For many people getting these
old organs repaired, or even finding someone interested in having a go
at repairing them can be quite difficult.
The main problem is the time
taken to find the faults, it's not the replacement parts that add cost.
It can take 3 to 4 hours to locate a fault that gets fixed with a blob
of solder. Naturally many repair shops don't want this type of job.
Another problem, with the organs being so old they are prone to additional failures or things not working right when reassembled. Many time I have cured a fault, reassembled the organ which can be very time consuming, only to discover something else has gone faulty. Not that I've been clumsy in reassembly but simply moving these old circuit boards brings new problems to light. It doesn't take many of these problems to increase time spent curing them quite dramatically. Again something a repair shop doesn't want.
In the case of the Farfisa, I have spent just so much time fixing it, from a commercial point of view, it's not worth it, dump the organ.
The good news is I have now experience of both the Farfisa and Continentals that I can effectively repair them. Usually the oscillators fail, I have people send me just the faulty oscillator and I repair that. I have now done this on numerous occasions from organs world-wide.
I have in the past tried to explain using emails on how to fix oscillator boards but this usually leads to frustration on both sides. The best I can offer is to describe the usual faults, then you decide if to seek out a local repair shop or send them to me. What I need first is a photo of the oscillator board, as there seems to be so many versions. One version in particular cannot easily be repaired if at all, alternative plan required.
The usual fault is notes from
the same musical pitch either don't drop an octave or fail to make a noise.
Using the example of musical note C, what happens is, the oscillator generates
a tone one octave above top C, that gets divided by 2 to give top C, that
gets dived by 2 to give the next C down and so on. Should one divider fail
all subsequent notes go faulty.
If two oscillator boards go faulty
some C notes may be fault but also some A notes will be faulty too.
All you need to do is identify
which oscillators are faulty, remove the board and send to me for repair.