Nord User Forum

Greetings from Norway!
It seems my Nord Electro 5 HP keybed was accidentally bestowed some red wine, two of the white keys (B and C in the middle) are currently not working.

This must have happened a couple of months ago, only recently (after summer break) did I discover that the two keys had stopped working. I opened my Electro and found wine residue on many of the keys, and it seems that the sensors on at least one of the affected keys has been visibly corroded. I'm hoping this shouldn't be too hard to fix, since this is a simple rubber contact switch.

Does anyone on this forum have experience with this? May it be a bad connection somewhere else in the circuit?

Hi Gunnar,
Welcome to the forum and sorry to hear of your misfortune.
Please note that when logged into the forum, the search function becomes available.
A similar issue arose a few years ago: https://www.norduserforum.com/nord-electro-forum-f9/repairing-the-keybed-of-a-nord-electro-3hp-t6367.html
Your situation may differ, so if you post photos of the damage it might assist in diagnosis.
At least one forum member (Pablo) works as official Nord repair and support, so if he offers an opinion, his advice is the best possible.

Determining the difficulty of fixing this also requires knowing your experience repairing electronics. Please let us know your familiarity with electronics and your comfort using solder iron, multimeter, etc.

-pterm

Thank you for the reply, I saw it too late but I was luckily able to fix the two keys myself and my keyboard is now working as intended!

For future reference, here's what I did:
After removing the keys I cleaned the remaining wine residue from the keybed PCB, under the rubber caps. This, however, did not fix my problem but it might mitigate future corrosion.
I then unscrewed the PCB (had to remove all the keys for this because of the fiddly bus cables) and cleaned under it aswell.
I then used a multimeter to check the paths involved in the damaged keys, and found out that four of the paths were damaged.

Under the middle PCB:
https://i.imgur.com/pR48dfK.jpg
Visible wine residue, vias (holes through PCB) in the red ring are not conducting. This was not evident before I checked with a multimeter between the individual conductor pad and their respective diode on the other side (D26, D25, et.c.).

Now that I had isolated the problem I decided to solder it myself. I scraped the surface of the paths in the PCB around the corroded via, put a bit of unisolated wire (I used resistor legs) through it and cleaned with "electric cleaner" (2-propanol). Then I soldered the connection and repeated for all four damaged paths. I also had to solder two of the conductor pads to their respective paths on the PCB, this I did in a similar fashion.

TLDR: There was some bad connections on the keybed PCB and I managed to solder it.

well done!

Thanks! I'm happy that this worked out. I had to open it once more to clean under a G key that didn't respond well. It didn't have any visible hair/particles under it but after cleaning it responded well.

My soldering was quite crude so I'll update this post in a month or so to tell you if it holds. Otherwise I'm probably going to replace the PCB.

...And no more drinking Glogg at the gig. For you, you drink water

Just checking back three months after the repair to say that all the keys still function with no issues whatsoever!

Nords are a pleasure to work on compared to most all plastic stuff,,,