Hard pivot to some puttering



    Oh please do not worry fans and adoring public, I will return to mediocre baseball analysis. But baseball ain't all I like. So for today I am going to focus on a new pet project I decided to do. What is it (you ask with baited breath)? I am cleaning and fixing a Peavey Unity 2002 16 RQ mixer. Why am I doing this? 'Cause it's fun and I like learning shit. I can fix electric guitars well enough, solder at an average level, and have rewired my kitchen. I leveraged my signature overconfidence, willingness to fail, and low standards to figure out how to do those things, so if I focus those onto this mixer I should be good. 
    So not to bury the lead, right now the mixer is taken apart and the parts are labeled and stored...that's it. My next step is to start cleaning everything. Now back to the beginning. Why did I choose to work on this Peavey mixer? That reason is simple, it was cheap. For real, I paid less than $40 for the mixer on Good Wills website including shipping. In the photo below you will see why. 



    While it is dusty, dirty, and missing a few knobs it did work when I got it. Though it did have it's quirks. To figure out these quirks I first had to test all the things I cared about on it. To do this I hooked up an Alesis drum machine, this is not an advertisement I just needed something that would continually make noise while I moved cables between each channel. So I hooked up a couple of speakers and went channel to channel adjusting the volume and wiggling the eq knobs. While doing this I found that everything except the fader for the right main out worked mostly fine. Some channels did require me to move the fader or turn a knob a bunch to nock the dust out and form a connection, but they worked. The right main out worked if you kept your finger on it, but the fader is broken as shit so it has to be replaced.
     I also need to replace a trio of broken potentiometers in the EQ and Monitor sections. As I have been unable to wash the housing, I decided to tackle the fader and pots first. I decided on this first because it is just identifying parts which can be done quietly at night without waking anyone in the house. From my research I found that the parts I need are a 10K log slide pot - 60MM and three 50KB 12mm hpc rotary pots w/dt pots. It just so happens the parts department at Peavey informed me that the slide pot has been discontinued (though amazon has 'em) and I don't know what the w/dt means for the other pots, but I made some decent progress. My next step is to buy the parts and whilst I wait clean the housing and lean a bit about electronics. 
    My goal is that by the end of this puttering I will be able to read a schematic and understand all those wonky symbols and have a better grasp on how all the electrical components work. Now I know one project will not make me an expert, but it will make me better than I am today so I am excited. So now I will leave you with a few more photos of this mixer taken apart. 















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