> From: Max <sndgroom@...>
>
> I own my Polaris since mid 90s, I remember when I bought it
> to have no idea of what it was, i only knew it was the little
> brother of the Chroma a friend had and that had impressed me
> so much. For many years it has been my favorite synth, after
> a flooding it occurred more than 15 years ago my unit
> unfortunately died . Brought to a synth repair center in
> Italy, the diagnose was that the synth had the switch panel
> failure, but the repair cost was too high as it needed a
> dedicated panel, well ok...
> It remained in the synths Hades, until yesterday, when once
> installed the new panels (thanks Paul!) the synth returned to
> a new life. Following the polarisserviceadjustmentscheckout
> instructions, I made it playable again, it now keeps the
> tuning well and it doesn't slowly transform sounds in a
> bubbling mess. The problem is that all sliders are still
> unresponsive and as soon as i touch them, data are jumping
> abruptly from a value to the other.
> While testing, I noticed that R45 doesn't seems to affect the
> master LED behavior, adjusting it the LED remains OFF. If I
> touch the MASTER slider instead, the LED turns ON and it
> turns OFF if I place the slider in the MID position (this
> looks strange to me).
> Apart this, the only problem I found in the tests is the
> voltage at P3 pin1, where I find 2.86v instead 3v.

As long as the CPU is running, P3-1 is okay, it's just a logic level reset line.

If the instrument got flooded, it's almost certain that the sliders are full of crud. There were two different sliders used in different versons. If you have the small white body ones, you can buy replacements here:

https://syntaur.com/rhodes_polaris.html

but they're expensive. If you have the larger yellowish metal ones, they're harder to find.

You should first try repairing them, though. If you carefully unsolder them, you can take them apart and clean the wiper contacts and tracks with Q-tips and alcohol, then put them back together and reinstall them. While they're open, you should also make sure the wiper contacts are straight, which you can usually fix with sharp tweezers. I've had pretty good luck with this, but you might not be able to get all of them working. But better to have to replace a couple of them than all of them.

--

Ciao, Paul D. DeRocco
Paul mailto:pderocco@...