Yamaha DX-21
This time I wanted to show you the repair — or rather the restoration — of my instrument, which I bought recently. The repair was unusual because it required some mechanical work. The very clever seller packed this delicate and heavy instrument in thin cardboard, like a shoebox, and the rest of the damage was done by the courier company (DPD — I don’t recommend them, second bad experience). One of the plastic side panels was broken (shattered).
There were no used replacement parts available online, but maybe that was for the best. I glued the broken panel back together, filled the missing pieces with epoxy resin, reinforced the structure, sanded everything, and finally painted it with a special textured and durable plastic paint. In my opinion, the result is great! As part of the servicing, I also replaced:
- all panel switches,
- all electrolytic capacitors in the audio path,
- 3 slider potentiometers,
- the original LCD display (no backlight) with a compatible OLED.
As you can see, the result exceeded my expectations. Interestingly, the OLED I used isn’t fully compatible with the well-known Hitachi HD44780 controller and wouldn’t initialize properly in other instruments — but in this one it worked without any problem. Clearly, the timing in this synth’s software is more flexible.
