Back in the early days a lot of the mixers that were in use were one-of-a-kind or handbuilt by the "sound company". I know we built some strange creatures, and I used a few built by others.
What were some of your strangest encounters, either your own or from others?
In 1979 we took on Johnny Cash. At the time, we had a second monitor console which was one of the early Ashly consoles with everything built in (mentioned in a reply elsewhere on this topic).
After seeing a John Wendt modified PM1000 monitor console (28 x 8 ) which had the bus pots at the top of the channel strip, and then seeing a Midas monitor console, I launched into two console mods (PM1000 16x6) for us with the bus pots in place of the channel slider.
One of these consoles was a very early serial number 302 and had the stepped attenuator channel sliders and was pretty useless as a house console.
The channel gain became a rotary pot in the physical location of the former pan pot. Two sliders were added to the headphone and talkback modules in place of the former rotary echo send masters.
We used quality cermet rotary pots, but ultimately they became noisy,
We used these two consoles for quite a while, the one on the Cash show was replaced by a Soundcraft and the one on the other system was replaced by a Yamaha MC3208.
One of these still works, and I keep it in my museum.