The Elektor Formant is a project that was printed long time ago in an electronics magazine called Elektor. You could buy the front panels and PCB's from them back then, but you could also make them yourself. At that time I had no time and no money to build it unfortunately. When I wanted to start building one I found out that it was difficult to find some parts. Then I found this one on a Dutch auction website. So I didn't build it myself actually but I bought it broken. So I need to completely restore it. I'm still considering to put it in another cabinet as well, but on the other hand I think it looks quite nice. Well at least from the outside.
When I got it the first thing I started doing is looking why it didn't work. Well I found that quite quickly. The power supply wasn't working anymore. It was short circuited for sure. Parts of the wiring was melted as well. The guy that had it knew nothing about electronics and tried to repair it himself I guess. Parts of the wiring was cut away and parts were still there. First of all I removed the broken power supply and looked at it. I saw quickly that it was quite a regular +15, -15 and +5V power supply. I decided not to repair it, but I will replace it by a more modern regulated power supply with load protection etc.
The next thing I did is starting to strip all the wiring from the back. I will completely rewire it. But first I will test it one module at a time. I also want to change some functionality. It came with a keyboard and keyboard interface. And CV and Gate were pre-wired to all the modules. If you use it stand-alone that is fine, but I want to be able to hook it up to the rest of my modular setup as well, so I want to add some patch points on the front panels. I will probably never use the keyboard at all, but I will make sure that it can work when I ever want to. Maybe nice when I bring it to a synthesizer meeting or something similar.