Awesome -- the DX7 had a huge musical impact.
They are incredibly durable, one that I got had been in a fire but it still worked, even though more than half of the keyboard had been burned off. The mainboard went on to repair one that was otherwise good but had a fried CPU. Another one I got had been owned by a touring musician, who apparently didn't know about flight cases :) There wasn't a lick of paint on the outer case. I got it for free because it wouldn't turn on any more. Turned out that the voltage selector had somehow been moved in transport and got stuck between the two settings, leaving it disconnected. That was the fastest fix ever, there simply wasn't anything wrong with it. (And good thing that voltage selector had not been pushed a tiny little bit further because then it would have been end-of-story for sure).
So, I have a pretty large collection of spares, looms, main boards, display boards, keys (they do break, especially as the plastic ages it can get more brittle, more so in synths that have been in the sun), switches, PSUs and so on. Every now and then I put an ad out to get people to sell me their broken ones or to help them out and then a new batch of working DX-7's goes back into the world. It's never going to make me a dime, especially not when counting the time but it feels pretty good to keep these oldies alive, and to see how happy musicians are when their baby works again.
Next time I have one of these die-hards I'll be sure to take pictures.
About 200K DX-7's were made, which is enough that you can find them and not so many that there is no value in repairing them, on top of that the degree to which people are attached to their synths is something that still amazes me. The level of emotion when a dead synth comes back to life with the owners is always quite gratifying, it's some of the best time spent for me.
Opening up the DX7ii (and other synths from the same time) is a pain compared to the nice hinge construction you get on the original DX7.
The best part is being able to map the sliders to /almost/ any parameter within a patch, so it's possible to have expressive control over the tonality of your instrument while playing live. Sure it involves menu diving to figure out ahead of time, but I'm a programmer. It's really more about the joy of being like "this sound needs more wonk, lets tie this parameter to the output of this other function and ooOOOH not what I was expecting but let's go"
If you ever can't find a part let me know.
Mostly though I've just got some weird dirty hiss (sounds like a rainstorm) on the output all the time that makes it unsuitable for recording. I use DEXED + midi in that case, but it's still fun on it's own (also weirdly I find menu-diving to edit patches easier than being presented with that big DEXED UI)
Thanks for keeping these things alive
They were dirt cheap and as mentioned, insanely solid.
Same thing happened to to the Casio CZ line. I bought one at a time they were very undesirable for $75 and they now go for $500+
There's a financial lesson in here somewhere
That and the DX7 was used to death and more so - 99% just used the pre-sets and got to stage that you could name the sound they used on a sound and all got cliché.