My Monomachine stopped working one day, it was working well the day before then the next day when I turned it on it became stuck in a boot loop, powering on booting up, shutting down again and again. I was panicking because other than Elektron themselves I’ve never heard of anyone repairing “vintage” Elektron machines. So I cracked open a beer steadied my hands and cracked open the Monomachine, it was a harrowing experience just opening the fucker but once I got it completely apart I checked everything I could with my very limited knowledge of electronics, while doing so I reseated all the cables and noticed once of them was slightly popped off. I carefully closed it all back up and that was that it was running perfectly again. I later realized that the cable coming loose was the result of the screw length of an after market 2 tier stand I had bought for the Monomachine and MachinedrumUW, I always put the MnM in the 2nd tier and when I was about to put it back in the stand with the knowledge of what the insides of the MnM looks like I found that the bottom right screw lined up almost exactly with that cable and was slightly too long.
I documented the whole opening it up process in some of my early posts on this board.
2nd to that was when I traded a broken Korg polysix for a Roland sh101 (in red!) when I got the 101 it was disgusting, it had weird black gunk all over it and several of the keys didn’t make sounds. I cleaned the whole thing, opened it up and cleaned the key contacts they all triggered perfectly after that and under all that goo was an absolutely Mint condition 101, I don’t know what the gunk was but it didn’t damage anything it ended up looking (and working) like museum quality.
I’m sure the guy that I traded with had a good fixer upper story about the polysix too because although the battery had opened and leaked onto the board (as they all do) the amount of battery acid that’s was on the board was super minimal, there was one very small contact that needed to be soldered but at the time I knew nothing about soldering. But in the end both of us ended up with a damn fine trade.
A sad fixer upper story is my damned Alesis Ion, which one day just didn’t power on, similar to the MnM the Ion was working perfectly once day then the next day it wasn’t, nothing happened to it I just powered it down the day before and then went to power it on the next day and it never woke up. I opened it up completely, cleaned anything that needed cleaning, reseated all the cables, I even tracked down the schematics to see if there was something wrong that I could see but to no avail. It’s a shame too because the Ion has a special place in my heart as it was one of the first synths I saved up to buy back in the day when they first came out.
I still have it in the hopes that I can save it one day or maybe scavenge it for parts if I ever happen across another one for sale that needs keys or a screen or something.
That’s about it though, I’ve bought and sold synths since the early 2000a vintage and modern and have only ran into a few repair issues.
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