Hi all...so glad to have my polaris back on line. I worked on another
guy's and did the repair on his badly cracked ribbon cable interfaces.
I do very precise, structurally sound modifications that hopefully
are a permanent fix (so far so good out of the half a dozen I've done ish)

Anyway after getting his done I found there was, as opposed to some
funky notes in the prestine movement as he had thought....a half dead
oscillator chip :-(. The only guy I've found that has them so far is
offended that I noted that his prices seemed high (eg asking 1800
EUROS some months back when they were almost double the dollar, for an
OB8 and that kind of thing) and that he might want to include pics of
the stuff so that people don't think he's a scammer or something since
I'd not seen him post in sdiy before. Hehe...so he tells me he has
the chips and shows me a pic of 20 or them or something...then when I
inquire starts pulling the 'oh I dunno..I'm the one you called a
scammer' thing. Well I didn't call him a scammer. In fact I was
quite cordial and was just trying to give helpful hints so he could
move those nice machines (crud he had everything..accoring to the
list. CS80, JP8, Chroma, T8, P5, OBXa and OB8 etc. etc. etc.)

Anyway..if anyone knows a source that doesn't have someone like this
behind them...it'd be great to get one.

NOW...here's what I found out on mine. (clip from a letter to the
owner of the other polaris)======

ALSO...last night I decided, while things were set up for polaris..to
get mine on the bench again. That..thing. It had ya know the two
ribbons I repaired on the left panel, all ok. And it appeared that my
two were in pretty good shape for the right panel. HOwever I tried
something I hadn't tried. I figured some goop adhesive might help add
strength so they don't break in the future. Instead it reacted some
with them and caused the big 8 pin one to bend at one point quite a
bit. The 5 pin one though looked totally ok still. WHen I saw that
NONE of those panel swithes on the right worked now, I checked all 8
of the pins on that side and they were total continuity right down to
the front panel! So I figured 'uhhhh..must be something else'. It
wasn't easy to check the others because I would have to strip
insulation with a solvent. In doing that last night though..all 5
were broken on the one that looked good! Ohhh crummmbb!
Unbelievable. What are the odds of that? Well better than the odds
that something else happened as I thought about it. I actually was so
confused I forgot I didn't even check that side. It was so deceptive.

SO anyway I did both of mine too and it's all up and running good
again! Now I can record 'virtual fame' a song I wrote with that
machine for my internet theme album :-) -Bob