Keith G4EQZ very kindly gave me this MFJ-976 Legal Limit Balanced Line ATU which he had no further use for. It was in need of a little TLC.

Keith had previously automated this tuner by using stepper motors to drive the 2 capacitors and the roller coaster. With an Arduino controlling it all.

After rewiring some of the internals and changing the balanced line output terminals for a pair of 4mm sockets, the next job was to do something about the front panel.

A bit of CAD design work and half an hour engraving on the laser cutter produced a nice looking panel made from acrylic.

Finally I cut out a piece of blue textured card to go behind the new panel to cover the holes in the original front panel.

The finished result, the original turns counter for the roller coaster had long since been lost but replacements are available from MFJ.

I decided that as the original counter was mounted behind the front panel it would be difficult to read with the front panel now being thicker so I bought a surface mounted counter from RS and fitted that with the original MFJ cranking handle.

As acrylic has a fiber optic effect I thought it would look cool with some blue LEDs lighting the edges of the front panel.

Here's what it looks like in the dark, the Fast and the Furious.