I was in Washington, D.C. visiting my cousin and her husband. Her husband and I went to his band practice to hack around. During practice, I noticed a familiar set of keys lurking under a pile of old newspapers on the floor. I pulled it out to find a Yamaha SK15. I’d been looking for a parts machine for my SK50D for some time in case anything went wrong. This looked pretty abused, so I purchased it from the fellow who owned it. Let’s just say I horribly overpaid. I should have inspected it MUCH more before buying it. I think I would have offered him $20 for it instead of what I paid.
I took it home and hooked it up. For the most part it worked, but all the sliders and switches had definitely been corroded or dirty for some time. The machine looked like it had been soaked in water as well. OK, surprisingly it still worked minus a few switches. Good for parts. Here’s a picture of it on the top of my A-Frame in the studio.
I took it to KWARTZLAB and opened it up to see what parts it had inside. HORROR!!!! OK, besides the water damage, the parts were incompatible with my SK50D. Word to those with SK50D’s… you need SK20’s and 30’s for parts. I sat there in amazement looking at the inside of this keyboard and wondered how the heck this keyboard still functioned! Yamaha built these things like tanks. That simple.
Out came the cleaning equipment. Scraping, cleaning, spraying the circuit boards with cleaner to get them proper again. For the most part I pulled the keyboard pieces apart, cleaned them and put them back together again.
A few of the switches for the keyboard sections didn’t work anymore, but at this point, I decided this was as far as I’d restore this keyboard. In the end, I sold it at a loss, informed the buyer about the condition and current state. Aside from the few switches that didn’t work to turn off the individual sections of the keyboard output, everything else worked. Since the volume pots for the sections still worked, there was still control over outputs, so all was not lost. Lesson learned – if you see water damage outside, it’s probably worse on the inside. The next question is whether you can fix it. This keyboard was salvageable even it looked horrible under the hood.
