New (broken) pedal day!

[laurie]

This will be a winter project in a couple of months.

Dismantled it for a quick look - nothing obvious. No visible leaking caps, broken wires etc. Should be an interesting hunt for the fault.

[Pepe]

"Poor thing! But don't cry, beauty doctor Pepe is coming to the rescue."





Why do people treat a vintage MXR ten band graphic equalizer like this?!

Funny thing is that this is the third MXR pedal that I received this year. And all the years before I have never had any of them in my hands! Only a modern Dyna Comp in the music shop that I used to work in.

[laurie]

Wow! Looking forward to what it looks like after Dr. pepe works his magic...

[Pepe]

The power cord was replaced in a very amateurish way. The ground connection with the rubber grommet was not connected with the screw on the right side. The circuit board is bent because of the squeezed power wires.



Not looking too bad from this side of the board. Apart from the heavy amount of dirt in the faders. One of the connections to the jacks came off. MXR used very thin wires back then.



Cleaning the faders will be painful again, just like it was in the six band eq that I maintained a few weeks ago. The unit seems to be from 1978, so this is one of the oldest effect devices that I have had in all the years.

[laurie]

You need an air compressor....

[bigtone23]

Wow! That is quite the MXR project!

[Pepe]

Already finished! Pics will follow tomorrow. Cleaning the faders took almost a full hour. I used the whole afternoon and a good part of the evening to work on this EQ.

[Pepe]

"Well, my dear, the doctor wasn't able to save your face, but your rear end hasn't looked this good in ages!"





Again, this is how the power connection looked like, when I opened the box. I was really shocked to see this dilettantish job. Had the isolation broken, the non-grounded (!!!) chassis had been under power. Absolutely dangerous! It was a good idea not testing the unit before having a look inside it.



This is the current state. I used a power cord from a dead KORG PME-40X unit from the early '80s, so it remains a bit vintage. I didn't have another one at hand anyway. And I had a new strain relief in one of my spare part boxes. So now it looks like in the pictures of European models that I found in the internet. Fortunately the circuit board has bent back in the original even condition. And of course the chassis is now connected with the ground.



The equalizer is now fully working to the complete satisfaction of whoever wants to buy it off from me. At first I was surprised that it sounds completely different in comparison to its little brother, the six band graphic equalizer. But after seeing that the range of the other unit is +/-18dB, I stopped wondering why the ten band version with +/-12dB sounded much more tame. Not bad at all, but different and less drastic.

[laurie]

Nice!!

[fernieite]

Great job, Pepe!

Looks like it might have been a Canadian pedal, originally. (CSA sticker and French information)

What did you use to get all that tape residue off?