MF#25 Eminent Solina F225 vintage Organ Repair and Service
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- Опубліковано 4 чер 2014
- Repair of my Eminent Solina F225 vintage analog Organ, Service and a Look Inside
I have to buy most items myself to make these video's so any help would be greatly appreciated "become a Patreon" / markusfuller
Fantastic to see this, I worked for Eminent around 81/82👍🏻
Just the construction of this beauty is a small wonder of engineering. Everything just seems so well thought out, and it is obvious that it is built around being serviceable.
Thanks for this video, and for sharing what you love!
WOW! I've never seen so many boards and so many components in one instrument!
What a completely gorgeous instrument, it looks & sounds amazing!
I loved playing this organ, my grandparents had one and I’d played it since I was a child up until a few years ago before they died. It’s such a massive instrument I had nowhere for it at the time so couldn’t keep it when their house was sold in 2020.
In my childhood for a few years we had excactly a Solina F225! Beautiful strings and a a motherload of boards inside.
I found this beautiful video , because I 'm the owner of an F225 for a few weeks now. . In fact, I 've learned to just this organ when I was a 12 year old boy. After I leaved my parent's home, the F225 stood for a long time unused in in the basement. Now I have inherited the organ and did not have the heart to throw it away. So I have it transported more than 600 km to my home. There has to be repaired a cuple of things , especially the 7 keys left of the upper keyboard do not work properly...
First of all, I ordered today a can Servisol 10 ;-)
Greetings from Germany!
Hi Janspapa, If there are several notes together not working than thats a good sign as there may be a faulty component in the keying matrix (normally theres 12 notes grouped at a time) Im sure it is repairable. I love the Eminent Organ and would never part with it.
markusfuller
Hi Markus, thank you for your anwer. In fact the 8 keys (not 7) on the left make problems, the C and below ist not proper working. On most instruments you can only hear a very high tone that is very quiet.
Hi Sometimes the keying matrix is A to G# or in your case C# to C. Im not absolutely sure but you will find several boards in the centre facing outwards with a metal strip holding them in place. If you turn off the organ and swop these around and try the keys again you may shift the problem to another octave. if this is so then you can at least work out which board in the keying matrix has the problem and you are on your way to getting closer to the fault, I fixed an eminent grand 2000 a while back just by swopping keying boards around though i did not find the original fault as it must have been a bad dry joint and I must have knocked something back into place. but try and find which board has the problem or check the wiring and push/bend the boards under keys (gently) it may just be a bad connection. good luck and let me know how you get along please.
Janspapa plus.google.com/u/0/photos/yourphotos?pid=6106468904831003122&oid=110078145289199734146
On the diagramm of the upper manual and shiftregister board section you can see, that key 18 to key 25 are building a group. So it's no wonder, that these keys are all gone.
But where I've got to search...???
Good old fashioned electronics, great video and well presented,
Keep it up.
Apart from the Maplin 5600 you repaired, some time ago, this is, for me, the most complicated-looking beast you've opened and worked on. Very interesting!
Jason really makes that thing come alive!
Thanks for the look inside this beast!
I wasn't expecting it to have ICs. It's more modern than I thought. Some serious engineering there, especially for making it so serviceable.
Lovely video, lovely music at the end!
i had Eminent 310 Unique... a beast!... with christmas lightning... unfortunately it had the typical problems... and to sold it cause no knowledge of the egineering 😢... but when it worked.... that sound, its Orbitone.... through a Smallstone Phaser..... heaven!!
I watched couple of your old synth videos and insides of these machines look like Apollo era space ship computer boards.
Hi Markus,
Great video. I just finished restoring two Eminent Solinas and never really gave Eminent much thought as to what all they actually built. Very impressed with the build of these units and really neat to see these complex units that built. I don't believe the U.S market got too much from them except for the Arp distributed Solina. Thanks for the tour of this unit.
Best,
Jareth
We have an Eminent 2000 Grand Theatre to sell. If anyone is interested just get in touch, thank you.
hi! what is the combination of keys to reset to a factory setting this instrument?)
