[sdiy] There ARE keyboards at All Electronics

[Gene]

Hi DIY,

I dropped in to All Electronics the other day (not too far from my house) to
shop a bit. While I was there I saw the recently-reported AGO keyboard
assemblies that they have for sale.

There's at least two pallettes of cardboard-boxed keyboards stacked about
four feet high. They have a couple of types - 5-octave and 88-note. The
5-octaves are semi-weighted, and the 88-notes are the full-blown
under-the-key hammer action. Both types use diode-matrix rubber-button
switching, with two buttons for each key to get sequential contacting for
velocity sensing.

I counted at least 50 of each. They're in boxes, marked on the outside with
comments like "clacking keys (bent hammers?)" and "C-0 too loud". Some
labels mentioned scratched, missing, or broken keys. An 88-note was out of
the box, the bottom A missing. Nice shape otherwise, however. A couple of
5-octaves were out of the box, definitely some keys missing.

It looks like a reject shipment from Fatar. All the boxes said on the
outside "Made in Italy". The price on the 88-notes was $20 each, but I
didn't see a price for the others. Bet they'd take $10 each! I would have
dug around and bought an 88, but I had to think about a) my current
unfinished projects, b) the fact that to do the assemblies justice one would
have to use a CPU to scan the things to get MIDI with velocity, and c) the
fact that I need to be honest with myself and admit that I have three kids
(i.e. little time) and I could get a used SL-880 off of ebay for probably
$450.

I honestly don't know if it would be realistic to hope that one could order
one of these without visiting the store and finding one that has the least
damage, or buying 2 so that you could use the parts to build one perfect
one. It's almost as if somebody from the DIY list in the LA area should go
"make a raid" on the place, spend a couple of hours digging through them,
buy a bunch, and resell them to DIYer's remotely. The price is so low that a
little mark-up for the effort would be appreciated. Not me though!!! I just
can't do it, my wife would probably kill me :). But I wanted to report on
the finding... these things are in pretty good shape mostly, and the
88-notes had me drooling for sure.

- Gene