old junk
I love dealing with "broken" junk. Ryan came in to work today with a "broken" Clavia ddrum + that he bought for $20. So after he and I both decided that we couldn't possibly break it any further we took it apart to see what wasn't working.
Well, what wasn't working was a disconnected power supply connection (the likes of which we had never seen before), and a power cord with shredded ends. So - we figured what the heck... let's see what we can do. Let's start connecting some wires and see what happens.
So we decided to take out the proprietary power connector and solder a 1/4" Phono female connector to wires that would connect the power to the circuit board. Then we took the power plug's loose wires... hoped to heaven that blacks would match up between the 2 wires and soldered on a 1/4" phono male to the power.
Holy smokes! The darned thing works. And works well! I've not really listened to drum machines from the 80's recently - but this one's pretty neat in that you can tune the drums and change sounds pretty radically. (I wish this MT app had spell check in it!) :)
Anyways the thing went from "broke" to fixed in less than a few hours. Now I would never say that I actually KNOW how to fix anything electronic... but doing this and my iPod repair (maybe I'll write that up someday) I'm feeling way more confident in my own ability to trouble shoot simple problems.
I told Ryan I think I'm more excited about the thing working than he is... I know he gets to play with the drums, but I feel like I'm pretty cool managing to get "broke" to working.