I am not one to take a big chance on an unknown condition synth, but a slightly risky $ on eBay is easy to deal with if it’s cheap enough.  In this spirit I bought one of two Crumar Orchestrator’s that were listed for $89 each on eBay from the same seller.  It had been listed for a while at a higher price with no takers but when $89.99 landed I bought one and someone bought its twin within minutes.  Unknown problems?  Okay -just nothing major please…

Recently landed Orchestrator.  Looking pretty good.  What could possibly be wrong?  It came with the lid but no pedals.  I hear the ‘Swell’ pedal is amazing -need to find or build one.  Anyone have one for sale?

I plugged it in, turned it on and messed with it.  Sliders were scratchy, and a few notes didn’t sound right but as far as I could tell everything worked and the Brass with Bass sound is great.

Wow -check out all those voice cards.  They don’t have chips on them so they’re not as tough to deal with as Polymoog voice cards, but I am still scared with a few wavering/strange sounding voices.

The problem with this synth is repeating voices (push key once and it goes baa baa instead of just baa once) so I figured it was a keyboard contect issue.  Here are the bus bars.  Oxidized?  Yep.  Maybe they are silver plated? 

Removing the bus bars was a bit of a leap of faith since I had to remove the panel with all the voice cards and disconnect the key mechanisms and desolder the bar from the harness.  Took about an hour all told with a few minutes thrown in for polishing the bars with Mothers Mag Polish.

This is the pitch slider, made by Piher -Mouser still lists these -maybe I should buy a few to check them out.  Scratchy in a volume slider is just noise, scratchy in a pitch tuner means the instrument is very hard to tune -it kind of jumps around instead of transitioning smoothly up the HZ to 440 or whatever.  I will have to replace it if it doesn’t clean up.

I bought the two missing slider caps from an eBay seller and need to do some detailing, but so far so good.  Up next: back on the Juno 60!