JOHN: My name is John, here at Deltronics in Chicago.

As you can see, it's kind of like a submarine. Some of it is parts, some old stuff, junk but mainly this is all stuff that's either estimated or waiting to be estimated.

This is keyboard world where we have a tall stash of customer units and junkers.

GRETCHEN HASSE: Where do you get your parts?

JOHN: Mainly the manufacturer. For stuff that's no longer available, scrap units, Internet. The Internet's a great place to find parts because there's a lot of people selling either junk units or parting out units so but mainly for the newer stuff and the stuff that's still available from the manufacturer, we just get it straight from them. These are a lot of the manufactured parts or old stuff. We try to stock as much as possible but real estate in the city's pretty high. And so this mainly is all transistors, capacitors, and odds and ends.

Fender Rhodes 73. I overhauled this one not too long ago, I want to say some time this year, and it came back and it's got a really crazy buzz. I'm just trying to figure out if it's in the preamp or it's in the amp, and it's in the amp. I mean obviously you take care of the common problems mainly the capacitors; all the old caps in these things need to be replaced. They all go bad and they cause problems so I just take care of those. There are some resistors that commonly go bad and need to replace those, and once you get tot that point and you're still having problems and you break out a scope and a meter and start troubleshooting.

Before, when the thing was in here, I had already taken care of all that other stuff, and the problem that it's having is a very strange problem. Now I'm just putting back together the preamp because I know that the problem is not in there. With like the Rhodes and the Wurlys, the most common thing is that people would work on and they don't know what they're doing, and they end them up screwing them up pretty bad.

The only other thing that happens is that age-related stuff like open pickups, broken tines, broken reeds, aged components, you know, they need to be replaced. These things were engineered great. They're bulletproof. As long as they were taken care of or as long as somebody's not tinkering around with the screwdriver and screwing things up. That was the case with this one. It's one of the earlier Rhodes I think from '68, and every single aspect of every single key was screwed up. I mean you have different things that need to be all in the right spot, the escapement, the tone bars, the pickups. This is how you tune them with the little spring down here. These are just the tuning of each of the tines. If you push them further out, it gets flatter. If you push them farther in, it gets sharper, so I just want to have them right in the center.

If you want to mess around with it, just make sure that you know what condition it was in before you messed around with it and what condition it's in after you messed around with it and try to get it as good as possible, and if you don't know what you're doing, either grab the manual, read it, figure it out, or have someone else take care of it for you. Make sure that there's no rust, no dead animals, rat feces. Make sure it's relatively clean and, you know, everything else, as long as it's in pretty good visual shape, then everything else is repairable.

Usually, they're all really, you know, dusty and dirty. You'll see dust bunnies all over the place but this one is in great shape. Sometimes, these things will come in where all the tone bars are rusted. Every single tine is rusted, like the pickups start to corrode and they turn different colors.

I was working on an old Roland synth a couple of months ago, and it had a power supply problem, so looking at the power supply, I see this little thing sticking out, you know, a little brown thing sticking out from underneath there, and I pull the power supply out, and it was a little lizard. He's whole and he's sitting right up there. He was stuck underneath the power supply and that's where the problem was.

As long as it's in pretty good shape and it's not, you know, rusted like all these tone bars, you can't get them anymore, and people pull them out and lose them. I think these things go for probably about 100 bucks a piece now, so when you calculate that out, it's just not worth it, so just try to make sure that everything's intact and, you know, electronically, if it looks fine, it's probably repairable, but if it's under water, it’s no go. Lizards, fixable. Water, no.