electrical help

February 27, 2008 12:08 PM

Basic Electronics Repair Filter: I recently purchased a used Korg ES-1 and after a few months the power started to randomly cut out... turns out the power pin on the mainboard has come loose.

Stupidly, I tried to repair this myself. I've no experience with soldering or electronics repair, but it didn't look too hard... a simple contact had come loose where the ac adapter plugged into the machine. I watched a couple of youtube videos on soldering basics (ha!) and gave it a go.

As soon as I plugged it in, a small stream of smoke came up from my solder point, and I immediately unplugged it again. It was plugged in for maybe 2 seconds. Someone said it's possible that the positive and negative points had solder connecting them, which may be what was causing the smoking.

So... is this salvageable? If so, what sort of business or person would I bring this to? A general household electrician? Some sort of VCR repair type place?

posted by Espoo2 to technology (5 comments total)

A good music shop will be able to fix it.
posted by bigmusic at 12:13 PM on February 27

I don't think it's a big problem if you shorted something out and plugged it in for a few seconds. At most, you burned out some power component, which a repair shop should be able to replace. Are you sure the smoke came exactly from the solder point, or some component near the solder point?
posted by Krrrlson at 12:30 PM on February 27

Does the ES-1 use a wall wart?

Other than that, find a good music shop, especially ones that repairs synths (as they'll probably be more equipped to repair something like this rather than a shop that mainly has experience with amps/guitars).
posted by drezdn at 12:45 PM on February 27

Yeah, it uses a wall wart.

I'm calling around to a few places now. They seem to think they'd be able to fix it... I just didn't want to go into a place with this fried box and come out $50 poorer and them not be able to repair it.
posted by Espoo2 at 1:01 PM on February 27

Never pay a repair shop before they've repaired an item.
posted by bigmusic at 1:38 PM on February 27