I recently found an Eminent DCS-325 church organ from the mid-90s in a charity shop which I bought for £100. I'd never heard of the make and didn't know they originally made theatre style organs as well! For 30-year-old tech it doesn't sound bad at all, but some friends are still saying I should convert it to Hauptwerk...
I'm dying for a bag of licorice all-sorts now! Brilliant video -- I'm no organ repair guy, but for whatever reason I was completely transfixed while watching this and couldn't look away. Your synth tear-downs are really cool, mate. :) Cheers from USA.
+Pete Kowalsky Same here....doing most of the stuff in-box (music wise), but these videos are just amazing :) Lovely!
omg that music in the end reminds me the 80's so nice ;D
Beautiful Organ! Ive always liked those Eminents..... They have a very nice tone...
Nice fixes, I must say, the contacts for the pedals look a bit flimsy.... But still nice!
Great Work!
this is so servicefriendly!
a dream for every Serviceman (or woman,of course)
Nice Organ,take care of it,but im sure you will.
greets from Germany..;)
What a monstruosity!! (in a good way lolol)
A pity how electronics change to something so tiny, less fixeable, less man-made.
Keep up the great videos!! enjoying all of them! :)
Loved the organ music ate the end thx m8
Loved this video, I love old organ/multi systems. I could have done with you a couple years ago when I had a Yamaha Electone from a charity shop. It had a nasty fag burn on a white lower keyboard key. I loved the tempo lights and all the lights that come on when you select things. The major problem I couldn't solve was after a few minutes of being on, when playing the audio would start to distort and fizzle out. My initial thought was the audio amp chip was overheating. It also had an undocumented mod on the right hand side of a toggle switch and 3 white square push buttons, not labelled but connected to an add-on board with a 5v regulator, a rom chip and a ram chip on it ( I googled the numbers on chips) I couldnt get the switches to do anything so I unplugged the power to the board hoping that would ease the issue with the audio, but no luck. After giving up I gave it to another charity shop and they said they knew someone who could mend it as he had experience with them.. Yeah .. I later found out he tinkered with it and managed to blow the thing up, literally he did something and it caught fire .. humph.. It also had a reverb spring in the bottom and I did the same thing you did and strummed it lol awesome sound. It is a real shame, it had no problems except the cosmetic burn, audio drop out and mystery buttons. Headphones worked fine. The audio amp was one of those vertical black rectangle jobs with about 12 legs on it. I probably could have gotten a replacement or even retro fitted a modern chip on a new board as it would only be L/R In, Power, L/R out and Headphone, Aux out but never got the chance. They are such big instruments though and I have such small rooms in my house it would be in the way mostly.
That must have been an incredable expensive piece of equipment, impressive
Impresionante, me recordó un antiguo reproductor de compact disc Technics de 1985, al abrir la tapa y ver multitud de placas electrónicas sólo para oir un CD. Un saludo amigos.
So important , fun, so cool. You are a walking university 🙂🙂🙂
Thank you very much :-)
i think you were having waay too much fun with this one :-)
Looking on picking up a B417 tomorrow. Not sure if the differences are tremendous, but will use this as a guideline.
Awesome videos Markusfuller! Thanks a lot. I used to live in the old Eminent factory so i bought one. I need to fix the ritm section. This will get me started but i hope i can manage to repair it. It seems a lot of eminent organs have broken down ritm sections.. :(
+GoJu Film Shame so many of them has gone to ruin over the years. in good working order they sound amazing.
+markusfuller all the switches sound great now again thanks to your video. tonight i'm opening the ritm's :D
Wonderful video, although I wouldn't like to be tasked with recapping this machine a few years down the line
P.S. I too have an autographed keyboard (Roland JD-XA - signed in silver fibre pen by Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran fame) which I won in a cheridee raffle. Best £10 I've ever spent on a raffle ticket.
This is really interesting - I'm happy to have stumbled across it 🙂
I'm keen to get an organ similar to this and there are LOADS going for cheap/free in my local area.
For transit purposes, do you know whether the top section generally separates from the upright speaker section (without too much meddling with or disruption of the circuitry)?
