I didn’t mean to get side tracked, but life does that to you some times.  I just read through the nine posts I did about restoring this thing and realized I created one of those internet dead ends we all hate so much, where the guy is reaching from the top of the ladder to a woman who’s hanging out of the window of a burning building… well, not that dramatic, but I did leave the reader wondering what the hell happened.

The panel:  the panel that you see in post one, with all the paint and scratches and glue and stars… I replaced that with one I got from Doug at Synthparts that only had a few very small scratches and a tiny dent.

The circuit boards: All my parts eventually showed up after about 4 weeks and it went together.  I didn’t get any pictures of the soldering process, but who cares right?  One of the voices had some trouble so I eventually sent it to Chris at This old synth who sorted it out.  I still long for a good oscilloscope.

The keybed:  I never got the original keybed to work very well, always had some glitchy keys, so I bought a Roland Piano Plus 11 that used the same keybed -which happened to be in perfect condition.

The cost.  My original estimate ended up being low by probably $200, so I worked for free on this synth…

Everything in its right place.  I even put all the wire ties back where they went.

I ended up buying this pitch bend panel from Doug along with the panel.  Screws came from elsewhere on the synth.

Looks amazing no?  The white buttons even came out very white.

You can see there are some light scratches above the arpeggio lettering.

Note the tiny dent in the corner.

I even cleaned up and reused this red plug.

Just going to have to live with that little divot in the button.

I went back and adjusted the LFO rate slider.  It’s straight in the next picture.

I think I got these bespoke screws from Doug as well.  I thought about calling one of those dent pro guys that removed door dings on cars etc, but decided a little patina was okay on a 30+ year old synth.

Even looks good from this angle.