Last weekend, I made a day and hit a bunch of pawn shops, specifically looking for keyboards.  I guess collecting CDs was getting too hard, and collecting CD players was too infrequent, so keyboards is now what I collect.  I had two a couple weeks ago, now I have five.  I’ll figure out something.

So, to keep that story short, I made a deal at the first place I went and the rest of the day was pretty crappy.  For some odd reason, my phone could not keep a GPS signal, so my trip was cut short.  No idea what was up with the GPS, but I hope it’s not a regular happening.

So anyway, at this first shop, they had a keyboard out front – a Roland D70, which is a 76 key synth from 1990.  Not bad.  The original price was $720 and it was marked down to $450.  ehhh, not that great.  But there was a sign nearby that said anything on that table, make an offer. Hmmm.  I did a quick price check and the D70 sells for about $500.  Ok, let’s at least check it out.

I ask to try it and the first thing I see is that the MIDI thru jack is ripped out.  I have no idea how something like that happens.  Not a deal breaker because I wouldn’t need that port, but it is a negotiation point.  It powers up and I start testing the keys.  To my amazement, some of the keys don’t work.  And when I say they don’t work, I don’t mean they don’t make a sound when you press them, I’m saying you could not physically push them down.  Five keys had that problem, all black keys.

The store got a little busy right then, so I had an extended period to consider what level of effort a repair would be.  Absolute worst case, find a dead donor board and swap the keybed.  The electronics seemed fine, the issue was only mechanical.  Time to barter.

Know this about me:  I don’t haggle.  I like to be a people-pleaser.  I don’t like the discomfort of potentially insulting the person who is offering me a service or product.  So I continually tell myself, I don’t need this board.  There’s no reason not to walk away.  I set my price at $250.  Now remember, this is a pawn shop, so it’s likely the person pawning it only got like $100 at most for it, so my price is still giving them a profit.  However, that price was lower than their lowest time-based discount price was.

The salesman came back and I explained the problem and the level of effort I’d have to take to see if it’s even repairable and told him I could only offer $250.  He immediately said, no, I already have $400 into it.  Well, that was quick.  So I was like, ok, I can’t take it.  But I can tell you there’s a repair shop nearby that could fix it for you if you want to get its full value.  I know a pawn shop doesn’t want to sell good stuff; they want to turn over product with as little hassle as possible.  Fuck, they don’t even clean things they put on the floor.  Such a simple thing to increase the value, and they don’t.

He changes his tune quickly, "let me ask the manager."  Yup, just like a car dealership.  However, unlike a dealership, he came back and said, manager says he’ll take $250.  I didn’t have to fight wave after wave of bosses to get the deal.  So, deal done and back home to see what’s up with this thing.

To get to the point, this keyboard had what I’d heard about in repair videos but had never seen yet: the Roland Red Glue.  This glue, in keyboards from 1985-1990, would melt in heat and humidity, loosening the key weights and running into the internals.  The five broken black keys all had their weights fall and that is why they could not be pushed down.  It’s quite funny to me to think that this board might have originally worked well, but because pawn shops suck, they might have left the A/C off at night to save a couple bucks and caused this problem all on their own.  I love that sort of justice.  But anyway, the problem was mine now.

I did some research and found that the usual fix is to soak the keys in drain cleaner to dissolve the red glue and then reattach the weights with epoxy glue.  The recommendation was to use a drain cleaner with lye.  Well, guess what, you can’t get that anymore.  Why?  Goddamn methheads.  Lye is used in making meth.  So I picked up some other cleaner that had some of the chemicals that are associated with lye and hoped that would do the job.

The keys soaked overnight and while it did appear to dissolve all the running glue and freed the weights from the five black keys that had their weights fall, the other key weights were still rock solid.  Solid enough that I broke the plastic on a key trying to pry the weight out.

So the next day, I spent a lot of time scrubbing the keys, to get whatever glue was left (which had turned black) and planned my next move.  In one video, the person said the glue was susceptible to high pH and tested his soaking solution before starting to show it was high pH.  Well, I can make a high pH solution with some pool chemicals.  So I took the broken key as my new sacrificial tester, bought some alkalinity increaser from the pool store, and soaked the key in a solution with a pH off the charts of my pool test strips.  After a few hours, the key weight was as firmly attached as ever.

So at this point, I think I’m just going to fix the five black key weights, buy a replacement key for the one I broke, and put it all back together.  Some part of me says it’s leaving a job unfinished, but another part of me is saying, those other key weights are on there.  And I’m not leaving my keyboards in a non-climate controlled environment anyway, so they should remain solid.  I dissolved all the excess glue that had seeped out, so the only glue left is what is behind the weight.

The replacement key arrived quicker than I expected.  And immediately upon opening, I check it.  Red Glue.  Ok, off into a drain clearer bath overnight.  The next day, I scrubbed the dissolved glue off and installed the key.  I had been waiting for this and had installed every other key in advance.  I put everything back together and powered the board up.

No sound.  Further, the display was completely garbled.  Actually, this is ok.  I’ve heard that you might need to do a memory erase and then go through a tedious process of transmitting data to the device to restore it.  So I download the data file, get the utility program and try.  And try again, and again.  We’re not seeing any success here.  I read a couple more posts about the process and someone comments on turning off a memory protect switch.  Oh yeah, that would help.  A few more tries.  More reading.  Eventually what worked for me was navigating to a system menu, enabling sysex receive, and setting the device id to 17 (why I don’t know).  But then I had sound.

Unfortunately, some of the keys weren’t responsive.  I was too optimistic about their integrity and I probably shouldn’t have been.  So, everything comes apart again and I disassemble the keybed completely again.  Now I have to clean the membrane contacts and pads with alcohol, which wasn’t really as bad as I thought it might me.  I put on some music and went at it.  Two albums later, I was done and reassembling everything.

I had sound and now I had keys that work.  Some of the black keys were more sensitive than others, but that’s livable.  I can tweak any obnoxiously incorrect velocity in the sequencer if I need to.  And that actually wraps up the repair and restore of this device.

In the meantime, I’m buying another keyboard next weekend, which might need some attention, and also the keyboard that started this buying frenzy, the Equinox, needs some care.  The pitch wheel is wonky and I think some of the faders are dirty and spamming the bus.  And I know the battery is low on that, too.  So, no shortage of future projects, let’s hope they don’t become as involved as this one.