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I recently picked up a beat up 1972 Stage at a garage sale. The pickups, tines, and tone bars are quite corroded, the tuning and voicing are a mess, but even so it still sounds pretty great. I have a 1979 Stage that I fixed up, so I was planing to do the same to this when I noticed a name stenciled in red: 'Buz Watson'. The name sounded funny enough to google it, and now I'm feeling a bit like a lottery winner.

I'm wondering now though if I should just keep my amateur hands off of it and take it down to Chicago for a professional refurbishment. I don't really plan on selling it right away, and would like to enjoy playing it in the meantime. Will I mess up Buz's work by installing new screws and grommets? How would I best preserve the resale value, while still fixing it up enough to enjoy playing it?

Where from comes the timbre? Is it in the tines? Tips? Tonebars?

Seriously though, I'd like to hear opinions on what the most important components are in imparting the different timbres found across the model years.

As in: would a 1980 mk2 bark like sparkle top if only you replaced the 'X's with 1969 'X's...

I was going to title this thread "Longtime Korg SV1 Owner Buys Rhodes, is Disappointed".

I recently picked up a 1979 mk1 Stage in good condition, it had been in long term storage. It had always been some kind of dream of mine to own a real rhodes, and while I thought the SV1 was an adequate stop-gap, I would never be truly satisfied until I had the real thing.

I had some awareness of the difference in timbre across the different model years, (my preferences are firmly on the older, darker, bark-ier side)though I didn't expect such a dramatic difference. In short I am not super keen on the clean, more bell like tone that the newer models produce, that my particular piano produces.

So far I have replaced all the grommets and screws, scraped off the factory shims and replaced them with slightly thinner pieces of solid wood, experimented with several voicing settings, and while I am able to get some of the nice dark, barking tones in the low and mid-range, the high end is still very chime-y.

I feel like the next step would be replacing the neoprene hammer tips with felt tips but I'm unsure if even this will give me the sound I am looking for. I read that even the tines from older models are different and contribute to that sound, though some argue not.

Any suggestions?