EQ6 Resurrected: The Bypass That Saved My Mount!

Bringing a Fried EQ6 Back from the Dead!

A friend recently fried his EQ6 by reversing the power polarity – ouch! He thought he’d have to replace the entire main board because nothing was responding, not even the LED. I’m no electronics expert, but I offered to take a look anyway. After opening up the mount, we quickly realized an electrolytic capacitor had taken the brunt of it (these little guys aren’t too fond of being plugged in backwards!).

It was a 470uF, 25V filtering capacitor. Luckily, I had one in stock, though my replacement was a bit too tall to fit in the original spot (between the main board and the front panel). No biggie! There was plenty of space on the other side of the board. So, paying close attention to the polarity, I soldered it onto the motor side.

Before reassembling everything, we plugged in the power supply. To our dismay, it still didn’t work! I pulled out the multimeter and quickly realized a protection diode was dead (I was measuring 12V at the input but only 5V at the output). Since I didn’t know the diode’s value (it was an SMD component, tiny and unreadable), I suggested to my friend that we bypass it. I explained that if, by some miracle, it worked, he’d have to be extra careful about reverse polarity from then on, as his board would no longer have that protection. He said, “What do we have to lose?” and told me to go for it. So, I bridged the diode, and we plugged it in again to test…

Miracle! The mount purred back to life, the hand controller screen lit up – it was working! We spent every night that week observing, and he hasn’t had a single issue with his mount since.

Total repair cost: 0€ and 20 minutes of my time, instead of 200€ and likely several days of waiting for parts to be delivered. To be safe, I also rewired his power box.

If you’ve had a similar mishap, don’t hesitate to reach out! I might be able to help you out too.

Many thanks to Julio Corredera for the photos illustrating this post.