As mentioned in latest purchases I’m restoring one of my 303s, it was bought in 2005 as a wreck that came from a hire companies service department, it had no CPU, missing pots, and a few ICs had been harvested from it. It was in a sorry state.
I fixed it up and added a acidlab mod kit, unfortunately the kit wasn’t built onto a pcb so there were lots of flying wires inside and it was a bit flakey, then it stopped working so I put it away with the intention of fixing it one day. Years passed, it needed a new case as the old one was a bit knackered, so recently I decided to get a alu RE-303 case and fix her up.
This 303 always sounded the best of any that I owned, the resonance and filter interactions were somehow always sounding more “emotional”
Anyway so a few days back the case arrived from Kumptronics and I set to work, I decided to remove all the acidlab mods and do a proper restoration.
Once I removed all the mods it was then a case of figuring out why there was no sound, a cut trace was the culprit, so I fixed that and now there was no resonance, I fitted a resistor and bingo she sprang to life!
I don’t care what anyone says, there’s nothing quite like the sound of a proper 303. Absolute magic.
Massive credit for bringing another one back into the world.
I found some old photos of what it looked like when I got it, note the components soldered to the back of the PCB, those were most likely done by Roland indicating that this was a very early one, the other two that I nave do not have them.
Great to see someone who saves old machines. It is so exciting to see when skills and effort give another lease of life to a “junk”. Thanks for sharing.
Bit more progress today - new clothes, midi finished.
Still quite a bit of work to do but all working, pretty stoked, I thought I was gonna have more issues than I did, blue leds are going to be replaced with stock red, some wiring tidy up to do, a few mods but no sound ones as I love the way it sounds stock, just vcf cv and a couple of others.
Hurrah! Nasty blue LEDs swapped out for decent 630nm red, much nicer but a pig of a job in this heat and when my desoldering station decided to need a total unblocking, still all done and working now, 3hrs to do what would normally take 30 minutes.
Added VCF CV input and battery power, the case does not allow for the original 4xD cells, so I used a 4xAA holder with a battery snap connector, it just about fits. I decided against adding other mods, CV for VCF is really all I need. It also has midi in and out.
So it was a nice little project, I’m glad that I decided to do it, the dinsync RE-303 case isn’t quite a perfect fit for a TB-303 but is great quality and a huge improvement over the original case. I will probably get my own cases made for this and my other 2 303s.
