[sdiy] Spring is in the air!

[Peter Snow]

Hi Don,

I pulled it apart last night and there is very little wrong with it that a good clean and a new
spring on one of the keys wouldn't fix.
But, I am not a keyboard player (handling two manuals and a set of foot pedals is way, way beyond my
capabilities!). So restoring it would only be for resale purposes.  And as Ken has pointed out, the
resale value on one of these is very low.

There are two main boards that appear to hold all the tone generator circuits and another board with
all the rest of the electronics.  Apart from two VLSI chips the rest appear to be quad op-amps with
some transistors and at least one CA3080. Despite the fact there is a chorus/vibrato switch, there
is not a BBD in sight (Harry, are you listening?).

The good part is that all the IC's are socketed.  However, I really do not want to waste time
stripping it down just for a bunch of opamps of dubious parentage, so a better plan may be to break
it into to two main parts - the keyboards and tone generators re-packaged into a table-top unit and
the pedals repackaged as a Taurus type synth.  The amp and speaker can be morphed into a guitar or
keyboard amp.

Cheers,

Peter


Don Tillman wrote:
> 
>    > Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 09:44:04 +1000
>    > From: sasami at hotkey.net.au (Ken Stone)
>    >
>    > Older Lowreys (pre 80's) are bound to be full of circuit boards, covered in
>    > nasty little sharp tie points for the wires. Rather crude beasts. Post 80s,
>    > I've never disected a later Lowrey, but there's not a lot in the 80's Yamahas.
> 
> This was hinted at in an earlier post...
> 
> Mike Ratledge of the band Soft Machine did absolutely amazing things
> with an old Lowrey organ and a fuzzbox.  And Garth Hudson of The Band
> also used a Lowrey.  So it may be worth restoring the organ.
> 
>   -- Don
> 
> --
> Don Tillman
> Palo Alto, California
> don at till.com
> http://www.till.com