Repairing silicon rubber membrane contacts; Installation instructions

Bob Weigel of http://www.sounddoctorin.com documents his contact repair invention. (for more details and a .pdf that gives better visuals on the details, go to http://sounddoctorin.com/synthtec/parts/key.htm#polycontacts ) A material created for NASA is backed with 3M adhesive and cut into disks the size of typical Panasonic, Fatar, Roland and casio contacts (or close enough to work :-). ) Other companies have offered paint which often doesn't work and then you have a bunch of paint with a rough surface stuck to your contact. Not to mention it goes bad in 72 hours and you're out 40 bucks or so. These disks have a great look and I'm sure probably a long shelf life under normal conditions. So you can keep them ready to go and just use them as needed. We can cut the material to do the concentric ring contacts found in K1000 series Kurzweils, Kawai K1, K1II, K3 and K4, Akai AX80, Fender Chroma Polaris and SCI Multi-Trak I believe also. But so far these seem to clean up every time I deal with them. So we have some spares. However I've run into several Polysix's that simply would not clean up. And some Fatar types in Peavey DPM3 as I recall. So these should work in Korg Polysix, Poly61, Poly61M, DW6000, Peavey DPM2, DPM3, DPM3SE, DPM SI, Kurzweil K2000, Roland JUNO-6, JUNO-60, JUNO-106, Alpha JUNO-1, Alpha JUNO-2, JX-3P, JX-8P, JX-10, D5, D10, D20, D50, D70, U20, Rhodes 660, 760, MK60, MK60 and the other RD series keyboards and a host of others. Moog Memorymoog, Oberheim OB-8, Matrix 12 I believe and many others. Seiko DS series keyboards I believe also. FURTHERMORE these work GREAT repairing buttons that press against contact traces on circuit boards (Siel DK80 for example which I did the other day. DK series use spring contacts I believe though on all of them.)

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Rubber
• Membrane
• switch
• contact
• repair
• carbon
• silicon
• rubber
• replacement
• substitute
• substitution

[danielortizdecaracas]

thanks a lot, please repeat all procedure video, but taking to close captiions zoom in in your aproach of this materials and zoom in in cuts parts

[sounddoctorin]

@danielortizdecaracas Rather just go to the sounddoctorin site listed in the info and look at the .pdf. it's a lot better really.

[danielortizdecaracas]

hi mr thanks a lot for you video, this method is valid for kawai k11?

[sounddoctorin]

@danielortizdecaracas I assume it has the rubber contacts. I'm not SURE if they are concentric ring or not though. Some Kawai's were. If so you'd have to cut your own 'ring' part. You could sharpen the ends of tubing to make a cutter or something and do it probably but GENERALLY those clean up so I've had no reason to try yet.

[quint9000]

I had an OB8 in for calibration. None of the keys worked. The customer doesn't care because he midis it. You can't calibrate it unless the first octave of keys work. I ohmed out the contacts and found they were ranging from 15k to 100k each. With my decade box I found that if you get above 5k you can't trigger a note. No amount of cleaning will fix these contacts. I'm going to try your solution.

Quint

[sounddoctorin]

@quint9000 Hi Quint, yeah that's way out of bounds. Exactly. Moreover if the surfaces measure over 700 ohms or so you won't usually get CONSISTENT performance due to the non-ideal nature of things at the interface there. In practice if you are getting 2000 ohms laying probes on the surface the contact is useless except as a button to increment or something. There will usually be at least a delayed response or sporadic contact.

[stormyandcold]

Thanks Bob, I purchased 2 packs of the Nasa pads for my Juno D and redid all the keys (122 contacts) works great and like new now. Recommended product A+++

[sounddoctorin]

@Ni5ei That's great to hear! Probably because on this particular keyboard Roland has had a lot of problems. (like I say if under warranty just get it replaced!!) I deal mostly in 'no longer in stock' items of that nature where it's part of a scrap out of what sometimes would be an otherwise ok but cosmetically ganked unit or something. So to make it play out I have to charge more like 10 bucks a strip or so depending on length. I usually figure 1.50 per contact on vintage ones.

[Ni5ei]

@souddoctorin Thanks for the replies. Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy I came across this video and your method is great! If I ever need to restore a vintage keyboard with these rubber switches I will immediately order from you. But I'm repairing a Juno D at the moment and got a reply from Roland today about the strips. Roland usually charge very reasonable prices for spare parts and the 5 strips needed for the Juno D cost me €15.95 (less than $22) including shipping.

[sounddoctorin]

@Ni5ei PS I imagine they charge at least 5 a piece but probably more like 10? So it'd be maybe about the same I don't know. Whatever the case my contacts are likely better than original material at least so no great loss for people who have done it already.