wax&wires

Keeley Electronics Burns Down

My first TS9 was a gift from my boss when I worked at a little mom and pop music store in my hometown. It was fried, and basically only worked as a sine wave oscillator. My boss let me have it for free since it was of no good to him. I had read about this guy named Robert Keeley that modded pedals and such, and though I wasn’t quite sure just what that meant, I gave him a call to see if he could fix it. He told me to send it on over, and a few weeks and $40 later, I had a Keeley TS-9. The pedal was sweet, and Robert Keeley was awesome at taking care of the customer (me) through the whole transaction.

Now, some 6 years later, Keeley Electronics has grown to a company that moves over $4 million in inventory per year, with international distribution.

I was saddened today to hear that their main building in Edmond, OK had burned down. Though they lost a good chunk of the building and lots of inventory, Keeley seems pretty optomistic about the whole thing:

Howdy folks!

Still in a bit of shock to say the least, but I think we will make it in short order. Everyone got out without being hurt. I got a chance to go in last night with a Fire Marshall/Brigade Commander (or something like that) and the worst damage occured to our parts inventory. I had some rare treasures there for sure (thousands of IC’s for EM5 clones, the hundreds of last opto-couplers on earth for the Mutron III, Telefunken parts) but nothing that would stop the world from spinning.

The best news it seems is that insurance is paid up and is with a good company. The stock of built pedals, unmodified pedals, etc. all made it I think. (Dealers out there, your orders made it without even water damage! We may have to rebox.) I think all of the one-of-a-kind and collector stuff made it as well. Smoke damaged for sure, but not water damaged. I think the Fire Department responded as fast as possible and even impressed themselves. I heard them joking that they couldn’t believe how much survived and how well they did! I can’t believe that with the fire raging so long that we didn’t loose more. (Just the “recent” $25K remodeled area! :-( oh well, People are Safe and Well!!!!) What started it? Don’t know, could have been where we smoke, or our solder pot room, or even another guy in the building that has a shop. I can’t tell>>>seems like investigators will be interviewing people today.

Well, off to pick up what I can and get a plan into action. I hope it remains as positive as it seemed with the dim flashlight last night.

Robert

More details here. If you get a chance, shoot an encouraging email their way.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 5:36 am. It is filed under wires and tagged with boutique, effects, guitar, keeley electronics, pedals, shop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.