The Weird One

The 80s were a hell of a decade, and right in the middle Boss came out with their micro-rack series. Most of the effects were pretty standard: reverbs, delays, compressors, phasers, flangers etc. But when it came to the delay effects (and there were multiple of them), they went a little bit wild. The most peculiar of the bunch was definitely the Boss RSD-10 sampler delay, which incorporated some features of a delay and some features of a sampler.

Naturally I wanted to play with one myself, and so...

Now as luck would have it, this is actually the second RSD-10 I bought. I had originally found a unit in good condition selling out of Italy for a pretty reasonable price, even factoring the shipping. I figured I likely wouldn't see one come up again any time soon, so I jumped on it. Wouldn't you know it, but a few days later one showed up in the US as broken for half the price. Due to the shipping time, the broken one actually showed up first, and I already had it fixed by the time that the good one arrived.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with two of them, but I suppose I'll figure something out.

I'm A Model, You Know What I Mean

This slab of silver is the Korg Z1. It's a physical modelling synthesizer that attempts (with a reasonable amount of success) to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments by, as the name suggests, modelling the physics of how they produce sound.

Despite being a late 1990s digital synth, the demand for this beast is still quite strong and they generally go for anywhere from $500 to $1000. Naturally I didn't pay $500 to $1000 for mine. Instead I only paid about $230. Well, ¥35,000 to be exact. Plus about $300 shipping to get it here from Japan.

Now you might say that this adds up to between $500 and $1000, but keep in mind that it costs about $250 to ship something like this across the US too, so I still came out well ahead.

How did I manage to score this discount, you ask? Well the auction listing clearly stated that two of the keys were stuck down. In fact, here's the photo from the auction:

I wonder what could cause that?

A mystery to be sure.

That doesn't mean that I'm home free in terms of repairs, though. This is still a mid-90s digital synth, which means we'll need to inspect it for capacitor and battery leakage before squirting a bunch of angry electrons into it.

The auction listing says it spent 20 years sitting in a closet, and yeah, that looks about right. The capacitors are all pristine. But how about that battery?

No leakage at least, but are there any electrons left inside?

Hmm, I'm gonna call this a "no".

Since this battery is soldered in, I'll need access to the back of the PCB, so out comes a few more screws.

Then I slurp the solder out and the battery comes free nice and easy. Time to give it the send-off it deserves.

Since I don't feel like keeping a supply of solder-tab batteries around, and since I don't like soldering batteries, I'll be installing a battery holder instead.

This style with the wires is really nice because you can install it in any PCB regardless of what footprint the battery uses. As long as the wires reach, you can just go ahead and solder it in. Like this.

And then a little square of velcro keeps it from rattling around loose.

So now we have a healthy 3.3v to keep the preset RAM saved when the synth is powered off.

So the board goes back in place.

And it's time for the moment of truth.

Well I guess Korg doesn't know how to spell "zed" but I'll give them a pass. Just this once.

Very Effective

So I'd like to make a blog post about how I purchased a Boss RE-50 half-rack effects unit for the low-low price of "for parts or repair" and then brought it back to life through a careful application of my skill and ingenuity.

I'd like to make that post, but I can't. This is because the Boss RE-50 half-rack effects unit that I purchased for the low-low price of "for parts or repair" wasn't actually broken at all. It was filthy, so I cleaned it up, but so far as I can tell it's working just fine.

It did need a new RAM battery installed (which was, conveniently, socketed rather than soldered down) and I still need to get the correct 12VAC power supply for it, but I was able to power it up by injecting some voltage directly into the regulator and it worked just fine. I even traced the power right back to the input jack and nothing at all was amiss.

It's days like this that I wonder what's become of humanity. It used to be you could trust a random eBay seller to deliver on their promise of sending you a non-working device. Who knew that they'd play the ole switcheroo and send me a working one instead? So disappointing.

The Great Fluffening Part 10

When we last left off, I had just upgraded my tool arsenal with some foam cutting jigsaw blades. I'm happy to report that these have been working remarkably well. So well, in fact, that I've managed to finally get all of the insulation panels installed.

This was also helped a great deal by the T-square that I finally got around to purchasing.

I really should have got this from the start, but live and learn I guess.

