Studer 903A Restoration: VU Meters

A little eye-candy...

You guessed it! Exhausted again, but I haven't worked on studio gear for TWO WHOLE DAYS! It feels like an eternity. On Tuesday, I was catching up with a friend at the studio and we ended up killing most of the night chatting and playing with a rhodes going into a space echo and listening back on a vintage 4x10 traynor cab/head (which was totally awesome). Tonight, I had some things to take care of at home and I tried to rest a bit as I think I'm coming down with this cold that everyone else seems to have. Lucky for you, I've got months of pictures/work to show you still!

I'm feeling pretty basic, so let's just cover the VU's today.




My Studer 903A has 11 large VU Meters and 4 small VU Meters. The large VU's are broken down as follows:
Group 1-8 (x8)
∑1+2 (x2)
∑Mono (x1)

The Small VU's are all in one module and represent the 4 sends.

The Large VU Meters

Not a lot to say with these... they are large VU Meters. What do you want from me? Am I here to entertain you?
I am? Oh... well then here are some more pictures.

Only 4 Caps to change here (the 4 blue cans).

The blue connector connects to a ribbon cable in the meter bridge.

The grey wires extend up to the lamps to light up the meter.

Undo a couple of screws and presto! Off comes the front plate.

I restored the modules in groups. Here are the first five pcbs with the capacitors removed.

Compared to the console channels, the soldering/desoldering on these was like being on vacation.

Not looking too shabby! Just needed a bit of isopropyl alcohol to clean up some old flux.

New capacitors in!



Here are the other five that I worked on in this batch. Module faceplates, VU meters and pcbs are clean!



All done! The modules were a decent bit of work, but nothing overly complicated.

What a beauty!

All of them are finished! I used the meterbridge as a nice place to sit them as they were completed one-by-one.

The Small VU Meters

Not many capacitors on these, eh? Just those two! Easy-peasy!

But that doesn't mean that I can slack off! Module apart, before cleaning.

Back together again. VU's, faceplate, and pcb cleaned. Notice that extensive recap job there as well!

Done! These modules are really quite handsome.

Not too difficult of a post today. A couple of other meterbridge modules to cover next week. Oh, and remember how I mentioned last week that you would see the entire meterbridge and console body today? I lied. I realized that I can't show you the whole thing without covering some extra modules first! Don't worry. We're flying through this console. I think we only have a couple more weeks until we're done! 
Have a great weekend!