Colin Furze has mellowed a bit.
ah man, one of this is up for grabs free nearby here. But it's so HUGE I can probably never fit it in my car haha
Nice video.......complex vintage synth. How things change, when compared to the Roland Aria kit you stripped recently.
I agree but I kinda like the old vintage gear as theres always a better chance you can fix it at home.
Hi Markus,
As for 04:30, when i done this on my hammond X5 some of the old wires just broke....it takes me hours to rewire them, so just feel very lucky that your organ wires remain intact while moving the frame down and up....
Hi Yes it has been soldered well and I guess in time if opened it will start to become brittle on the solder joints.
It´s not an issue of the soldering or the solder joints. It has been the wires themself which causes these problems. These old wires become inflexible, the isolation and the copper itself, the last due to corrosion the first due to the loss of plasticizer...I had to spend hours of changing all these old wires.
Hi. thanks for a great video! I've got one of them myself and it's a great piece of old school musical gear but I'm having one problem with it. It keeps playing one note (Ab) as if one of the keys was stuck, yet none of them is, and every Ab I play just adds note on top of the one constantly playing. It only switches off when I turn off the Upper Manual section and the lower manual is on the black button setting. Have you got any idea what may be causing this problem? Otherwise the organ is fully functional :/
Hello Eryk Jan , sorry but I sold mine a long time ago and cannot honestly imagine where you would start to look to find where your problem is being caused. I think there is a large board with 12 or 13 chips in a row and they are part of the keying matrix. if you have an oscilloscope i would test the output pins of those chips and one of them will give a different reading that being the chip that controls that key which is on all the time. either the chip is faulty or the capacitor right next to it which will introduce noise etc into the chip and trick it thinking there is a signal from that key being activated. That is a wild guess but it is where i would start first.
I have a Solina B313 with a Rythmix 110 drum machine build in. I am always wondering if it is possible to take it out and make a stand alone drum machine out of it. Would that be possible? I don't have the knowledge to do that though :-) Love your videos!
Do you by chance know where the early push button switches for the solina SEIV can be found?
Sometimes the "candystriped" capacitors have a bad connection inside the "candy". I ones bought a very cheap Elka organ where the entire accompaniment system was dead because of a capacitor that had lost connection inside.
Hi organfairy . I recently repaired an old eminent for a friend and the candy stripes were just crumbling in my fingers. it was a very delicate repair and took me many hours but fortunately it all worked in the end :-) best wishes from Markus
Check the capacitance value on that candy capacitor. It might have a capacitive leak which would explain the extra time needed to get that part of the circuit working.
What a beast !
I know I should have had a shave before doing the video LOL
markusfuller
LOL, not you the organ silly :)
I wanted to try to fix some issues with my Lowrey Celebration organ. If you've ever seen one it's about twice the size of that Eminent of yours (probably around the same age - late 70s / early 80s?) I removed the back cover, took one look inside (it has kind of the same system of circuit boards attached to hinged metal frames) and decided it would be best to just leave it alone. First time I've ever been scared off to trying to fix something (which I usually do successfully) by the sheer terrifying complexity of the thing.
+Robert Kilbourne quite simple really - a can of gasoline and a match!
Wow, I wonder how many separate parts it takes to make one of those? Opening the back of that you'd definitely feel you got your monies worth.
Jep! If you do so, let say, on the MicroWave-II. You find a little PCB with a DSP on it, leaving 90% of the 2U rack mount case just plain and lonely empty....
Hi Yes when I opened it up I though OUCH I'm not going to be able to sort this out as there was so much to see. but it was simple fixes thankfully.
TubiCal
do you know where to get the instruction manual for this wonderful piece of magic?
The speakers were made by IREL in Genoa, Italy
Are schematics available for these? Where were they assembled, who did the hand soldering? Just curious.
Paul Howard Hi they were made in Holland/Netherlands . the schematics are online I'm sure. and the soldering is good quality done by Eminent themselves.
