Legacy Modules and BMF's calendar

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There have been many many threads about [no, not that]… the Moog 901 and for that matter, the 921’s and for that matter, 907 FFB design and the clones that have popped up lately or two years ago or ten years ago but I have to say; I just received my BMF 2014 calendar and am incredibly impressed both with the collection/history, and how elegant the design appears even when chaos seems to have been a big player in design/build. Several impressions.

  • Photography is beautiful and I hope I’m no going too far by saying that I feel privileged to be seeing the board of these classic modules
  • Many of these modules have been hacked/modd’ed, etc. Very interested, as a DIY’er myself, to see this and also have an account of why/what was changed
  • Despite the cleanliness of panel design, and multipurpose edge connector on the back of each module, there appears to have been a great deal of variability, if not, breadboard hand wiring on some of the modules (case in point, February which depicts the 901-C (admittedly, not the most common module)
  • March shows a 921 with wiring mayhem, everything wired to everything, components missing or removed. Gotta love how easy it is to maintain this generation of PCB builds
  • Then there is the 921B, what a layout. I have the MOS-LAB clone of this and while I have not compared one to the other, I have to hand it to Seb’s design sensibilities for holding true, the philosophy of discreet componentry (not that Bob had a choice, he used what made most sense based on what was available), wide board traces and generous layout. Recall that in the 70’s and certainly in the late 60’s, there was no auto-routing software to provide optimal placement and trace routing. This was hard work and I would imagine many hours invested in getting this right.

I would urge anyone with any interest whatsoever in MU or 5U modular (synth.com, MOTM, etc.) to pick this Calendar up; or if you are a Moog junkie (cork sniffer). It’s well done.

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I also love the calendar, and it does show some interesting details, especially with the insides, not commonly seen. It is not always mentioned that the modules have been changed in the text - and I hope someone doesn’t see the mess of wiring that is that 921 and assume it’s the way Moog built things. They would never allow that kind of wiring to happen - it is someone else’s work. (Classic Moog wiring was not as neat as military spec, it was sensible and generally clean.) I wrote to Erik and the BMF to ask about this one - no mention was made in the text of it, but it had clearly been changed or rebuilt by someone. Erik did indeed confirm that some of the modules were burnt in a fire long before he had them - so someone likely had rebuilt things.

Indeed, the perf-board hand-wired modules are a clear indication of how things were done - when circuits were done in small runs, it made more sense financially and for time to do them this way. This type of wiring is more common that one would expect, I run into it quite often in modular systems. However, these modules themselves are often the best-wired and cleanest-arranged of the systems, though they tend not to sound any better than PC-board versions of the same circuit. It is possible that these small run (and prototype/early) modules were done by a more experienced hand - you’ve probably seen the tables of women (usually) stuffing boards on the MoogArchives site; this is how things were typically done.

Hope the calendar is selling well. If you don’t have the previous calendars, they are ALL worth having for various reasons - the earlier Pioneers calendar has beautiful shots of early and unusual Moog modular systems, many photos never before seen. And for a good cause, too!