206A restoration

[adcurtin]

I just bought a 206A in pretty rough shape. I probably paid too much for it, but oh well; it was the cheapest I've seen. Every other wurly I've seen near me was around $1000.

Anyway, someone tried to chop this, and did a pretty terrible job. They didn't take the 2 difficult screws out, they just broke them. The also chipped out the wood bottom a bit. I didn't get any part of the base, so this has no speakers. There is also no power cable or power connector. I have the plastic piece that the receptacle plugs in to, but not more than that. The action is quite rough and needs a bit of work. There was a cap the came loose from the amp, but the cap was still with it (thankfully). There's no faceplate or knobs either. The top has a hole in it and a decent scratch. Also, there was a broken connector from the bottom of the action up to the damper was broken. One more thing: the 3 highest hammers hit the metal bar and didn't return fully to their rest position. The worst part is the keys and keybed. It looks like there's a little water damage to them. some of the keys stuck pretty pretty well, most of them were the bushings on the front, the felt was peeling off and bent over. Luckily the keybed doesn't seem to be distorted much if at all, and the keys don't seem to be swelled up, so when I'm done with everything I'll see if I need to replace this.

What I've done so far is to solder the cap back in, cut off the plastic connector and temporarily connect a standard power cord connector (from a computer), and find a random speaker and hook it up. The electronics work, which is pretty much the saving grace of buying this. There was some hum, but it's a grounding and shielding issue (I put the metal cover on top of the dampers and a lot of it goes away). There's also a high pitched whine, but that might've been partly the speaker. I swapped out the random crappy speaker I first chose with an old 5inch subwoofer, it sounds great. I also heated up the 3 hammers with a blow dryer and moved them so they no longer hit the metal bar.

next, what I plan to do:
1. build a new bottom case, prime and paint it. Pretty much completely replace the original one (but I'm not gonna just throw it away).
2. The top cover is yellow, and not very pretty. I'm gonna fill the scratches and the hole, and dye it either red or black (leaning toward red, but I have to see how it looks).
3. I got some action lubricant, bushing lubricant, and one new action piece from vintage vibe to replace the broken one; I was going to just do it myself, but finding the screw would be hard, and getting the felt bushing right would be hard, so the $12 was a better option. So I'm going to take all the actions out and lubricate them.
4. I'm going to throughly clean whatever parts I can get to that need it, like the mount for the amp board and the top case.
5. The keys are yellowed, so I'm gonna try some retr0brite on them, which should return them to their original white.

With all of this done, I'm going to see if I can live with the keys the way they are, or if I'm gonna need to redo the bushings. I called a couple piano repair places, and most told me they don't work on electric pianos (sorry guys, this is pretty much the same as an acoustic piano for the that you'd be fixing. The repair guys were old and I didn't want to try to explain this to them). Anyway, the one quote I got was something like $425 to fix the bushings. That's not really worth it, especially with keys that are a little damaged. If I do have to fix the bushings, I'm gonna get the kit from vintage vibe and do it myself. If I don't think the keys are close to perfect when I'm done, then I will probably eventually replace the keybed and the keys. However, being in college and not having a ton of money to spend, that will have to wait for now.

Once I have all the repairs done and I can see how well it plays, I probably want to add vibrato. $56 for a few passives seems really steep to me, is there a parts list and a board diagram I can use to do it myself?

Also, I don't have any speakers. Can I just use any 4x8s? Can I get mounts to mount them to the metal piece the amp is on?
I'd rather not modify the top case if I don't have to.

Lastly, does anyone have any suggestions for other repairs or different ways to do what I plan on doing?

I'm out of town and away from my wurly for another couple days, but I can post pictures when I get back. If there are any specific pics that would help (probably the keybed would be one), let me know.

Cheers,
Andrew

[pianotuner steveo]

As a piano tech that works on eps as well, my educated guess for the reason why most piano techs do not want to work on Wurlis is because they do not want to be reponsible for the electronics if they accidentally damage something.  The other thing I have experienced is that most tuners do not understand the appeal of these and they think of them as "junk" so they do not want to be bothered.

Just mention the brand Wurlitzer to most piano tuners, and they roll their eyes....