Baldwin organ model 236d goes crazy during play

[baldwin 46c]

i have a baldwin 236d organ that goes crazy and plays different settings by itself . for some reason during normal play after a while the organ unexpectadley starts playing several setting at once and jumps back and forward from one setting to another and i am forced to shut it down , has anybody any idea as to what is going on ? =-O

[jbird604]

Unfortunately, this could be the sign of impending death. Many Baldwins of this era are heavily afflicted with problems due to leaking capacitors on many or most of the numerous circuit boards that are in the big horizontal cage or board enclosure. If you pull a few boards out (being very careful to photograph and make notes about exactly how the wires are attached, and using extreme caution as you put it back into the socket), you may spot some of the leaking electrolytic caps, which are little radial caps that stand up on the boards. They may be 10 mfd, best I recall. But there are scads of them throughout the organ, and they will all eventually leak, causing all manner of malfunctions, even leading to board damage or possibly a stinky smoke rising out of the organ.

Of course it COULD be nothing of the kind. I'm not certain that EVERY Baldwin organ of that era was affected, but I have seen several of them, and tried to save a couple of them by repairing boards and/or sending boards to Robert Spoon, but to no avail, as the organ simply gave up the ghost.

[baldwin 46c]

hi ! thanks for the reply . you are right about the boards , i lifted the front panel and there is a horizontal row of boards ,it looks like a nightmare of wires and boards . just to locate or try to find the board with the leaky caps is in itself huge task , some caps may not show clear evidence of leakage ,
if i were to replace every cap on each board , would that solve the problem ?

[tucsondave]

Ahh, the world of Baldwin MCO. These organs were plagued with problems from the beginning. Baldwin tried to save money by using soldered-in pins to connect the circuits from each side of the boards instead of printed through holes. The solder connections eventually crack causing a variety of issues. The fix (maybe) was to resolder all those pins on each side of the boards which could mean over a hundred per board. The Four main microcomputer boards were most critical. Those were boards # 26, 27, 28, and 29. You could start with checking those for bad caps as jbird said.
Sometimes a board with bad solder connections could be located by slightly flexing it while the organ is on. The resulting effect would vary depending on the board.

Baldwin also used solid wire for interconnecting the boards which made the plugs prone to dislodge. The plugs had labels on them to match the pins but those labels tended to fall off.
Removing a board is easy, replacing it no so much. There is only one edge guide for the plug-in boards and it is easy to misalign them and damage the pins on the backplane board.
That board also had the soldered in feedthrough pins.

Another issue was the non-electrolytic capacitors on the orchestration boards.

td

[jbird604]

It's a pretty box, but I just don't think I'd ever be up to the task of re-flowing the solder on every single board and replacing every cap. Even if you only paid yourself minimum wage, you would probably put thousands of dollars worth of labor into it, and then it still might not work. TD recalls some of the issues that I had forgotten about. I do recall once that I sent about four crucial boards to Robert Spoon, as he thought if those were working we could probably figure out the rest. But even in that case, after spending several hundred dollars on the refurbishment of just four boards, there were so many other problems that we eventually gave up on it.

Just make a little desk out of the box or set potted plants on it and find a working organ on craigslist.

[baldwin 46c]

thanks guys ! i sure hate to use it as a flower pot ! as for finding another organ ! well i am tired of finding other organs , i now have about nine of them and each one was acquired because the previous one had problems , even when they seemed ok at the place of purchase ! they all decided to kick me in the ass after i took them home , the latest P.I.A is a HAMMOND H-100 with a series 10 TONE CABINET , the dammed thing just sounds horrible to my ears , THE PRE -SETS ARE THE WORST , they sound bloody horrible .
looks like i may end up having an ORGAN CEMETARY .

[RogerM]

looks like i may end up having an ORGAN CEMETARY .

Sounds like you already did!

