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Of all the Gear in all the basements of all the repairshops in the world, this is the rarest.. Why? Because Like PAIA, POWERTRAN sold KITS.. But UNLIKE PAIA, POWERTRAN were Based in the UK, and had a much smaller Customerbase - thereby making sure they ran into a brick wall sooner rather then later, and if You made the Kit and it didn't work properly, odds-on You would dump it.
Powertran advertised in E&MM, The MAPLIN Magazine - and even designed a Keyboard-synth for Maplin to sell as a kit - again, rarer then You think due to a low-success rate when it came to building them. Strange as they did seem to be based around curtis chips, and not discrete circuits at all, so the potential for fuc*ing it up was minimal..
You would think there would be more of this stuff surviving, given the range of tasty-looking gear they did.. But not many people had the time or skills to build a kit of such size, and fewer had the money to splash out on what was only a little cheaper then a Japanese machine that would definitely work!
I only ever saw 2 bits of Powertran gear, a 'string machine' - an organ-like divide-down machine with a chorus effect that sucked balls through a shitty drainpipe, and a 'mixer', that worked well, but was ugly and horrible, and so had an unhappy life as the on-air desk at a pirate radio station..
Today of coarse, we have Modern PAIA kits, and the likes of MOTM, MFOS and Blacet making kits, and they are difficult to get wrong.. But pretty much NOBODY makes full Keyboard kits - i wonder is this because of lessons learned with Powertran?
Powertran advertised in E&MM, The MAPLIN Magazine - and even designed a Keyboard-synth for Maplin to sell as a kit - again, rarer then You think due to a low-success rate when it came to building them. Strange as they did seem to be based around curtis chips, and not discrete circuits at all, so the potential for fuc*ing it up was minimal..
You would think there would be more of this stuff surviving, given the range of tasty-looking gear they did.. But not many people had the time or skills to build a kit of such size, and fewer had the money to splash out on what was only a little cheaper then a Japanese machine that would definitely work!
I only ever saw 2 bits of Powertran gear, a 'string machine' - an organ-like divide-down machine with a chorus effect that sucked balls through a shitty drainpipe, and a 'mixer', that worked well, but was ugly and horrible, and so had an unhappy life as the on-air desk at a pirate radio station..
Today of coarse, we have Modern PAIA kits, and the likes of MOTM, MFOS and Blacet making kits, and they are difficult to get wrong.. But pretty much NOBODY makes full Keyboard kits - i wonder is this because of lessons learned with Powertran?
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