I recently purchased a Polymoog with an early serial number. It is in fairly poor working condition. I paid 250$ Canadian for it and it has its legs as well as a massive Moog hard case. Cosmetically it looks good for a unit of its age. About 1/3 of the keys produce no sound and the others are fairly unstable. As well a lot of the buttons don’t work. Is it worth sinking the money ($500-$1000) into restoring this or should I cut my losses and find one in better condition? Any advise would be appretiated.
Early Polymoogs are failure prone. By serial #3900 a lot of factory updates went into the production line and they were more reliable. Polymoogs are complex machines and it doesn’t take long to reach the point of diminishing returns trying to repair an early one. I’d look for a later one.
it is correct that old pollies are not the most stable synths on this moogian planet. The older ones (until serial number 3000) should be avoided. Above 3000 some major upgrades helped a lot. The service manual describes the changes in the internal design. There were changes in the high frequency oscillators (at nr. 3300), or concerning the temperature stability (at nr. 3549), etc.
Before sinking an awful lot of money in a pollie (although I think it is worth it, no question for me) try the following:
take out every voice card, if necessary clean the contacts, and put them in again. You´ll find them at the bottom of the synth. Dislocated voicecards are often the source of a misbehaving pollie.
often the power supply doesn´t function correct and causes the rest of the electronics to “freak out”. This should be checked by a technician, who knows what he is doing. The older pollies had a “Faratron” power supply, which was crap. At nr. 1750 (I think) moog built their own, which was far superior.
If this shouldn´t help, try cleaning the contacts (not the key contacts, of course). There are about 300 contacts in sockets. Unplug and plug them in several times.