![]() ![]() Levelled a few low-lying keys by adjusting the key springs. I’ll tackle that sometime when I’m feeling brave.) Tuned it using a chromatic guitar tuner. ![]() (It’s got one broken key contact, which means one key is missing the 8 foot tone - which really isn’t very noticeable when several drawbars are pulled. Within a few days, I re-soldered a handful of broken wires, which restored all but one of the missing tones. I figured it might be fixable, pulled out my credit card and carted it home.īy the end of that evening, much of it was functioning beautifully. I had cleaned the contacts (mostly by playing, but a few stubborn tones required a little work with a pipe cleaner and some contact cleaner), cleaned the drawbar contacts and cleaned and adjusted the bias pots, For a week or so, it seemed like I had to fiddle with the pots of a few notes every day, but after that, they just seemed to settle in. ![]() I started fiddling with a few bias pots, and could hear the tones returning, note by note. So I backed away from the door, and asked the clerk to remove the orange top. Now, the Continental secret is that you can sometimes bring a seemingly dead UK or Italian Connie back to life by slowly and patiently turning the bias pots on each of the 12 tone generator cards. When hitting the start switch fails to produce any tones, they assume it’s not working and price it accordingly. (The Hammond buyers’ secret, for the uninitiated, is that most thrift shops and people who inherit Grandpa’s Hammond haven’t figured out that there is a sequence of flipping the Start and Run switches that makes a tonewheel Hammond spring to life. But then, I remembered the Vox equivalent of the “Hammond buyers’ secret.” So, I offered the guy the $399 starting price from the auction. But I figured that if I could get it cheap enough, I could at least sell some parts to recover some of my costs if things didn’t work out. I really didn’t want this “beauty” that badly I was feeling stupid just considering buying something so abused. I could pretty much guarantee that it would be just as junky when it arrived in my home as it was in the store. And, seeing that it was already seemingly beaten to death and I could cart it home myself, I certainly wouldn’t have to worry about the condition in which it would arrive at my house. On the plus side, it was an English Continental, with wooden keys and that original British mystique. Half the keys didn’t play at all the rest made vague croaking noises or were missing footages. It’ll just take a minute,”) And just to add to the fun, it didn’t work, either. (I just imagined the Tech from Hell working on this: “You want a modern plug there, kid? I’ll grab my hole saw. I really liked the modern AC receptacle installation. Still, this thing was a wreck. The back panel was ripped all over. Pretty ugly, huh? Actually, in some ways the pictures (which are from the seller’s auction) made it look worse then it was: He photographed it without even wiping off the grime, and somehow, his camera made it look like the orange lid had been painted bright red. And his lens must have had some awful distortion, because it made it look like the rail under the keys was bowed out - but it was not. I emailed the owner, and found out it was at a used guitar store just a couple of miles from my house. In April 2009, I spotted an eBay auction for a Connie that was located in my town. I was getting discouraged, but I kept looking. I kept losing auctions in the last 15 seconds. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to pay more for a slightly abused combo organ than I had paid a few years ago to buy a lovely Hammond B2 organ and two Leslie speakers. Continentals that weren’t fully functional, and sometimes looked like they had been fairly well beat-up, regularly fetched $1,500 to $2,500. (Or they pretended to know nothing, so they could later claim ignorance when it arrived with half the tone generator boards missing.) Some looked really nice, but the thought of letting UPS work its magic on a fragile piece of vintage electronics was scary. Most of the sellers seemed to be people who bought them a day earlier at a yard sale, and really had no idea whether they even worked. ![]() Nothing ever seemed to come up for sale locally. And eBay didn’t seem like a good alternative. With my limited technical skills, I figured I’d better get one in pretty good shape. For several years, I had been searching for a Vox Continental organ. ![]()
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