Been a right PITA day. One of those where everything you pick up is either not worth repairing, or seems to get worse if you as much as bring a screwdriver anywhere near it. And so it was with sinking heart that I put the Technics SL-PG480 CD player on the bench. "Not playing discs" said the ticket, and when I reached for a screwdriver, I needn't have bothered - the owner had already kindly removed all the case screws, to save me the trouble ... I probably should have just sighed at this point, and sent it back where it came from, but I've always liked these, so I thought I would just give it 5 minutes. Everything basically did what it should, except focus search didn't take place. That's an unusual problem on one of these, so I thought I would just whip the deck out first and have a look at the connectors, as someone had clearly been in there before me. There was nothing obviously wrong, so I thought I would just check the continuity to the laser focus coils whilst I could easily get at the connections. With an analogue meter on a low ohms range, I checked the coils. The tracking ones were fine, and the lens deflected left or right, but the focus ones read open, with no lens movement.
The deck fitted to these is a Philips CDM12.1 and the lens carrier and coils are clearly visible and accessible on the top of the laser, so I had a close look with my powerful headband magnifier. You could clearly see that one of the superflexible tails that connect from the fixed pins that come up from the laser flexiprint to the focus and tracking coils on the lens carrier, was laying detached by the side of its pin. It didn't look broken - just never soldered or soldered properly in the first place. Pointy tweezers, a fine tipped iron, and some fine gauge solder, soon put that right, and the lens then deflected normally when the meter was applied again. All worked nicely, as these always do, when it was reassembled.
Makes a change to get a decent result like that, and just goes to show that you shouldn't just get jaded with all the crap passing across your bench, and just not bother even attempting a repair on the basis that spares ain't gonna be available anyway ... d;~}
Arfa