Finding a good, honest TV repairman

20-30 years ago, maybe. Most consumer electronics from the last couple of decades, the components are wave-soldered, purpose-built, and unlabeled, other than on the circuit diagram in the manual you can't get. Around here, bench fee at an electronics shop is fifty bucks to bring it in the door. I think the nearest one is in the next county- the local guy couldn't make his rent.

Have to do a cost-benefits analysis. Take how many years you expect it to live, post-repair, and compare that against cost of a similar new one. In almost all cases, home TVs count as disposable, if they are over

2-3 years old.

I'm a cheap SOB, so I'll open stuff up and look for any obvious stuff like a popped fuse, or mouse piss on a circuit board that a little spray cleaner will solve, or maybe a cold solder joint on a power lead. But any evidence of fried components, life is too short.

-- aem sends...

Yea, if you say so...

Anything is fixable, IF you want to spend a lot of money. As far as cost effective, I don't think so. Component level diagnostics and replacement is not exactly quick and easy.

PeterD wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

a lot of time. (= money)

Heh,I built a TEK 2213 o'scope from boards that other TEK techs replaced because they couldn't find the problems on them.Got a free grade-B CRT from the head of CRT Manufacturing,and only had to buy $20 worth of parts to complete it.($20 after my TEK discount!)

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com

'purpose built and unlabelled' components? what does that mean? In fact, I suspect it means nothing as it is gibberish, although I imagine most components are 'purpose built' for something - resistors for providing resistance for one. Hate to tell you, but that's been going on a lot longer than 2 decades!

As for unlabelled, I'd love to know what kind of 'unlabelled' gear I've been missing these last two decades. Those of us who work on these items daily can identify the components by reading those cute little coloured stripes or printed text on them. If need be (for example if a component is destroyed) we even sometimes look for the component reference off the pcb, and consult the schematic. You know, you can even find lots and lots of them for free on sites like eserviceinfo.com. Try it one day.

-B

Custom ASICs and components with their labels either removed or with the box manufacturer's part numbers. If you've been around that long and haven't seen these, you're blind.

I'd like you to point out these "colored stripes" on SMT devices (almost everything is, anymore). Most SMT devices, particularly capacitors aren't marked with value. If you can find a schematic

*maybe* it'll help.

It means 'jungle chip' components that were only produced for a few months during one production run for a plant in Singapore, or power packages with undocumented innards (maybe a Darlington and some bias resistors, or maybe something else). Or it means little surface mount chip components, with no printable surface for writing on. Diode? Zener? Varactor? Fuse? Who can tell?

It also means programmed chips (PIC or PAL, gate arrays, or SOC microprocessors). Anything you can swap for a known-good part gives, at least in principle, a repair option. On a 'modern' consumer item, there's lots of no-repair-option components. Even if you KNOW it's a bad flyback, maybe the only thing you can do is order a full deflection board (about $400 for an old Apple iMac). When the gizmo turns six years old, maybe you can't even get the $400 part.

This is nonsense, from someone who has no idea what he is talking about. This set likely has a rather trivial problem in the vertical output stage that we repair at the component level all the time for around $100.

Leonard