Vintage electronic instrument maintenance, cloning and research

• Whether you are dealing with custom or commercial instrument, when doing maintenance try to establish a timeline.
  • When was it built?
  • Does everything seem original?
  • Any signs of tweaking, maintenance or mods?
  • Is there any documentation that could help?
  • Remember to document everything yourself!
  • Save all the parts removed.
• When conserving a functional object:
  • You need to somehow study how it is currently functioning.
  • Is current state indented or is it partially broken?
  • If broken, how long it has been broken?
  • If it has memory, get memory dump.
• Possible sources of information:
  • The actual hardware
  • Reverse engineering hardware
  • Schematics
  • Other documentation
  • Recordings, video, photographs
• Cloning
  • Allows studying and modifying without altering original hardware
  • Can be done either 1:1 or just cloning the circuit
  • Cloning can be reverse engineering byproduct