Main manual completed

This past weekend I've finished the work on the lower manual. It went quite well. I noticed one thing, however. When talking about MIDIfying a console, people always think about wiring, diodes, MIDI encoder boards, etc. In fact, CLEANING takes much more time, and it is very boring and repetitive. 61 keys, 122 contact pins, 61 contact frames, 61 keys... Anyway, It is done now, but it was enough for this weekend, so instead of starting to clean the contacts for the second manual, I completed some smaller tasks. 

Back to the project. As I have 3 pistons on each manual, I've figured it is best to wire them together with the keys on the manual, thus creating 61+3=64 connections, just enough for a 8x8 scanmartix. I've decided to use two contact pins for the keys, just to have some redundance. For this, I soldered the diodes so that that leads connect the two rows of pins:

I made them alternate by fours, because I used a 4-wire phone cable to connect them, and I wanted to keep the same colours in separate tunnels. This way rows 0-3 of the scanmatrix face one way, rows 4-7 the other way. Here is a picture with half the diodes connected:

I also wired up the 3 pistons as if they were notes c#, d, d# above the highest note of the manual. Hauptwerk will take care of them.

Following that I cut up the common bussbar into pieces of 8 contacts and wired them up to form the columns of the scanmatrix. I made sure that the contacts from neighbouring columns couldn't touch. Finally, I covered the wiring with the original coverings, so you can barely notice them.

This is what the complete assembly looks like (notice the markings on the cables!): 

I used two rows of contacts, I had to activate them. These used to be contacts for different stops, one row per stop. Unlike with the pedalboard, here I cleaned only the ones I use. (As a side note, I could have made a velocity sensitive keyboard using two contacts at different positions from the copper frame.)

The rest is easy and quite spectacular. I took the keyboard frame upstairs and installed it in the console:

Then I added the keys, springs and some keyboard hardware. Finally, I had my son check the weight of the keys:

They feel good. 

I've also disassembled the upper manual, removed all the old wiring, but haven't started cleaning it yet. On the other hand, I've cleaned the contacts for the stop switches. There are fewer of them, and they are not so close together (my eyes get tired of staring at all those pins for more than 5 minutes at a time). I've also tested the MIDI In port of my M-Audio FastTrack Pro device. It works fine doing MIDI In and SPDIF Audio out at the same time. Following a tip, I have also located a suitable power source for the HWce MIDI encoder board (soon to arrive, I hope): it is the power adaptor of my old US Robotics serial modem!

In the meantime, I ran out of cables! I don't really know why, because I've calculated how much I would need, and added 50% extra. But still, I need almost as much as what I've used so far. Go figure...