Rhodes Chroma Polaris

> From: Chris Ryan
> 
> Sorry for the delayed response. I had an e-mail exchange with 
> Richard Lawson of RL Music (rlmusic.co.uk) a couple of months 
> ago about the possibility of making replacement membranes for 
> the Chroma. He wrote, "The Membrane manufacturing is going to 
> be too expensive it seems after discussing this with my tech. 
> The design of the micro-switches into the membrane itself 
> means this is a complex manufacturing process that would 
> require specialist tooling. Having some experience with 
> restoration work, I know without even a detailed 
> investigation that this is not going to be cost effective 
> unless we were to sell hundreds of them and I doubt that is 
> ever going to happen." I'm not sure how similar the Polaris 
> membrane mechanism is to the original Chroma.

Well, they work on the same principle, but that's about the only similarity.
The reason the Polaris ones fail and the Chroma ones don't is that Fender
Japan decided to make the Polaris ones out of something other than plain
Mylar, for reasons that are as lost in the mists of history as the tooling
they used to make them. (On the other hand, has anyone actually tried to
contact FJ to see if someone there has the tooling sitting in a dusty
closet?)

Without the original tooling, the actual screen printing would probably be
fairly cheap, but the expensive part would be the knife-edged dies that cut
all the holes in each piece. In such small quantities, it would probably be
easier to make a few individual punches, and then punch all the holes by
hand. In addition to the single size of LED hole and slider slot, the
switches themselves need a dime-sized hole in the spacer layer, so that
makes three small punches that would have to be fabricated. The outline,
including the tails, could probably be cut with scissors. Not fun, but not
impossible.

Given the passion some users have for their Polarises, it wouldn't surprise
me if some people would be willing to cut all the holes and slots by hand
for their own instrument, using an X-acto knife.

-- 

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...