New forum member says hello

[HappyTinkerer]

Hello Forum,
After reading for a while I had decided to join this forum and asked for admittance and here I am.

Thank you to the forum hosts and members for all the valuable information that has been gathered here over the years.

I am from Europe and a proud owner of a Rhodes Mark II 73 Stage Piano built in 1981.
I aquired this piano in 2015 and had started restoring it immediately.
The Tolex had been badly torn, the lid was missing, and because of that, the piano was very dirty inside.

I had
- taken it apart,
- cleaned it,
- renewed the Tolex cover with black Fender Tolex,
- renewed all damper felts (VV set)
- renewed the hammer tips (VV graded set)
- renewed part of the grommets and screws (I did not like the fact that the VV screws were thicker than the originals and therefore stopped this)
- renewed the pedestal felt (felt from a Portugese seller who is no longer in business)
- pickups were all working but some had been replaced/rewound.
At that time I did not have the tools and facilities to make a lid so I postponed that "to later".

Sadly, the Tolex detached again after a few weeks at the overlapping areas which really frustrated me and because "new adventures" lay ahead, I added the Rhodes to my stock of "uncompleted projects".

In February, I "restarted" the project.

Since then, I built a lid, renewed the Tolex, upgraded the hammer tips to VV's new graded set (which is very nice) and other things. I am not finished yet!

I will try to add new information for some of the topics I had been working on. This will include product reviews.

While working on my Rhodes and learning about intonation, I figured the best way to listen to the Rhodes for this task was through my Harman Kardon HiFi amplifier and a pair of headphones.

As the output level of the Rhodes Stage Piano is too low to really drive the line-in input of the HK well, I decided to upgrade to a built-in preamp (with tremolo/vibrato as a very desirable option).

I will also report about my search for a preamp, my pick and the disappointment with the purchased preamp.

Spoiler: I am currently implementing my own preamp which is basically a copy of the late Janus with knobs.