Repairing Liquid Damage on a Roland JP-8000

I took a broken Roland JP-8000 synthesiser from my client’s studio in Sussex to the Logarhythm workshop in North London to receive specialist repair attention by electronics expert Matt Intalekt.

The top octave of the keyboard wasn’t working, so Matt took the synth apart to investigate. On visual inspection of the circuit boards, we could see that the particular board which registered the key presses had corrosion damage. This was almost certainly caused by liquid getting into the unit. You can see the damage to the tracking in the left-hand side of the picture below:

Matt’s solution to repairing this board was to rebuild the damaged tracking with tiny jumper leads between the components on the board. He started by removing the damaged areas and exposing the copper tracking with a small fibreglass brush.

Matt then used magnification equipment to trace the circuit board connections and work out what was routed where on the board. He soldered tiny jumper cables to rebuild the connections.

While this was taking place, Zuzana from the Logarhythm team cleaned the graphite pads that make connection to the circuit board.

Once the board was repaired and the pads were cleaned, Matt put the synth partially back together for testing.

Only two keys not working. Matt worked out which connections were the problem and labelled them. He took the board back out of the synth and made alterations to his jumper leads connections.

After further testing, the synth was restored with a fully working keyboard. This particular job took 3 hours in total and the cost for the client was £210.

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