My friend Ken Baird had a Yamaha CS10 sitting around forever collecting dust, mostly because the audio output was wrecked and several keys were broken. It worked alright, but was in sad shape. Thankfully the sliders, pots and keys all still worked as they were supposed to.
The biggest problem… The broken keys! Where to get them? I called Yamaha Canada service. “You know that’s 1977? We don’t have replacement keys for keyboards that far back, sorry.” Fair enough.
One of the folks at the KWARTZLAB mentioned that they had hauled in a discarded Yamaha Electone organ that was going to be stripped for parts for other projects. We wondered if the keys were compatible with this CS15. How lucky was that? They were! I stripped the keys off the organ.
The replacement keys went on beautifully. Next problem… the ruined output jack. I swear the keyboard was dropped on a 1/4″ cable end that was plugged into the back of the keyboard. The case was bent, the circuit board the output jack was mounted to was broken off from the rest of the board. Thankfully that didn’t ruin the functionality of the wiring. Worse yet, the nut the output jack was held on to the case with had been reefed on an angle so hard I had to cut it off with a dremel. The jack was toast.
I replaced the jack, rewired it into the keyboard, hammered out the back panel of the keyboard using a block of wood and a hammer, and remounted the new jack back in.
The keyboard then was blown clean of dust inside and out, cleaned from top to bottom, pots and sliders sprayed with pot lube, and everything reassembled. The keyboard is fully functional once again, and is actually looking quite decent now for its age.
