If you recall, I won this orange nugget from my first-ever foray into Japanese auctions a little more than a month ago. It had some battery issues when it arrived, but I'd seen enough YouTube videos on how to clean the battery contacts on these things I thought I'd try doing it myself. I mean, how difficult could it be?
It turns out cleaning the contacts on the battery door are easy as fuck. It's the internal ones that are a little more challenging. I took the rear cover off, and with a combination of cotton swabs, vinegar, isopropyl alcohol and most importantly nerves of steel, I cleaned off most—but not all (because it would require a degree of disassembly that I most definitely was not comfortable with)—of the extensive green corrosion that had been caked on the internal contacts.
After reassembling, I slipped in a new gumstick battery and was genuinely amazed that it actually worked and that I hadn't destroyed anything in the process. As weeks passed however, I knew I wasn't getting as much running time between charges that I should have been getting, and when charged, the battery was never charged fully.
While all this was going on, my baby blue 910 started screeching when recording. I did the basic clean and lube (again, something I learned from YouTube), but it didn't alleviate the problem. Once again, it looked like it was something that was going to require a level of disassembly that I wasn't comfortable with. So I took a chance and reached out to one of the YouTube guys who effortlessly works on these antiques to see if he took on outside work and what it would cost.
To my surprise, he wrote back within minutes of me sending the email, quoted a very reasonable price, and I sent the unit off to him the next day. A week later he returned it, cleaned, lubed, and now the mechanism made only a normal amount of noise. No more screeching! I wrote back to him and asked how much he'd charge for battery contact cleaning in addition to the standard clean and lube. Again, he quoted much less than I was expecting and the orange 910 was sent off.
I got the nugget back today. The mechanism is silent and the battery has now lasted me nearly 8 hours of continuous use and shows no sign of giving out any time soon; only the end-most battery indicator has gone out, indicating it's still comfortably at 80% capacity. Thanks, Shawn!
The blue 707 is still my favorite, but the 910s (either this orange one or the baby blue) are the ones I take with me when I'm out and about.
