Hopefully I can do more videos at this level if people are interested, they just take a long time to make - I was trying to have this finished by Christmas, and look at how well that worked.
The song during the cleaning/restoration part of the video is a cover of “Forging the Beast” from the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack for Mandy, which I made entirely on the PT-10. Not very creative of me, I know, but hopefully it proves my point that you can really make great stuff with the PT-10. Definitely check out the film and the rest of the soundtrack, I’m a big fan.
I decided to not go into that much detail about how I did the actual restoration and instead went for a more cinematic sequence, but if you care about that sort of stuff, here you go:
I used a contact cleaner (CRC contact cleaner, I think from Walmart) to spray down the board and clean all the contacts. I used paper towels to wipe off some of the gunk and then used a toothbrush with isopropyl alcohol to clean the board some more. I used a toothbrush and warm water and soap for the key mech and the case, as well as the rubber switch domes and buttons. To remove the tape gunk I used a combination of a toothbrush, water, and and isopropyl. For the slide switches (the main culprit) I used the contact cleaner again, and then after that didn’t work 100% I used a fine file and some very high grit sandpaper (1000+) to expose fresh metal on the contacts. I also removed the 6V power jack and replaced it with a 3.5mm line output jack, just hot-glued in place. If you do this note that you need to bridge some of the pads to complete the power circuit once the 6V jack is gone.
Below are some resources that I used for making the video.
Link to sample folder: goo.gl/kVMK1H
Link to VST Zampler: goo.gl/nhwfep
The 8-bit keys video on the VL-1: goo.gl/lMrKja
Info on the PT-series and similar keyboards: goo.gl/hcaQid
Link to 3D-printable battery door replacement: goo.gl/uuR52a