I’ve worked on about a half a dozen Porta 03/ Porta 03 Mkiis this summer. I really like them for some reason. I’m trying to catch up on posts here before I forget which is which.
I can’t really tell what differences there are between the Porta 03 and the Porta 03 MKii. Perhaps it’s some minor board revision I haven’t noticed, and the case and knob colors are a bit different. I’ve also noticed some internal differences in the case plastics of MKis that made it not possible to swap boards between them. Anyway, on to this repair.
This Porta 03 came to me with no DC jack. It was straight up missing from the power board. I’m going to try to keep this straight but it’s a little foggy because of how many of these machines I’ve had recently, and the fact that at some point, I did some parts swapping that resulted in one non-working machine that I have harvested parts from. Some of the knobs were melted too. I had another machine that arrived with a broken counter button, and somewhere along the way, I received an 03 with no case screws, and one that every single knob shaft was cracked, which was a real disappointment.
So I pulled the whole power board from one of those other derelict machines, repaired the soldering on the DC jack, added a jumper to make sure the ground connection was good, and went on cleaning and servicing as usual. Somewhere along the way between one of these machines, a resistor blew up. The heat damaged the board enough that I didn’t bother trying to figure out what other components were affected. That one went in the heap in case I need to harvest parts from it.
After much swapping of parts, this ended up as a decently clean and well working machine. It sold on Reverb here.