself (preferably splines) for the plastic knob to grip better? Hmm. It might be hard not to torque the shaft applying that kind of force.

Instead of re-thinking the button plastic, or deforming the shaft, how about fabricating a cylindrical steel shim that slides over the shaft tightly and that has splines on its outer surface?

The shim can fit very tightly, and still allow the button to fit loose (and thereby still allow disassembly), since it would be the splining on its outer edge providng the grip against the plastic fins inside the button, and not steel-plastic friction...

Plan: when I get home, I am going to find some thin (THIN!) copper tubing (with an interior diameter of at least 0.5mm LESS than the empeg's volume shaft's diameter), cut about a half inch of it, slice it down the side, slide it over a wooden dowel, crimp the HELL out of it with Vise-Grips (to leave spline marks) and then slide it over the empeg's steel volume shaft and see how grippy the volume button is after that.

I am still worried about those fins wearing down even more, however, in the future.


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MK2 #141, green, 12GB