This Blog is to document the overhaulings of this old Rodgers Organ I bought.


Dears,

I found this organ on eBay. Its owner deceased last year and the family wanted to get rid of it. So, put it on a trailer and drove it from the Black Forrest to my place. The intention is to repair what needs to be repaired and give it a second life as MIDI frontend for GrandOrgue.

Things that need to get mended are:

- The felts in the pedalboard were gone
- The lower manual needs to be replaced
- Some of the bulbs need to be replaced
- The sound generator is outdated
- The smell ....

I worked myself through the Internet to understand what the efforts are and the risk to get it done. The 520/530 models did not get good reviews being built in Italy and positioned by Roland at the lower end of budgets. At a first glance, yes, some details are not that rock solid as you would expect.

Pedal Board

The pedalboard is only equipped with rear flat metal springs and not with the additional wire springs in the front as you know from church organs. The semitones are wood/plastic hybrids and the keys are rather light weight compared to regular organ pedal boards. After replacing the worn out felts, playability is okay and sufficient for practicing at home.

The real downside is, that they use micro switches and rubber dampers to operate the switches. The switches have a limited lifetime and are hard to replace in the pcb they are in. The switches themselves are rather easy to get spares, a pcb replacement should be close to impossible. Currently, all switches do work. But, at some point in time they will need to get replaced with contactless magnetic switches.

Keyboards

The manuals are made from two Fatar TP/8L. Fatar is still producing those, but it is very difficult to find a dealer as they only sell B2B. After removing the top lid and the roll-cover you can remove four screws beneath the manuals. After removing two further screws behind the front panel, you can lift the upper manual+front panel and the lower manual for service.

The problem with the lower manual I have is, that the action simulation is worn out.


In the picture you can see the rubber domes that tend to break at the most used keys C5-C6. The mat with the domes is specific to this keyboard. The more regular available TP/6x model uses different ones. An annoying and loud clicking noise comes from debris and dirt that crawls under the rubber contact. Rubbing them gently or replacing/cleaning the contact after dis-assembling the keyboard helps. As it is 20+ years old, I decided to replace it, disassemble and clean the old one and use the good parts for later repairs. The Keyboard is still in transit, will post if it works.

To be continued ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
New Sound through old speakers The main reason buying it was, that the Rogers 5xx feature a Midi Interface and do have an Aux-in. So, you can replace the outdated tone generator with a contemporary software sampler. If you go for the high budget variant, simply buy Hauptwerk and you are done. I tried the Basic demo and the integration of the organ works perfectly out of the box. Using GrandOrgue you have to to invest far more time, but far less money. If you are new to the subject, please go here for more info and how to get this great piece of software. There are quite a some free sample sets available in the net, most outstanding those from Piotr Grabowski and his collection of very well sounding instruments. The target for me was now to integrate the entire organ front-end (pedal, manuals, stops, volume control, crescendo ..) into the UI of Grandorgue. Step one was to disconnect the manuals and pedal form the internal tone generator. The most easy way to do this, is to s
Read more

LED Upgrade

Image
Replacing the original bulbs with LEDs An obvious issue of the organ is that all controls and indicators are done with light bulbs and that those have a limited life time. When buying a 20+ year old instrument you can expect that the bulbs will burn out having reached the end of their life at some point in time. All bulbs are accessible, so theoretically there should be no problem replacing them. But, the types that were used are impossible to get - at least where I live. Rogers is using so-called fuse-bulbs that look like 30mm micro-fusees, but, instead of the standard 6x30mm those are 5x20mm. Scanning through the forums, Rodgers is rumored to still provide those, but availability seems to be an issue. There are two different types used in the 520/25/30/35. Stop tab switches and indicators use a 12V/1W type, the bulbs for the pedal board are 12V/3W. There are about 60 lamps in the entre instruments consuming roughly 70W peak. That is quite a lot for an aging power supply. So,
Read more