{"id":245,"date":"2010-05-23T08:46:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-23T13:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/?p=245"},"modified":"2010-05-23T09:40:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-23T14:40:00","slug":"korg-esx-1-1-5a-chip-fuse-repair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/?p=245","title":{"rendered":"Korg ESX-1 1.5a “chip” Fuse repair"},"content":{"rendered":"

Had to repair my ESX-1 today. I went to turn it on this morning and it would not power up. The symptoms are: Unit turns on; Yellow back light comes on; No text on the display; No Led lights. When you turn it back off the LCD’s Back-light turns off very slowly after you press the power button, as with lag. These are all very noticable. If your unit is doing these 5 things and nothing more, nothing less… then is it very likely you have a bad fuse. Once I googled the info up (I had read about it before), the repair took me about 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

Apparently many of the early models off the Korg line had a 1.5a fuse on the board that often goes bad, they later replaced it with a stronger fuse. Many people bypass the fuse altogether in order to get their ESX-1’s (and EMX-1’s) working again since the fuse is not a typical one you can easily find. I bought my ESX-1 used off Ebay nearly 3 years ago and the problem did not occur until now. I do not leave my ESX-1 powered on when unattended because it can run pretty hot after awhile and here in Louisville we have alot of lightning\/thunderstorms. It was not a storm or power spike that caused it to go out, Korg just chose a bad part on these early models. They used to repair them for free, but I believe that period has ended. You can always contact Korg Repair and ask if there is an authorized repair shop near you, or failing that you could send it in.<\/p>\n

I do not recommend anyone else doing this repair unless they are confident about their precision\/pcb soldering skills as the contact points are very small. However, if you insist on doing so (like I did), there is a helpful thread about doing this @ Korgforums<\/a>. The pictures in it are poor quality though and there’s no mention of taking apart the ESX-1. I found a couple other pictures to assist me. Click them for larger views.<\/p>\n

The first picture is one of the Fuse itself that needs to be replaced or bypassed, note that with a bypass like this once you know the rating needed for the fuse you could add a ratshack one in yourself inline (i did not). Note that the fuse is labeled ‘FUSE1’ and that its near the cluster of capacitors located on the right-hand side of the board:<\/p>\n

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This second picture is from a forum thread back in 2006 that I had to dig up off Archive.org. It shows the simple process of taking your ESX-1 apart. There are 14 total screws, 10 of which are 2.5mm HEX that hold the faceplate on and then 4 Philips head screws around the Tube section that hold the control panel to the body:<\/p>\n

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Had to repair my ESX-1 today. I went to turn it on this morning and it would not power up. The symptoms are: Unit turns on; Yellow back light comes on; No text on the display; No Led lights. When you turn it back off the LCD’s Back-light turns off very slowly after you press\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,36],"tags":[61,59,60],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lazytrap.com\/trapped\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}