Roland MKS-80 front panel reassembly LED guides

thingiverse

The Roland MKS-80 is a rackmount synth module from 1984 with an amazing sound and it's both popular and expensive today due to its age. Many of these modules are under the knife for various repairs and upgrades, some of which involve replacing the dead backlit LED with a nice new OLED. This requires removing the front panel, which can be a challenge because of the four rectangular LEDs that must be exactly positioned to go through the front holes in the panel. Re-assembling the front panel is quite challenging due to the lack of guides for aligning the LEDs. There's no phenolic alignment sheet or other aid to help them find their spots, and there's zero wiggle room for adjusting their position. It's common to misalign the LEDs during reassembly and end up pushing on them with the front panel, which can cause damage to the LED pads. Many MKS-80s have the LED pads popped off the thin front panel PCB due to this issue, and it's easy to do because the tracks and pads aren't well-adhered to the pressboard panel. Getting to those parts of the panel to fix the traces properly is a real task that requires a lot of disassembly or very careful surgery. To prevent this from happening, I've created a set of guides that are permanently installed inside the front panel to gently coax the LEDs into place. These guides are not visible from the outside and make a huge difference during reassembly. They're designed to be easy to print using Rhino software and come with a PrusaSlicer project file for 6 sets of prints, which take about 1 hour and 6 minutes to complete. Note that the smaller single-LED guide may not work on your panel due to clearance issues around the MIDI LED cable. The three-LED guide works perfectly in its place.