So I bought a Poly 61 and came home to test it out. It ran okay but one of the voices had a weird envelope. Opened it up to check for battery leakage and yes there was some so I removed the battery and now nothing! I just get a stuck screen with no buttons responding at all? No sound either. I just cleaned the battery leakage area with alcohol. Should the Poly 61 run fine without the battery?
Also how would I go about repairing the damage done by the battery never done a trace repair job before.
Hi , your board is damaged obviously, when you cleaned with alcohol you may broke some traces, the battery need to be replaced with new lithium ion battery, to repair the traces you need to download the high resolution circuit board diagram available online and measure with the ohmmeter every small trace where is any damage , I soldered wires on mine on each trace to create a bridge over damaged areas, also check the switches in the back (tape and normal mode) you may have a bad contact if buttons on the keyboard not responding
The Poly-61 should work without the battery, it just won’t store any programs. But it shouldn’t be frozen, and you should be able to manually make a sound that plays.
I’m guessing a trace got damaged perhaps in the process of removing the battery. If there was leakage, it might have been barely hanging on, and desoldering the battery or cleaning the board may have been enough to break a connection.
Repairing it is pretty tedious. We’re doing a Synth Wizards episode on exactly this (mainly focusing on the Polysix, but the two are similar in that regard).