I have an After Later Audio 7U 84hp Adventure Case. It comes with a latching cover for portability. Their 104hp 7U Adventure Case has an optional kit for converting the cover into another full size case. But they don’t offer such a kit for the 84hp version.
I thought I would be taking my Adventure case for playing out. But I have become so accustomed to taking small cases to play out with, the Adventure case just became another of my collection of Eurorack cases. The lid just sat around unused.
But the 84hp lid has features that indicate the powered expansion was considered and then abandoned. For instance, it has a spot where a power supply would go and cutouts for the power entry and switch.
There are also holes for a handle and side holes for affixing 84hp rails. It seemed a relatively easy project to add some rails, a power module, and a passive power distribution board. That is what I did, and there was really only one small glitch.
I ordered two sets of 84hp rails with nut strips. These come with the end screws needed to attach the rails to a case.
Now the glitch. The rails were just a few millimeters too long to fit the ALA cover. I just had to file down one end (all four rails) to make them fit.
The ALA steel case sides are welded, so they cannot be removed.
Power and Distribution board
I ordered an ACL EVE1 power distribution board, which I had used in a previous case build. The EVE1 is a very high quality low impedance board.
The only drilling I had to do was eight 1/8″ holes in the very thin aluminum panel. The EVE1 mounts on that panel with eight 4-40 machine screws and eight 1/8″ thick nylon spacers. The screws that hold the panel to the case are still accessible on either side of the EVE1.
Power Module
I chose a 4ms Row Power 45 module. I’ve had excellent results with Row Powers in the past, being careful not to overload them. A nice feature of the later Row Powers is having holes for a four-terminal Molex connector, which I take advantage of.
The power brick I used was one I already had, a 90 Watt, 19 Volt brick from Meanwell.
I also solder a ground wire to bring out to a banana jack for distributing 0V across cases. I used an old heavy duty wiring harness, being careful to insure the wires from the Row Power 45 to the EVE1 went to the correct terminals. I made Red be +12V, Yellow -12V, but since there were two black wires in the old harness, one of them got used for +5V.
There is a 5-pin Molex header on the board that can connect to an ACL power supply (which is quite expensive). ACL nicely provide the screw terminals as well.
You notice that the 1U extra row at the top is left empty. That is because there are no side holes for mounting screws for that. With a lot of drilling through steel, it could probably be done, but I didn’t want to complicate this build.
The above image also shows the rubber plug and the ground wired to the banana jack.
It fits on the stand!
I didn’t know if this would work, but it does!
