Hey guys, I figured I’d post about my most recent project, repairing my old MIDI keyboard. I bought my keystation on reverb a couple years ago for a great value but it came with several damaged keys/contacts. After playing it for two years and even more keys going out I decided it was time to tear into it. Removing the housing was fairly easy, removing the keys was simple but tedious.
As expected, it was filthy under the keybed.
After giving it a good cleaning, I removed some of the rubber contact pads which I assumed were the point of failure. To my surprise, there was no corrosion on the contacts and only a few of the pads showed signs of damage. I believe they were actually damaged when I removed them. I replaced some of the bad sections with new pads.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that many of the black silicone pads on the hammer mechanisms had cut/gouges, correlating to the sticky keys that had issues with their hammer/return action. I couldn’t understand how those pads being damaged would prevent the keys from returning so i decided to rule out the contacts as the issue first. After reconnecting the ribbon cables and hooking it up to a synth I pressed each of the contacts and all of them worked just fine. I decided to reassemble the keybed to see if it would still work. During this process I realized that some of the keys had had broken “clips” where they made contact with the hammer mechanism, the shape of the clips also matched the gouges in the pads.
After checking syntaur it seems that the pads aren’t sold standalone and require buying the entire hammer, which are $5 each, out of the question when there’s over 20 that are bad. After putting some keys back on it seemed that the torn pads weren’t a major issue as long as I didn’t use the broken keys on them. I was able to strategically place the broken keys in one zone at the highest octave. This worked quite well and now instead of having a dozen or so bad keys spaced randomly, there’s only a few bad ones off to the side. After putting it all back together, it’s actually playable and the cleaning reduced a lot of friction as well. I’ll probably repeat the process and do a full repair once I source some new keys. Syntaur is the only site that seems to sell them and their prices are pretty steep. I’m considering 3d printing as an option, It seems like it would be tricky but doable.
