I need to make a squeezer for a Source Four Junior

[Todd Terry]

Mark you don’t really need any plans or DIY instructions, not for a clever guy like you…

You just need to put a rheostat in a box with an edison plug on one end (or a stage pin, depending on your electrical source) and the female connection for your Source4 on the other.

The only trick is getting the right rheostat. The ones you buy for eleven bucks at Home Depot won’t work, as most of them are only rated for 600w.

Go to an electrical supply store, and you can easily get 1K and 2K rheostats. They look exactly like the Home Depot variety, but will handle several times the wattage. Oh, and they won’t be eleven bucks, they’ll be more like a hundred, or more… but will do the job.

We’ve built a couple of squeeze boxes like this, and they all work fine. As long as you don’t buy a bargain-basement rheo you shouldn’t get any “buzz” or interference.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

That’s about what I figured. I dunno if the petty cash fund can stand it… do you rhink I could do as well for the immediate emergency by jjst cobbling together some hardware store wire mesh diffusers? That’s gotta be cheaper, probably five bucks? What’s the downside?

[Todd Terry]

Sure, they should work… that’s pretty much what guys have been doing for a hundred years or so.

If you have some old gel frames you could make several of the usual varieties… singles, doubles, halfs, etc.

Just make sure, of course, that you get the real METAL hardware cloth. As luck would have it, I just finished re-screening 10 storm windows at home at the better-half’s insistence. I was surprised to find that it’s a bit harder to locate the real metal screen now… almost all of it is fiberglass now. You don’t want that of course. I actually did use some in the past for lights… and while the fiberglass itself will stand up to the heat, it has a coating on it that will quickly burn off leaving huge stinky clouds of smoke. Just get the metal. We finally found it, but it was in the minority of what’s out there now.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Alan Lloyd]

From another forum I know you got one, but if you’re going to do more of it, do be sure to put it in a metal box and ground it.

Also, router speed controls are in metal boxes, rated at 1K, and sold by a local lighting/grip supply house here in MN as dimmers.

[Mark Suszko]

Alan: The one we had our engineer build from scratch is in a grounded metal enclosure and is safe, rugged and completely variable across a 100 percent range. The one I got from Harbor Freight is also in a metal enclosure. However, it’s utility is more limited in that it won’t allow you to reduce power to less than about 75% of full. For many light dimming applications, that’s not an issue, but for some needs, it ain’t enough dimming capacity.

[Alan Lloyd]

Yeah, I saw all that in the other forum after I posted my comment.