KIMBALL ORGAN SERVICE MANUAL MANUAL

Not that it’s necessarily low budget, but these organs are a dime a dozen (ok, a bit more than a dime) and usually every thrift store has one in various states of repair for sale. There’s even a company that replaces things with their own custom solutions at a price I’m sure I couldn’t afford. Looking on the web I found a number of people who have modified their electric organs by hacking the internals or gutting it out and providing their own solutions. What have others done to solve this problem? I give the original designers lots of credit. Engineering that in analog and discrete logic must have been a real monster. I’m estimating that there’s about 180 or so different switches that must be monitored and the organ must generate about 30 different effects. There are various volume and tempo sliders, 3 presets, other switches that generate special effects, including generating chords based on single keys, tremolo, vibrato, sustain, chorus, and a whole bunch of other things that I can only guess what effect they have on the overall sound since my electric organ doesn’t work so well. Along with that, there is a rhythm section that generates 14 different ‘beats’ from Waltz to Beguine and in between. The pedal board has 13 pedals (keys) and 6 stop switches.

KIMBALL ORGAN SERVICE MANUAL MANUAL

The lower manual has 52 keys and 10 stop switches. The upper manual has 52 keys and 23 stop switches (most are voices, a few are functionality). It was obviously built for repairability, with many boards on hinges for easy access, but only if I had the factory manuals, which I didn’t have (nor could get, even checked online auction sites) and the desire to begin troubleshooting, which I also didn’t have.įirst, defining the organ a bit more. Clearly, it would take more than some simple contact cleaning.

Whoa! There were what seemed to be tens of thousands of large circuit boards. Assuming that all it needed was a good cleaning, I grabbed a can of contact cleaner and took off the back. Across all the manuals, many of the stops (voices) didn’t work. The upper manual, however, had a mind of its own at any particular moment it was anyone’s guess as to whether it would work or not. The lower manual (keyboard) worked most of the time, sort of. Just so you know what I’m talking about, here’s a photo (borrowed from the web, will supply my own photo shortly). I had been given an old console organ, a Kimball Syntha Swinger 1100.

Kimball organ service manual