Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

After two weeks of eating dust and going nearly blind, it is back
together and running and all that is left is the tedious adjustments
to the transport and keys. Besides the satisfaction of a fresh
appearance, I now know the innards of this thing intimately,
something you could not gain merely by reading or looking at
pictures.
First off let me thank Jerry Korb for sharing his knowledge and
experiences, and Martin for the "authentic" information, and the
others on this site that shared their labors. What really seemed to
slow the work down was constantly stopping to document every step of
disassembly, notation and taking pictures, but absolutely necessary
for future reference. Turns out this unit also had the SSI (un)
modifications. Worst problems were mounts on bottom of spill box and
motor mounts. Even though the unit seemed to play fine with a four
note limit before it fell down, rotted rubber grommets and motor not
in line with capstan causing belt to skew, after correcting things
it runs better with more torque and seems quieter. Amazing on how
these will "play" out of adjustment but play so much better when
things are aligned properly. One thing I did years ago was build
a "line conditioner" a trip to our local electronic surplus store
had everything I needed. This prevents voltage spikes or drops from
ruining the electronics in the instrument by keeping voltage at a
constant, and costs very little to build, basically a choke
transformer and a bridging network. JK came up with a couple of
quick fix improvements that should be a 'Must" for any unit. One is
changing the current path to the power switch in order to fuse line
current at switch, the other is replacing the wire from head block
into preamp. The line wire on mine looked ok and rang out using an
ohm meter, but when moving the cable while hooked to meter there was
variance, not good. I used a good quality shield cable as the cheap
stuff may not have shielding and pick up noise. When time permits
will assemble notes and pictures in step by step format and make
available. Will also add pics of finished unit later. Anyhow this
should hold up for another 30 years unless we are plagued by
termites, or JK's chili! Doug