Repairing Roland Piano HP-237E Keys and Pedal Connector

This is a bit of a different type of post… At my son’s school, the piano in the music class had a few issues, and I went “on a quest” to fix it :-) This post is a collection of what info I needed to get this done, written down here, just in case someone is looking for the same info.

Broken Hammer

Three of the keys could not be used as they seemed to be blocked. The hardest part of fixing this was finding the video below ;-) Once you know which screws to remove, it’s very easy to remove the broken keys and find the problem. It turns out the visible keys were all OK, but one of the hammers was broken. The piece that fell off the broken hammer, was blocking two other ones. It couldn’t find new replacement parts anymore - at least not in Europe. But the problem could easily be fixed with 2-component glue. Before gluing, I used a multitool to drill a little line in the plastic, so I could add a short piece of metal wire to enforce it.

In all honesty, I’m afraid this is only a temporary fix, as a few months later I had to repeat the process for another hammer that broke. I guess the plastic of the hammers gets worn out, and they will break one after the other. But in the meantime, the piano is fully usable again!

Broken Pedal Connector

Up to the next problem… The piano was pushed too close to the wall a few times, and the connector of the pedals was broken off. The metal pins inside the connector disappeared somehow. This is an 8-pin DIN connector you can find very easily online (I bought them on Amazon). But the original cable length is very tight, so I needed to replace it too. I used a network cable and found some online info about the wiring on “Roland HP-3E digital piano pedal wiring - how to?” and “Note Pedal Exploded View & Parts List; Circuit Diagram 3 Note Pedal - Roland HP-1 Service Notes”. My advice: make sure you have a piano player available to validate this, as it turned out I connected them vice-versa…

Conclusion

Thanks to the video by almamanley, it’s very easy to get to the internals of the piano. And with some glue and spare cable parts, you can fix - almost - anything.