As some of you know, I was given a mint Kawai SR6 a few months back, and I'm loving it! Back to the late 80's in sounds and the way I play it. However, as with all digital organs that old, you do take a chance on something major failing. So I was delighted to be given a second mint SR6 as a back up. With nowhere to put it, I opted to gut it and keep all the parts as spares, ensuring that the rest was properly recycled.
Well I did the dismantling yesterday and got a spooky surprise. No, it wasn't haunted, but as I removed the main audio mixer board, I thought to myself, "There's some non standard wiring here that I recognise." This was MY old SR6, from 1989. My local engineer and I did some modifications to add a stereo audio input and there was our handiwork! And in the bench was a letter from me, that I'd written to the new owner, along with the extra owner's manual that I'd written for her previous 3 manual Kawai, the DX900!
What are the chances of that happening, eh?
Anyway, though it's against my usual nature to gut a perfectly working organ, all attempts to sell it had failed and it was either dismantling for parts, or landfill for the whole thing. As it is, I now have the entire innards in sealed boxes in the loft, apart from two 'surround sound' speakers that refused to budge. The parts have 'come home' and the rest gets recycled this morning. And the T400 Hammond replaced by the SR6 has been further stripped by those needing some bits and pieces, not much left in there now, just the TWG and some tabs. I think that's a good enough result.
Thanks should go to the Friends of the Rye Wurlitzer and their Wurlitzer Academy, for the donation of the organ and to Bournes Removals in Rye for storing the organ for me, supplying me with tea during the 5-hour job of dismantling, and for arranging the recycling.