Speaking of learning things, I learned that my head gets really sweaty when I'm at the top of a ladder. I think it must be because I'm afraid of heights, since there's simply no other logical explanation for it.

But I managed to persevere, and, as I mentioned above, the insulation panels are all in place. Let's take a moment to bask in their insulating glory.

The moment of basking is over, work will resume immediately.

Specifically, the work of putting up the strapping. At some point in the far distant future I expect this strapping will be holding up some drywall, but in the more immediate present it's going to keep the insulation panels from falling out, since a few of them aren't an especially snug fit and the tape won't hold them forever.

First up, the diagonals along the valley.

Followed by filling in across the joists.

The pneumatic nail gun is really pulling its weight here.

Continuing across the top, it's more of the same, though on a 19.2 center instead of the 16 inch centers, because this section of ceiling happened to be about 40 inches across so it divided more evenly that way.

If you recognize this strapping from a few years ago, you've got a good eye. It's actually the strapping that used to be (barely) holding up the vinyl siding that used to be on the front of my house. Naturally I wouldn't throw away some perfectly good crappy wood, and that decision paid off handsomely today.

Of course there isn't nearly enough of it to do the whole ceiling so I'll need to get about 30 more boards to wrap things up, give or take, but I at least had enough to get things started.

Synth Dentistry

Since I had my MG-1 out recently it reminded me that I never went through and freshened up the keys. They uh... they needed it.

Step 1 is 1000 grit wet sanding to knock down any raised burrs and scuff out any light scratches. It's not going to get down to the deep scratches but that's not really the point.

And while we're at it, I'll toss them into a bucket of borax to clean off all the hand cheese.

Round 2 is 2000 grit wet sanding. This evens out the scratches from the 1000 grit and gets the surface ready for buffing.

And then, of course, the buffing.

This electric buffer has been a fantastic investment.

So there's a few deep scratches left, but they're very difficult to actually feel and you don't notice them much through the shine unless you're getting up close and looking for them.

It's safe to say that both the look and feel of this keyboard have been hugely improved by this procedure.

A Sequence of Unfortunate Events

Back when I picked up my Boss RRV-10 reverb unit, it came bundled together as a lot with a Korg SQ-1, which was also nonfunctional. I found this a bit peculiar because the Korg SQ-1 really doesn't show up as broken all that often, since there really isn't much inside of it to break. It's pretty much a microcontroller with some knobs and buttons and some in and out ports.

When I opened up the unit to do my initial diagnosis, though, things got a little weird.

Working backwards, I think what probably happened was that the sync-in jack failed and caused the issue I saw near the end of this video where the sequence would stay stuck and wouldn't advance. Someone then started poking around inside and said to themselves "I guess if the sequencer isn't moving, then that means the clock is broken" and used all three of their braincells to tear the crystal clean off the board. After their failed bodge prevented the sequencer from booting up, they likely assumed they had completely destroyed the device and decided to get rid of it.

Well, out of the ashes of their failure rises the phoenix of my triumph, I guess. Time to toss this box into the "fixed" pile.

Back in Black

A while back I got a carbon steel frying pan, and it's been serving me quite well. However, when I initially seasoned it I ended up with some uneven spots, and having the seasoning go on a bit too thick in places tends to result in it flaking off in those spots later, and that's what's been happening.

I was hoping the season would build back up in those areas just from regular use, but that largely hasn't been the case. But it's not a big deal since we can just start over.

It's apparently common to boil vinegar in the pan to strip off an old layer of seasoning, so let's start with that.

Except actually that's slow as fuck so let's boil some borax and water to break up the old polymerized oil that forms the seasoning layer.

This just leaves a caked-on carbon soot behind which is easy to scrape off.

Some of the spots were a bit stubborn, but that's nothing that a little mechanical agitation can't loosen up.

Now that's a clean starting point!

As the final preparation step, we'll pour that vinegar back in that we started with and boil it up to etch the surface of the steel.

You can tell it's working because the vinegar dissolving the surface layer of iron will leave behind a haze of carbon soot that easily wipes away.

So now we're prepped and ready for re-seasoning.

This time I used the technique where you heat up the pan dry and then use a paper towel to brush on just the lightest coat of oil, and repeat the procedure a few times. This avoids the oil's natural tendency to withdraw into pools that dry too thick.

Now that's a nice even layer of seasoning!