Recently I got an email from Ohm64 user Daisuke from Tokyo Japan. He was asking about a the “scar” in the body of his controller pictured below (to the right of the usb connection). I explained to Daisuke how Jelutong is harvested, so it seems like a good time to explain it here.

Jelutong wood is tapped for latex, then cut into lumber. We choose Jelutong because it is easy to mill, is very light for a hardwood, and is a renewable resource due to its quick growth. What particularly drew us to this wood is the multi-purpose usage. Most hardwoods are simply cut for lumber, but some are used for multiple purposes which cuts down on waste and make us feel better about using mother natures resources.

The scars in Jelutong wood is a result of the dual purpose harvesting of the latex tree. The tree is stripped, pierced with special tools, the latex is gathered from the piercing, then the tree is cut into lumber. The resulting scars can show up as small knot holes or in long lines depending on where the cut ends up in the board when we mill the bodies. We call it the beauty of dual purpose wood.

Alot of our customers are very into the resulting appearance of Jelutong. The beauty of using wood as the body for a controller is that no controller is exactly the same, each has different properties in terms of lines, knots, and marking. Some people are allergic to certain woods however, so if you are one of them let us know and we can create you a controller out of something other then Jelutong, we have plenty of Maple, Mahogany, and exotic woods in our shop.

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As the Ohm64 circuit boards are coming off the assembly line I shot some video of them being assembled. Last year we purchased our very own pick and place machine so we are able to do all of our own assembly work on demand. It is also really nice because we can do all of our own prototyping as needed. If you ever visit our shop or call us the sound you hear on this video is pretty much the soundtrack of Livid as this machine is running all the time. In this video the machine is placing the indicator LED’s on the Ohm64 button grid. After this the board goes into the reflow oven to complete the automated soldering. We then hand place and solder the potentiometers (faders and rotary knobs). We will eventually do a whole “how we do it” in depth video and share it with you here.

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Until about a month ago we used to have to go to a local waterjet company to have the face plates of the Ohm cut. We have been talking for a while about brining most if not all of our manufacturing in-house, but getting our own water jet just to cut faceplates didn’t seem to make sense. We already have one CNC machine to mill wood, plastics, and soft materials, and another to assemble printed circuit boards, but really had no way to cut metal. We talked last year about cutting metal with our wood cnc machine, but that would tie it up because metal takes a long time to mill using drill bits. It would also require a coolant system, so the moisture would not play well with our wood work. Travis came up with a solution and built us our very own metal milling CNC machine that we call “Metal Bot”.

Since we plan on cutting metals only on this machine it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to cut each piece. We are currently cutting the faceplates of the Ohm64 using aluminum in about 30 minutes. There is a nice timelapse of a faceplate being cut that can be viewed here. When we finally tweaked our machine to create very accurate cuts, I shot some video of Travis explaining how it works. In this video you can see the very first faceplate being cut for our prototypes, and Travis talking about it.

Since this video was shot we built Metal Bot her very own room, and I will shoot some production video of the production faceplates being milled.

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