Pimp My Moog, pt. 3

With the taste of success still on my lips (or was it lacquer thinner?) I decided the next step in the Minimoog restoration would be a bit bolder. The Minimoog and I had reached a special stage in our relationship; I was one of the few lucky guys to have had a peek under her hood, so to speak. Now I wasn't so afraid to turn her around, brandish my tool, and poke around inside of her. And eventually I got around to doing some repairs as well (nyuk, nyuk).

So I set my sights on one of the other minor issues I wanted to fix: the power cord. Obviously Backbone is a band that rocked pretty hard on stage, and nowhere was it more evident than the Minimoog's tattered power cord.

As you can see, the cord was torn and taped up right were it goes in to the synth. Also Backbone managed to rock so hard, the ground prong came right out of the plug. That's just the awesome effect of Backbone. And sure, the synth worked just fine with the cord like that. It could have even been an advantage to not have a ground prong on the plug - what if Backbone was rocking a stadium that only had two-prong outlets? But I just couldn't bear it. It felt like the cord was neutered at one end and just broken at the other end. So this was my next project.

Inside the synth, the power supply to the electronics is all on the left hand side, near where the power cord comes out. A couple of circuit boards block a clear view of the wiring, but fortunately the boards are connected via sockets, and easily removed. It looked like this:

The power cord has three wires: black, white and green. The black wire (the "hot" wire) is connected to the bottom of a fuse holder on the right. The fuse holder is connected to a brown wire, which leads to the transformer (the silver box on the left). The white ("neutral") wire is connected to part of the power switch. The green wire (the ground) leads to one of the screws that hold the transformer in place. I made sure I didn't get any of that mixed up. I didn't want to fry the synth.

I used a 10' computer power cord (I had to lop off the female end) to replace the original one. The operation was actually pretty simple, and it afforded me the opportunity to use my soldering iron, which I haven't touched in a while. I love the smell of melted solder rosin. The above picture is of the completed operation, from the inside. Here's the outside:

Probably the biggest challenge (which I realize now is really simple) was figuring out how the strain relief came out. That's the black plastic bit that wraps around the cord as it comes out of the synth. In the end it just needed some perseverance with needle-nose pliers, squeezing from underneath. As you can see, the new cord fit snugly into the strain relief, and eventually it all got put into place.