Re: Advise anyone?

["Bruce A. Wahler" <bwahler@tiac.net>]

MAX8223@aol.com wrote:
> 
> I hate to tell you this but we chucked 3 Farfisa compact Duo's in the
> dumpster last year. Same problem you are having, hard to service, hard to get
> manuals, hard to get parts. They were pretty nice instruments, I bought 2 new
> in 1967 and 1969. It was very popluar then to run them thru a Leslie 147 with
> the combo pre-amp. It didn't sound like a Hammond but it didn't weigh as much
> either.
> 
> Good luck.

I did a bit of repair on Farfisa and Vox equipment (which was related 
in the early days through the manufacturer, Crucianelli -- spelling???) 
I had a number of years back.  Here's what I remember:

VERRRRY hard to service, especially the tone generators!  Each note 
(C, C#, D, etc.) had its own tone board.  They used transistor-pair 
circuits for the octave dividers, and the pairs have to be GERMANIUM 
transistors, and very closely matched, to work.  I tried replacing a 
couple of bad transistors myself, and I never got the tone card to work 
again, even with multiple substitutions.  At that time, Vox had an 
exchange program for bad cards, and some kind of test jig to match the 
parts in their repair shop; I'm sure they're LONG out of that business. 
 Your best approach seems to be the "parts car" method; if one of your 
organs is missing, say, C# notes in some ocataves, find a working C# 
card in the other units, and mix and match until they work again.  Use 
the same approach for the other octaves.

As a last resort, I got this address and phone number from the Keyboard 
Mag site:

        Farfisa (distributed by Comus, Spa.)
        Viale Don Bosco 35
        62018 Portenza
        Picena, Italy
        voice   39-73-388-5217
        fax     39-73-388-5240

I have NO idea if English will get you very far!

Good luck ....

-BW