Rhodes Chroma Polaris

Thanks..yeah...I know buttons fail :-).  But...I'm talking about ALL
of them.  Literally..every one has failed within a matter of hours
after working great ...completely great...for 20 years!  hehe.  Yeah I
know other people have a button or two fail here and there. 
But..let's do the odds calculation shall we?  I mean..the odds that
they all would fail the same day.... even two failing the same day
after none for that many years... you have to figure a 10 year fail
span over which the two buttons would fail probably at this age (ie 5
years one way or the other) so that's 3650 ish days for buttons to
fail and since there are 3650 different 'same day' occurance
possibilities and two 'floating' objects then it's simply 1 in 3650 of
this happening.  To have each successive switch fail on the same day
then it's just another 1 in 3650 of a common occurance with the pair,
the trio, and so on.  How many buttons? A - K, 1-12 and what 15 other
buttons?  soooo...odds of all the contacts actually failing on the
same day.... you realize...this is one of the most unlikely odds
scenarios EVER recorded to occur..in human history. Correct? :-) 
3650^37th I think!!!

Yet..what am I to think?  ALl of the ribbons look perfect. Like I
say..continuity all the way down to the flat on every line!   I
seriously..believe this thing should be in a 'freak occurance museum'
someplace. hehe.  I mean just the membrane panel.  Give me another one
and I'll take the chroma polaris for my contribution :-)

But I'd say much more likely..somehow there is a weak point under the
panel somewhere and all the data lines severed somehow.  Even though
I..never pulled or anything on anything that should have done that..ahem..

Well, thust he title.  Anyway glad at least I got the thing to where
it can be played again.  I fixed up the key movement which has needed
it since I got it.  Some of the notes needed to be hit pretty good to
trigger them.  Washering the up on a few of them took care of that. 
Black keys seem more prone to have problems on these movements which
are a modification of the polysix type movement for velocity sensing
with concentric ring conductive rubber contact cups.

Anyway yeah I wouldn't be surprised if something got latched in
software when I was messing around with the broken panel on the left.
 I'll have to read all the manual on the sequencer.  I've never used
that.  Thanks.
-Bob
--- In chromapolaris@yahoogroups.com, "Benjamin Kuris" <Bkuris@...> wrote:
>
> I have had failed membrane buttons (not ribbon cable) on 1 of my
> polaris keyboards.  I've described the fix on this group-- drilling
> panel and replacing w/pushbutton switchs.  It is a time consuming
> process, a drill press and hot-tweezer wire stripper are highly
> recommended.
> 
> Sometimes the honk happens from sequencer events-- I would check the
> manual and make sure it is truned off.
> 
> -Ben
>