Taurus pedals case foam disintegrating (melting)

A short while ago, I opened up my Taurus pedals case to find that the blue foam that surrounded the inside of the case had started to disintegrate.

Blue foam sucky mess

 The foam had left a sticky substance all over the pedals, but the control window was tightly closed so I figured that any foam that entered the inside of the machine probably went through the foot controls or through the bottom of the pedals.

A few members of the VintageSynth.com forum indicated that the best bet for clean-up was compressed air, tweezers and distilled water. Isopropyl alcohol and q-tips used sparingly on the stubborn spots were also recommended.

I decided the first step was to get use my hands to get as much of the material out of the case as possible. Then, I moved the instrument onto the floor and used an old vacuum to suck up the larger chunks of foam stuck around and underneath the instrument.

But the instrument was still sticky. So, I found some household surface wipes and after an initial test to make sure it didn't harm the instrument surface, gave it a good cleaning. I'd say that managed to get out 85% of the stickiness.

After initial cleaning

Next - time to look inside. I unscrewed the three screws from underneath the pedals (I'm missing one) to open it up - and took a deep breathe. Lucky for me, it looks like the only foam that got inside were smaller crumbs that fell in when I tipped the machine on its back to clean the underside.

Taurus pedals - opened

Small crumbs of foam in corner

Moog on the circuit board!

Next steps will be to do another wipe down to try and remove the rest of the stickiness from the outside. And then, get those broken pedals replaced. 

But, its probably time to take the pedals in for a good professional cleaning at my local shop. That will ensure that no foam made it in through the top of the machine. 

At least now, when I take the pedals in, it won't look like a big blue mess.  My fix-it guy looks for any reason to yell at me.  :)

Ubuntu upgrade from Natty Narwhal 11.04 to Oneiric Ocelot 11.10 - ReNoise keeps on tickin'

I decided to upgrade Ubuntu on my first generation netbook from 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) to 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) the other night. 

I followed these instructions on howtoforge.com, with the addition that before I clicked the 'Upgrade' button, I first clicked the 'Install Updates' button in the bottom right corner of the Update Manager window to ensure everything was up to date first. 

The upgrade process went pretty smoothly and after the restart, 11.10 was installed successfully. 

All my icons, including the shortcut to ReNoise, were still on the desktop. I started ReNoise and quickly ran a few of the ReNoise song demos to make sure everything still worked. It could have just been my imagination, but it seemed to load a bit quicker, and everything worked as it did before. 

If I run into any problems, I'll note them on the blog.