Feeling Tacky

Today on the bench is a familiar fellow, the Yamaha FB-01. When we last saw this happy little black box it was suffering from a shorted capacitato, which I fixed on video.

At the time I noticed that the tact switches were a bit iffy, but the ones used in the FB-01 are a slightly peculiar 2-pin rectangular switch that I didn't have replacements for. I ordered a pack of them, but they took a week or two to show up, so I set the box aside and didn't really think about it.

Until now, that is.

So let's dig in.

I think the front panel might be removable without pulling off the top case, but it's only 6 extra screws so not really a big deal.

Disassembling the front panel, we find my favourite thing: a broken screw standoff.

Oh goodie. Well let's glue that together with some superglue so it can fail to bond even slightly.

I'm sure it'll be fine.

[Narrator: it was not fine]

Moving on, the button panel PCB comes out quite easily.

And on the flip side we can see that they didn't exactly spend a lot of time laying out these traces.

If it works, it works I guess.

Desoldering went smoothly.

As did soldering in the new switches.

And for the grand reveal, did the super glue stick?

Of course not.

But no worries, I'll just apply some more and then screw everything back together before I notice that it didn't stick again.

I'm sure it's probably fine.

If I Had A Nickel For Every Time

I got a few new bits of gear added to the pile recently, and both were half-rack modules, both produced no sound, and both, curiously, suffered from a shorted aluminum electrolytic capacitor which is a very unusual failure mode.

First up, the Boss RRV-10 Reverb. This reverb unit has a delightfully crunchy 12 bit sound to the echo signal which makes it honestly kind of an amazing effect. But it won't do me any good if it's dead, so it needs some fixin'.

Next is the Yamaha FB-01, which is a 4-operator FM sound module. It's mostly notable for the SolBass preset, but it has some other nice sounds in it. Or, at least, it would have other nice sounds if it wasn't just spitting out nothing but hum and noise. So it gets some fixin' too.

You might be wondering why it looks like the FB-01 has a black hole on its surface. The reason is pretty simple: at some point someone decided that it needed to have a sticker, and then at some later point someone decided that it needed to not have a sticker. That latter person scrubbed pretty hard to get the sticker and its residue off, and left a bit of a ring in the paint.

I hit it with some car polish and got it looking a lot better.

The remaining ring is much less visible but still there, and I can't really fully get rid of it without polishing the whole case to a high shine, which would look kind of out-of-place, so I'm leaving it like this.

I did at least take off some grime while I was doing that polish.

So that's a nice bonus.