Fixing a Yamaha DGX-620 grand piano screen

How I got my piano and the problems of fixing it

Introduction about the piano

I bought a second hand Yamaha DGX-620 Grand Piano also known as the YPG-625, the YPG stands for Yamaha Portable Grand, sure portable…, after carying it for 10 minutes by myself my back hurt for 3 days.

Opinions and problems

Overall I’m very happy with it, while I still don’t know much about playing paino, it does look and sounds great, but it came with problem that bothered me a lot, that the seller did not mention it until I went to buy it.

The screen was broken, it’s a common known manufacturing problem for these models that looking online affects a lot of people, fortunately due to this reason I got a huge discount, only 70€ to buy the full piano, there’s people selling it with a broken screen for around 200 € minimum, the cost new was of ~700€ so a 90% discount.

The problem is very simple, the ribbon connector for he display loses connection overtime, due to a very thin solder that’s in tension.

Possible first solution

This video shows a very simple solution which seems to work for most who tried, simply add foldback clips to increase the preassure of the connection.

This solution sounds great, low repair cost (only 2 foldback clips), without much risk besides open it, so I tried.

After removing around 100 screws (that was painful), the case can be removed and the board can be accesed.

Now that’s open the process it’s easy, after remvoving the ribbons and the 4 screws around the board, the main board will go out and the display can be accessed. The display has two ribbons that each control half of the screen, I had to fix both in my case, so this requires to remove 2 additional screws to acces the second ribbon.

I isolated the clips with masking tape, to make sure the circuits will not short with the metalic clips.

After this I checked the screen and unfortunately it only fixed half of it, I tried adding more pressure, but nothing worked, so I gave up after a while.

Second option

At this poin I thought my only solution was to replace the screen, this was problematic for two reasons, number one, a new screen cost a minimum of 60€ on aliexprss sometimes as much as I paid for the whole piano, reson two is that it requires an iron solder.

I did want an excuse to buy a PINECIL, an amazing tool, but this will add to the cost, and I decided it was not worth it, besides the piano works great, and the MIDI input can be used without a screen.

Here it’s when I thought of a differnet solution that so far I didn’t see online, if the solder had desolder why not try to melt it, I do not have a heat gun but I do have a hair dryer so I gave it a try.

The process is almost the same but instead of adding pins for preassure, I just heated both screen connectors for around 5 minutes using the hair dryer’s max temperature, somtimes adding preassure with the plasticl nozzle.

After mounting it again I got a gorgeous working screen.