Nothing much, now... I actually got a manual from a guy in the US. I don't want to spam someone else's commercial stuff, but if anyone wants I will pass on his eBay username. I'm pretty reasonably happy with the price (about £30 all in, once you convert from USD) and the manual is indeed a real genuine Akai manual in a real genuine Akai plastic wrapper and not a shoddy photocopy. 2700 feedback responses with 99.87% positive obviously earned ;-)
Anyway, the display was gubbed. Someone had snipped the ribbon cable right at the display. I re-crimped it back on (IDC connector soldered to the LCD) but broke a small through-hole resistor in doing so. A bit of guesswork and I found a 10K resistor got it going - but only if I added my own contrast pot since the one on the back of the unit has been smashed to pieces. Dear knows how, but the pot spindle was rattling around loose inside!
The choruser was stuck on. I had visions of needing to track down faults in the PIO chips (what, a weird, single-bit-stuck fault? Could be...) but it turned out that the chorus and jack board was cracked, right across. A bit of scraping and bridging and it was good as new.
Finally it had a couple of sticky keys, so I removed the contact PCBs and gave the rubber (concentric conductive rings for the velocity-sensitive keyboard) and PCB a good scrub with IPA. They're all working fine now. I stripped the keys off and gave them a wash, and they feel all nice and clean.
Now all I need to do is give the rest of the case a good clean, devise some way to reattach the spot-welded standoffs that hold the control panel PCB to the top cover - JB Weld probably, don't want to burn the paint with real welding ;-) - and make u p new end panels. One of the plastic panels is smashed, and the other is cracked. I will probably just hack up a bit of old Ikea shelf to construct wooden sides, because wooden sides are teh awsum.
Author
Topic: Akai AX73 service manual? (Read 12071 times)