+markusfuller
dutch classix ,.5a10 years ago ,.. ya could pick them up , for nothing soo we did ;]] ,. had r 2 broke one / sold one 100 gld easy price ..
was drummachien modded sync in really simple
still have a yamaha c 35 / 55 analog cool organ 60ies , cool drum unit like korg minipops ,.. arpeggiaters tremelo / spring coil inside
[still as new ,.. cool looks from da cs50/ 60 / 80 '] cya
great video!! i have the same organ but i have a problem where it randomly pops and makes cracking noises out of nowhere. any idea what that could be? thanks!
Hi crackling noise and pops may be old capacitors breaking down and sadly is something that a lot of these old organs suffer from. I liked the eminent but had to give it to a charity shop as I needed the space. they sold it and it made them £350 which was surprisingly good.
@@markusfuller thanks for the quick reply! how do i replace it and what do i replace? feels like there are endless capacitors in there
@@markusfuller where should i start searching for a faulty capacitor?
@@markusfuller it sounds like it does at 14:40 but it happens without touching anything
@@markusfuller any ideas?
Hello Markusfuller, My friend get an Eminent Solina F225 as a present from her neigbour. However, it dosn't have the power cable. Could you please help us indicating which type of cable and how to install it? I will apreciate if you could provide this informaion.
Nossa 😲 quantas placas 😕 caramba 😯 é placa que não acaba mais ...o meu Grace não tem tantas placas assim não
How do you know which part is which on these complicated machines?
I do not know all the parts and every organ is a little different so I have to do a bit of guesswork everytime I get into an organ that i have never been inside before. i do a lot of google searching for information also but even that can be a challenge.
i have had the same one
I have a Eminent Solina P275 that I got for free. Great piece of gear, love it
Been trying to record it but the rec out isn’t working and headphone output is noisy.
There’s another output called “channel 3 direct amplifier” but it’s a din connector, can I just switch it to 1/4 connector ?
Don’t know exactly what’s coming out of this and what’s the difference with the rec out
obviously I can’t find any schematics online since it’s too niche 😅
If anyone knows anything would be greatly appreciated
Hello very education video of how an organ works. the shadows keyboard player cliff hall used a arp.solina. there's a video of the shadows in rotterdam part 1 Atlantis used strings do have a look it's after man of mistrey. I wonder if you can hear what settings cliff hall is using
awesome! my yamaha organ has an issue where the f key plays in a higher octave than it supposed to on every key...any suggestions?
+stealingroses There should be a set of 12 identicle looking small circuit boards and they are part of the keying matrix. it may be that the board that collects the F keypress is faulty. you can swop them around so if you change it with say Key F# then test if all the f# keys are one octave too high then thats the board you need to deal with. unfortunately I do not have my Eminent any longer so I cannot get inside and very what could be the problem other than the wild guess I just mentioned. Good luck.
+markusfuller thank you! I will give that a shot :)
Currently trying to fix one of these that has some strange faults, bass notes not working , even from the syncopator, and I noticed a strange veroboard installed inside which must be a DIY bodge of some sort.
Hi there!
Is there any manual available for this organ? - I couldn't find anything online...
sadly I could not find anything as in schematic diagrams.
@@markusfuller too sad, thank you anyway!
That could all fit on a single IC now days.
My father owned one of these, it was more in repair then making music...the welding on the circuit boards was done really bad... in the end i guess it broke his heart and he gave up on. Making music..
Two of the instruments on mine cause the pitch of the entire machine to drop about half a semitone if I select either of them, any ideas?
hi!) what is the combination of keys to reset to a factory setting this instrument?
there is no factory reset on this instrument.
@@markusfuller what about Solina f217-27?
That is like the bulb used on the Creed 744S Teletype
Good afternoon Mark. I have watched your Video on organ repair and I hope you can possible guide me to a point where I might find the problem to my Technics PCM G7. One day it was working the next day it was dead, meaning no sound coming from the speaker or the headphone jack.