[Silken Path]

Baldwin, I think you've just been unlucky, or you haven't been fixing them as they developed problems. (I need to move everything off my little Rodgers and clean all the connections again. It's started blopping off at random times. John jbird told me how to fix it, and it's a six-month ordeal.) Anyway, I have a M3 that just works, a Conn theater than just works, etc, etc. I also have a Thomas Triannon that I dragged to the edge of the woods and for which I am hoping for termites that like PLASTIC. Hmm... don't we have a forum member who is knowledgeable about H100s?

[you795a]

What about considering converting at least one of them to a VPO (virtual pipe organ)?

[baldwin 46c]

Or maybe i should have a giant organ cremation instead of an organ cemetery , who wants to attend an organ funeral ?

[jbird604]

Don't feel bad. My organ shop tends to accumulate old clunkers at an alarming rate. About once a year I have to rent a big truck-size dumpster and load it up with old organs that I've taken in because I thought I could fix them up for someone to have a "bargain" organ to play!

I'm about to decide that I should only be taking in organs that fall into a pretty small set of categories -- almost any digital Allen, fairly recent models from the other major church organ builders, and Hammond A, B, and C series organs. Almost everything else that I've taken in has either eventually hit the dumpster or else (if sold) created headaches for me.

Older Allen digitals (MOS and MOS2) are possibly the best bargains, as they often can be found for cheap or free, parts are often available cheap on ebay (as long as you understand the "codes" and such so that you don't buy parts that look right but wind up being incompatible with your model), and they were built like tanks, nearly indestructible. They can need serious renovation, power supply rebuilds, amplifiers worked over, speaker rebuilds, considerable routine maintenance, but they are fixable, while so many other organs from the same time period have become useless boat anchors and flower tables.

I'd add that older Rodgers organs, especially the analogs from the late 60's and early 70's, and the serial-keyed models from the 80's, can also be good bargains, though you have to be prepared to do some work on most of them, and there is always a small chance that some part you might need -- such as a CPU board for an 80's model -- will be difficult or impossible to find if it needs replacement. But the consoles are sturdy, keys and pedals are excellent, and they make great VPO bases.

You MIGHT get lucky and run across some old Baldwin or Conn or something like that, in good working order, that can make a good first organ. But you also run the risk of getting something that will have a fatal flaw, an engineering disaster, and not one bit of factory support to help you through it, and few if any techs still around who know anything about it.

[baldwin 46c]

thanks jbird , yes you are right about all you said , the newer more complex transistor or IC chips organs are the worst ones , they are prone to failure and a nightmare to figure out .
that is why i recentley acquired a hammond h-100 thinking the older organs would be easier to maintain or repair because they were less complex .
well i was wrong ! the h-100 turned out to be another giant P.I.A. . THE PARTS THAT WORK SOUND BLOODY HORRIBLE .

[Silken Path]

Baldwin, BobMann was the person I was thinking about. He's here on the forum and has a YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/user/bobmann107/videos

HE is knowledgeable about H100s.

[jbird604]

Unfortunately, the H-100 series have not endured nearly so well as the A, B, and C models. When the H was in production, Hammond was making an attempt at mimicking some of the sounds and features, bells and whistles and toy counters and such, that the competition was offering, while holding on to the tone wheel generators. The result is a mishmash of technologies and circuitry that probably worked well at the outset but has proven to be hard to maintain and harder still to repair once it starts to go down.

I have to wonder if out there somewhere there is someone who has successfully altered an old "H" to bypass all the quirky, tricky, troublesome circuitry that produces those unsatisfying percussions and stuff. The rest of the organ is probably not too bad. But I don't know if anyone has done this....

[baldwin 46c]

after i picked up the h-100 and had it for a while and gave it quite a few spins and many different trial settings i decided that i hated the sound , i just could not get it to sound right . as luck would have it , a short time later i came across an h-382 , i gave it a brief trial run at its location and it seemed ok , i purchased it for $150.00 canadian and took it home, and to my horror after a longer playing time trying all the settings it sounded no better then the h-100 and to boot it has a very noisy dual scanner and just as many quirks as the h-100 .

what a bummer ! mr. hammond ! i think i hate you !