Re: DustBowl's journal
Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2022 10:34 pm
Adventures in Electric Piano Disassembly
I was sitting at my piano last weekend watching some lessons when I sloshed coffee onto the keys. Whoops. I cleaned the surface as well as possible, but I could see that some of the coffee had made it down below the keys. I was tempted to leave it alone because everything seemed to be working fine and I wasn't sure whether there was anything sensitive for the liquid to reach, but I decided I should at least attempt to disassemble and clean it correctly.
I didn't know where to start, so I did a little googling. It took me a few searches to find a video that showed how to take everything apart. The correct search term turned out to be "Yamaha P125 replace keys" (Yamaha P125 is the model of electric piano I have)
The first step was to unscrew 60 (!!) screws in the bottom side of the piano body. That allowed me to separate the upper part of the body, which houses the keys, from the lower portion, which houses some electronics and the speakers. I was surprised to see that there's not really that much in that lower part of the body. Two speakers, a couple of boards, and some wires.
From there, I needed to fully separate the top and bottom of the body. That was as simple as removing an adhesive strip and unplugging four wires (cables? not sure about the correct terminology)
That freed me up to start working on the keys themselves. Four screws held in each octave. Once those were out, I could lift out each octave as one piece to reveal... some kind of electronics beneath them. Which wasn't a super exciting discovery, since that's where I just had just spilled my coffee.
Lo and behold... once I had everything opened up, I could see that coffee was in fact sitting on whatever those electronics are. I don't know a lot about this kind of stuff, but I feel pretty confident that it's not good for sugary liquid to be sitting there. Not a lot of volume, but probably still less than ideal. So I dabbed up as much of the coffee as I could and then followed up with isopropyl alcohol.
From there, it was just a matter of reassembling everything in the opposite order. The piano seems to be working fine, though it's only been a week. To be honest, I'm not even sure whether this whole process accomplished anything, but it did make me a little bit less afraid of taking apart electronics that I own for fear of hurting them. Baby steps.
I was sitting at my piano last weekend watching some lessons when I sloshed coffee onto the keys. Whoops. I cleaned the surface as well as possible, but I could see that some of the coffee had made it down below the keys. I was tempted to leave it alone because everything seemed to be working fine and I wasn't sure whether there was anything sensitive for the liquid to reach, but I decided I should at least attempt to disassemble and clean it correctly.
I didn't know where to start, so I did a little googling. It took me a few searches to find a video that showed how to take everything apart. The correct search term turned out to be "Yamaha P125 replace keys" (Yamaha P125 is the model of electric piano I have)
The first step was to unscrew 60 (!!) screws in the bottom side of the piano body. That allowed me to separate the upper part of the body, which houses the keys, from the lower portion, which houses some electronics and the speakers. I was surprised to see that there's not really that much in that lower part of the body. Two speakers, a couple of boards, and some wires.
From there, I needed to fully separate the top and bottom of the body. That was as simple as removing an adhesive strip and unplugging four wires (cables? not sure about the correct terminology)
That freed me up to start working on the keys themselves. Four screws held in each octave. Once those were out, I could lift out each octave as one piece to reveal... some kind of electronics beneath them. Which wasn't a super exciting discovery, since that's where I just had just spilled my coffee.
Lo and behold... once I had everything opened up, I could see that coffee was in fact sitting on whatever those electronics are. I don't know a lot about this kind of stuff, but I feel pretty confident that it's not good for sugary liquid to be sitting there. Not a lot of volume, but probably still less than ideal. So I dabbed up as much of the coffee as I could and then followed up with isopropyl alcohol.
From there, it was just a matter of reassembling everything in the opposite order. The piano seems to be working fine, though it's only been a week. To be honest, I'm not even sure whether this whole process accomplished anything, but it did make me a little bit less afraid of taking apart electronics that I own for fear of hurting them. Baby steps.