[sdiy] Keyboard Connections

[harry]

Hi Med....

I'd try to rotate the organ 90 degrees...so the shit would fall away from
the circuit boards... then I'd drown the shit out of it with contact
cleaner while
having a friend (better be a GOOD friend) work the keys vigorously....

That might not even be enough... you may need to scrub each contact point
with a swab.  Probably a foam or chamois swab would be best, because the
cotton will shred and fuck things up worse.

I'll let someone else suggest the best contact cleaner... I'd start with
one non-residue
type to clean and another to protect / lubricate.  I used Cramolin on the
last keyboard I did... but that is long-time unavailable now....

H^) harry

med wrote:

> Okay, I've got myself an old Thomas organ (lemme tell you, if you've
> got a forklift or a few strong men and a Huge-Backed Truck you can
> pick up an organ real cheap or even free in the classifieds!) whose
> manuals ("keyboards") have a bit of an issue.
>
> Some of the keys on the lower manual tend to make only intermittant
> contact, and that only if you press it forcefully. It wasn't played
> for a long time, and presumably, this led to something accumulating
> there. We immediately wiped down the organ with various towels when we
> first got it to get rid of the surface dust, and I opened it up to
> vacuum it out, and retuned the three oscillators that had gone flat.
> (odd side note: The various notes are generated by one of 12
> oscillators. Does it divide the frequency down for whatever octaves it
> needs and then add harmonics for whatever stops it is using?)
> On the upper manual, there are various sounds you can patch in (i.e.
> 8' whatnot, 16' whatnot, 4' whatnots) and when you press some of these
> keys it again, the higher sounds come out clearly, but the lower notes
> (i.e. the regular note and the octave below it) make intermittent
> contact (kind of a sputtering of the notes, and sometimes they just
> don't 'come on').
>
> I've opened it up, and it has a (what i believe to be called) matrix
> type action, where pressing a key moves a little metal wire which
> touches a grid. I'm assuming that in the twenty years (!) that it was
> not often played, some dust and 'crud' accumulated there. The only
> problem is that this 'matrix' is directly over the sound-generation
> circuitry, and if i spray contact-cleaner there (my first idea) it
> will drip onto the components. Since you guys seem to do a good job
> self-repairing old synths, perhaps you have had to deal with this
> issue? What do you recommend? Is this even the correct means of
> tackling this issue?

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