The waiting (for the package from Hong Kong) is the hardest part but it has given me the chance to get some little stuff done and replace the capacitors in a friends Arp Omni (more later).  One of the things that has bothered me about the Juno 60 is the connections to the panel in the power supply that have to be cut or de-soldered to remove the panel -yesterday I added an EIC socket that unscrews from the inside so it can be removed from the panel and today I added spade connectors to the wire that runs to and from the power switch so it can be pulled out of the top.

Pretty colors!  The Arp Omni has spade connectors to the power supply from the switch so it should be okay right? I added a few layers of heat shrink to the connectors to protect against problems.  Note the little string knot holding the two purple wires together -it was someones job to tie little knots all day long -can anyone say RSI?

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Lots of little details to wrap up and then I can start enjoying this synth for what it can do -I suppose the last installment will be a song composed for and entirely played on the Juno 60.  I’m waiting on a package from Hong Kong based Technology Transplants that will be the new toggles I need along with a slider cap set and some other stuff I can’t remember.  In the mean time I’m moving slower than normal but it has given me a chance to do some little jobs like install an IEC type plug.

I love the convenience of having the same cord power all your stuff.  This was pillaged from my parts Prophet 600.  It’s a cheap part but it saved me a drive pulling it.  Thursday I’ll get my drill and Dremel from my dads house (long story) and modify the panel.

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Any long task is accomplished in small increments.  A difficult task is accomplished by spending more time thinking about it than trying to do it.  A long difficult task… you get the idea.  The bender panel on this Juno 60 is frankly fucked up.  Let’s give it a clean.

Gold finger would love it.  Amazing thing is there were no screws securing the board or bender to the panel, it rattled around, but it worked.

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Synthesizers of this era relied on mechanical components to select and vary controls.  Toggles to switch between settings or switch them off, sliders and pots to vary resistance and incrementally change the magnitude of a filters effect/strength of amplification/rate of change etc and momentary switches to change logic states. This afternoon I removed and cleaned up all the momentary switches that control the wave forms, chorus settings, presets and write capabilities.  If this thing was a little cleaner I would have cleaned them on the boards, but as can be seen below, the boards are pretty dirty and removing them was only a few minutes work.

Pretty gross build-up on these switches and on the circuit board below them.  I pulled the middle switch the other day to see why it didn’t work -it was missing the little contact button.  There’s one of those Hitachi HD14051BP’s that are probably about to hit the endangered IC species list.

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The power supply board seemed like a nice place to start since it’s small, really dirty and needs a lot of attention. First order of business was making a sketch of which wire went where coming out of the transformer since I had to cut these wires to separate the transformer from the board.  I also took a bunch of detailed pictures of the plugs and wire bundles so I’d be able to plug everything back in when it’s time for reassembly.

I read with interest a post about Arp Omni sliders that described a process for cleaning them without removing them from the boards.  It involved washing the boards in Simple Green, rinsing them in distilled water and thoroughly drying them.  I did this on my Omni 2 and it came out great, so I used the same process on this power supply board.

Looks damn good now.  All the barf is gone.  The plug pins are all clean and shiny. 

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I come from a classic car background.  A project to me weighs 2000+ lbs.  While the comparison is not all that great from a tonnage view, they do require a similar approach and care to make sure it can be put back together.  This Juno 60 is pretty easy to deal with from a picking it up and moving it perspective, reasonable schematics are readily available and I have a complete, together, nearly-fully functional Juno 6 to look at if I get lost.  Even with all this reference material it makes sense to keep all the little bits separate, take lots of pictures like those below and make diagrams like the one below if you think it’s going to be confusing in a month/year when you go to put it back together.

Besides showing how gross it was inside this thing, this shows which connectors go where, zip tie placement for if you get really into putting it back to exactly how it was and other details.

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First order of business in an endeavor like this is to see if completion is possible, and if possible, financially responsible. Do not overlook this.  Imagine if I did all the work I propose to do, spent all the money on missing parts and all 12 of the $40 – $60 a pop voice/filter chips were bad.  That said, near as I can figure there are two parts you can’t readily buy or make yourself: IC’s IR3R01* and IR3109.  There may be other dear chips in this machine but it shares these two with the mighty I’m-gonna-have-to-get-me-one-someday Roland Jupiter 8.  If more than one of the combo of 12 of these chips is bad in your Juno 6/60, you might as well buy a parts machine or part out your machine.

How do you answer whether it’s a good idea to undertake the endeavor?  I looked my sad, sad synth over and compared a picture like this from eBay to mine.

Yer gonna have to click the more thing below to see!

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I have a soft spot for hard luck cases; a trait you will come to recognize in me if I can manage to keep this blog up.  Case in point is this Juno 60 that I bought off Craigslist today for what I consider a good price.

Tape is for ‘transport’ as there are no screws holding it together. Yes that’s a penny peeking out where the D key should be -had a decent jingle worth of change rattling around in it.

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