As I stated before I have a Technics model G7 which I purchased in mid January this year from a Company going out of business but the organ, even though it had some problems, was working fairly well at the time of purchase. The Unit was a showroom model and from the condition of it, had never been sold. That is the main reason I secured it, hoping that I could get it fix by someone who knew how to do it. However, no one is available to tackle this so I am coming to you for guidance and help. When I press the power button, I get a popping sound, but not the correct one and every thing lights up when pressed or in the program set. I am 86 years young and I truly love the organ sound. If you know anyone in the Washington DC area who will tackle this problem for me, I would appreciate your giving me that lead. If not, let me know where to look for the answer to the problem, and even through my age is somewhat prohibited, my desire to get it working is young (greater). Any lead you can give me is and will be appreciated. My plan of attack to this problem was and is to change all of the capacitors first and then the diodes and any part that look like they are iffy, so the speak, and go to the program boards looking for cold solder joints, etc.
My name is Dan Lyles and I look forward to hearing from you.
Hello Dan. I do not know about the Technics PCM G7 as in I have never been inside one and do not know the board layouts etc. However if the organ lights up and you can press selection buttons and they light up then the problem may be just on the amplifier board. Have you opened it up yet and checked all the fuses as I’m guessing there will be some for the main organ and some for the amplifier, If they are all ok then I would see if there are any jack sockets on it for signal output left right and if so then maybe connect those up to a seperate amplifier of something that takes an audio input like a surround sound system or tv soundbar, do you have a multimeter so you can check if voltages are coming from the power supply to the organ ?. there may be a seperate power board where the mains goes in and then there will be several wires from that board to the organ and speaker amp, “I am only guessing here as I do not know the organ”. also check to see if any of the big capacitors have any slight bulges (domed) on the tops or any sign of fluid leakage. sadly I do not know anyone in your are that could tackle this fault for you and as you already know many organ engineers have retired or passed away especially in england but the one good thing is many of these organs used common off the shelf components except for a few custom chips so its probably repairable but finding the fault can be simple or take forever to find. I last fixed one about 5 years ago after another engineer repaired it but when he reassembled it a new fault appeared and it took me 2 weeks to find that one metal screw that he tightened too much was touching the board and shorting out part of the circuit. I too have retired and just enjoy playing my keyboards and organs now. If you can get the schematic diagram for your organ off the internet it may help to find out how many fuses there are and maybe the voltages to look out for from the main power supply board. I do hope you manage to get it up and running again. oh one more thing depending on the amplifier there may be a large chip that is attached to a heatsink which has pins along the bottom as in one edge if so that is one of those all in one amp chips that power the speakers and headphone outputs and i have had to change several of those over the years. if it does not have this large chip you may just have a few big transistors on heatsinks on the amp board that may need checking as you say you get a popping sound so something somewhere is working its way to the speakers but I cannot guess what it could be. I do hope you get it repaired as these organs are becoming an endangered species and need saving. contact me if you have any otter questions and I will try my best to help if I can. Best wishes.
@@markusfuller Thank you most sincerely Mark. Lord willing, I will follow your lead and examine that circuit very carefully. Thank you also for responding to my plea. I like you do not like throwing away a perfectly good piece of furniture (organ in this case) just because it doesn’t function as designed. Should I get it working I will first thank the Lord and then you next. Have a great and blessed weekend.
Mr Lyles
I just got one of these things today. Also in Sussex. Have you still got yours?
I gave mine away as I needed the space but it was a great organ.
12:19 Do I see a loose wire there?
Hello Jacques. yes there was a couple of those that are connected only on one end to a blank spot of the board. I could not figure out what they were for as connecting the other end to something would not make any difference because the soldered end led to nowhere ?. maybe they were used to tie wires into place. ?
Maybe they have been used as probes and have been forgotten after repair?
I just got a F219... And it's almost the same! xD It's strange why they did so much different type organ?
Got an F219 too. Have you had any luck finding a service manual or at least a user manual for it? Indeed it looks quite like the F225 one.
The thin wires connecting all the keys are insulated. I have a Gulbransen organ where there are miles of individual wires (copper) but they are ALL uninsulated. I am wondering how they can carry an electronic charge to a specific are when they are uninsulated, bound all together, but come from different parts of the circuit boards. Wouldn't the charge that's going through those wires get corrupted by touching all the other wires. Each cable between the circuit boards gathers together at least 50-60 strands of these copper wires. An idiot moving the organ cut the cable so I have to rejoin these. Anybody have an idea what to do?
please i buy one organ in reciclate trash and her use ci m259eb1an andm108b1, do you have share manual service have 2 CIS , thanks !! ( Obrigado!!! )
I am very sorry I no longer repair and have no service manuals now. my apologies.
