$4 decksaver

They sell these fishing tackle boxes on Aliexpress for about $4.

(I use them for electronics components, they have lots of compartments inside):

With a bit of fettling you can do this:

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It boggles my mind that there’s no real competitor to Decksaver AFAICT. I guess relatively speaking, the market is small but even so.

I’ve used Tupperware and stationery boxes in the past and I’m repurposing an old TD-3-MO Decksaver cover for my OP-1F at the moment.

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Yep, you’d think there’s be low-cost versions out there but maybe the market just isn’t big enough.

The official ones used to be about $35 IIRC but now you can only get them from Elektron and they’re 55 Euros? :astonished: It’s just a piece of plastic…

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FWIW it’s the “small” one here:

There’s a lot of sellers who sell them. Click a few, wait for Aliexpress to offer you a “bundle deal”, then pounce.

Edit: I noticed there’s a few variants on these. The one shown (with the sticker on the lid) has a much taller lip around the edge and stays on better than the other one I tried (no sticker on lid).

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Oh wow, thanks a lot! Got one for 0.86€

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Savedecker

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Does this have proper clearance for all the knobs/buttons?

@funkylsk prints his decksavers, it’s a solid low-cost alternative to the official decksaver.

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As someone who has never used AliExpress, is it safe to use (financially speaking)?

i.e. Does the item ordered typically get delivered? Safe to use a credit card, or best to use a “one time” card number when making purchases? etc

I’m in the US if it matters…

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I’ve never had an issue with Aliexpress. They’re a marketplace, or a middleman, so it’s like an Amazon type thing except almost exclusively for the large Chinese factories (although one could argue that Amazon is primarily the same…).

It’s not sketchy in terms of who you’re purchasing from or the payment system itself. Any concerns would be mostly related to product quality or ethics of manufacture. Or delivery time.

If you’re just buying a cookie tin to dremel the edges off and put it on top of your super expensive grooveboxes then there should be no issue to the purchaser when buying with credit card or whatever. I’ve made numerous purchases from aliexpress (prior to any price increases related to North America issues) and have never had an issue to date.

It ships from Asia though, so even paying for a shipping upgrade it’s usually slow. Not a dealbreaker but something to be aware of.

Aliexpress also has a customer service that you can chat with, at least in an instant message type format (and maybe a call center type phone number). I once had someone in a chat window help me close an order and start a new one with a larger quantity than what I initially planned to purchase before my order actually shipped. They were communicative and there was no issue getting that handled.

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I did the same thing with my Keystep. I managed to find a case on Ali Express almost identical to those Analog cases for a fraction of the price and it was also being marketed for fishing tackle.

I was a bit nervous the first time I ordered from Ali Express but I’ve never had a problem. I always use Apple Pay because (I think) it gives an extra layer of protection

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They advertise ability to use paypal etc. but it did not show as an option. I was able to use Klarna though so did not have to insert card info.

Yes I was wondering about 3d printing…

The high price for decksavers has everything to do with the small market. They are an accessory for a niche product. Decksavers the company needs to make custom molds for each specific product, which are very expensive. And definitionally a decksaver will not sell greater quantities than the instrument it is covering. Synths are already a small market, so decksavers are an even smaller one. I would be willing to bet that at the absolute largest sales numbers, all the digi’s combined are nowhere near a million sales. That means a total addressable market for the elektron decksaver is like a few hundred thousand people if we are being generous. When you have to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling to make something, that is a pretty slim market.

Plastic food containers on the other hand are a massive market, orders of magnitude greater size than decksavers. Probably billions of potential customers. So manufacturers of plastic food containers can tap into economies of scale that decksaver the company cannot.

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Completely.

Returns, etc., are as easy as Amazon, too.

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Full confession: The buttons are fine but it touches the knobs at the back. I don’t think it’ll hurt them, it’s very soft plastic.

Note: I wouldn’t put one in a backpack with only this to protect it, and it won’t make them stackable.

It’ll definitely keep the dust, coffee and cats off though. :slightly_smiling_face:

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There’s plenty of them out there but my 3D printer isn’t quite big enough (20cm) and the ones I saw were fugly. This one looks cute with the smokey lid and colored tabs.

PLA plastic isn’t ideal either, I’d want to add EVA padding at the corners.

If anybody finds one which is a better fit, I’m all ears!

This is just one I happened to have in the workshop.

That was before.

My last order of these took 4 days to arrive in Europe, with free shipping.

The trick is to search for these, click on a few, then wait an hours.

After an hour or so Aliexpress starts offering them to you cheaper in the “bundle deals” section on the home page. You have to buy at least three items there to qualify for a “bundle” but you get free shipping and it’s fast.

Throw in some $1 cable tidies or whatever to get to three and you’re golden.

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3D print:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6698073

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