one dead-ish key ?

[jcase]

hey all - i'm trying to clean up a rhodes that is pretty great except that one key, has much lower volume than the keys around it. the hammer tip looks good. the gap between the pickup and the tine is, at least by eyeball, the same as the working keys...it is one pickup away from a clipped lead, apparently to alter the output impedance, but other keys are fine near the modification. do you guys have any suggestions as to what might be going on here ?

thx
jcase

[vicvega1972]

Take the tip of a screwdriver and gently tap the pickup in question. Then tap the adjacent pickups to see if the "click" you get is the same volume. If not, you know that the pickup is either dead or has a bad connection (cold joint). If you can safely rule out the pickup as the source of volume drop, then start to look at the hammer tip (grooves), damper felt (kissing the tine), the tine (either bent or need to be replaced), or even the tine tip (jagged edge).

My guess would be that there is a pickup issue though.

[mmy]

Most propably the pickup is dead, meaning that adjacent pickups are picking the "low" sound. The pickup iron core gets rusted in humid environment (garage, outdoor, etc) and the very thin copper coil can be broken .. closest rounds to the core. Remove the pickup. Take 2 pencils, attach the pickup to one pencil with sticky tape. Unwire the copper coil to the other pencil (drill or screw twister is great help here). After almost done, you will see that the wire was broken. Fix the broken wire and re wire it back round the core. 15 min and you are done.

Good luck
If you have multimeter, measure the coil first to avoid possible unnessary work.