Did I miss the felt part...?
Smell of vintage....me gusta....isn't it ;)
24v bulbs is easy to get. Used for trucks.
yes i should have realised that as I was a hgv driver many years ago. thanks for reminding me.
@@markusfuller I can understand you want to forget that life. I suffer from the same. Trying to forget..
What is "overtone"?
For 08:00 uuuh, that´s why i hate all these old "rotor emulators" that much....the fast rotation mode is most times so awful, in no way any match to the original mechanical rotor systems. It´s just heavy frequency modulation, while the mechanical rotors do 70% AM and 30% FM modulation, or 50/50 if you got the acoustical lenses on. In addition they do some comb filter modulation as well while they are spinnin´.
I would hate to see the cost of building something like that today...I mean with the same cabinetry and circuitry
This guy reminds me of Colin Furze
Who or what is "AM?"
what is the weight of this organ?
Too heavy, ours got stuck in a stairwell once...
hello markusfuller
Hello dear can u fix my cavendish organ please
i tought the string was making the actual sound. peculiar... a string sounded organ wuth a soundless string
An instrument this vintage needs every last electrolytic cap replaced, for starters.
if you help me I will help you and your channel. I have an older Baldwin Organ I go for free. It is a Hybrid. Tube and solid state model 73L If this helps you Diagnose. This organ features the Panoramic. ( A fancy looking 3-way switch) which does nothing that I can hear. The organ also has a Leslie that does work and quite well I think. I have just describing to help you Identify. The Panoramic I will fix later and for now it is not my main concern.
The issue is this:
when playing up and down the keyboard The Notes "C" and "F#" are octaval incorrect. example: play up the scale and when I come to the "C" if I play the previous lower "C" that seems to be right. my first thought was Okay Retune the tuning one octave down and it will fix problem. The problem there is that turn mechanism does not have that far perimeter, maybe 3-4 tones either way. And when it turned thats far , I felt it was starting to bind, any farther seem to risk damaging. So stopped. My next theory was incorrect wiring. On the inside, the electronics the keys I am presuming are connected to what I think are called tone generator boards, each board contains the electronics for two tones. The wires that I moved are indicated by Master Osc output signal, !st divider output signal, 2nd divider output signal, 3rd output signal, pedal trigger output. The wires that correlate to each tone are all the same color. In this case they were all blue. Doing this it seemed like I had gotten lucky because it seemed to fit the scale octave but only partial . I was still missing the lower octave???? So feel this is not my fix. I need to lower the entire group by one one octave. I do not know organ note processing theory. I am finding out there are majors difference between Manufactures.
I got this for free, its big and heavy , Its has more 12ax7's in one place that I have ever seen and I love this stuff and fixing things. But there is zero info out there. Ask any question you want that will help you or test you want me to perform and I do my my best, I own two multimeters and pretty good at soldering.
Looking forward to your response.
Ps Will post this on another on of your video's because I don't see your responses here.
AmIonArock Hello I cannot help you with this one. I only work on things that i know about and I have no data on the baldwin organs. plus I have been moving away from repairing keyboards as I am working on other projects that take up all my time. there are several facebook groups that are about people who repair keyboards etc try the vintage organ forum on facebook as there could be someone there who would know about the baldwin, certainly more than i do anyway. good luck i hope you get it fixed.
Thank you for your consideration , What ever direction your taking I wish you well
colinfurze of music
Those organ are on the side of the road, for 20 euro's on market places. it's a shame.... some people bring them to the garbage places .. its so painfull to see it. Eminent had a lot of work and research before they produced those solina series.
i find computers r a bit of a candidate,unable to acccess ,then they offer a choice that it still cant comit
They are very susceptible to static electricity
man a recapping nightmare !!!!!!
that foot switch springy wire slipped around the end of the L contact because it was bent. you should have bent it slightly back to center so it doesnt slip off and jam on again!
Hello dear can u fix my cavendish organ please