Peter - yes - beast (trivia - back in about 1981 I was one of hundreds of volunteer extras (person-sized bird characters) for a movie being filmed north of Los Angeles called "the beastmaster" - never saw the movie!.)
A recently purchased (earlier this week) VEVOR TFD15 hydraulic lift table has made 1000% improvement in handling these heavy/old machines (8660, 8350, 8673) which use linear/transformer power supplies and are made of 100% pure cast iron straight from the mine. Highly recommend such a thing for those of us "of a certain age" that still wrangle electronics by the metric ton.
Determined course of action at this point --- going to build extender mechanism to allow the pictured module to operate outside the synthesizer. 6x2 3.94mm card edge connector, already have PCBs with 3.94mm pitch traces for making these sorts of things, and 14-pin IDC DIP male plugs to make the 2-port ribbon cable that appears to go off in the direction of the YTO, are both on order, couple weeks til delivery, so machine is back to it's "hangar queen" location until I am ready for testing.
Barring any other adds to this discussion, I'll surface again with the topic once I am able operate the module(s) outside the synthesizer chassis.
