Missing coax connector on TV

$85 US for putting a connector on a tuner?!?

Tom

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I see this all the time. It's easy to fix using another connector, or the original connector if you still have it. It's not hard, but you need to be skilled at soldering. You WILL ruin the tuner if you're using a $10 radio shack soldering iron and radio shack solder. It takes a powerful temperature controlled soldering iron and good quality solder to solder the outside of the connector to the tuner case. If this connection is poor, the connector will be ripped off again by even the slightest tug. The center pin is easier, but if the iron is too hot you can easily damage the board inside the tuner. Any clumsy soldering can damage the many surface mount components inside the tuner. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@psu.edu

I've had success using a Weller 140W soldering gun for the outside of the connector, but if it fits tightly you can jam it in there and then epoxy around the inside to hold it. Any iron will work for soldering the center conductor. I've also used panel mount connectors with a threaded nut that holds them in place.

James Sweet wrote:

The outside needs to be a good connection so if you glue it, you will need to also solder it at a minimum of three equally spaced places round the circumference. Epoxy cannot take soldering temperatures so this may be more difficult than just sweating it back in place with a soldering iron.

I get good results with a Weller 50W iron with a fat 800 deg F bit in for the outside. It is ESSENTIAL to work with both covers off the tuner and the connector you are replacing uppermost if you want a nice uniform fillet that doesn't have any blobs to foul on the case with no solder dropped inside. Getting the covers off can be a royal PITA if they are soldered in place and you dont have a desolder station. This usually involves taking the tuner off the main board for access. Ones I've tried to do in situ are invariably a worse PITA than taking the tuner out.

If I haven't got a decent 50W or higher iron handy, I've had good results tinning the edge of the broken off connector, blobbing enough extra solder round it to allow for a fillet to form then reheating it with a pencil flame micro butane torch.

The centre pin will probably need a short length of tinned wire to reconstruct its connection to the board and a delicate touch with a small iron.

I haven't seen any modern tuner I can fit a panel mount connector to without crowding the coils etc. inside it. Panel mount connectors only get used for isolated chassis sets that have an internal cable from the original connector to the tuner. Thankfully, the need for multiple AV connectors nearly removed live chassis sets from the market more than a decade ago so I no longer have to stock isolated sockets.

We usually charge around £40 for this job, but if there is good accesss, you haven't lost the connector or bust it too badly and the TV is small enough to put face down on a cloth to work on, we have been known to go as low as £30. If you hand me a loose tuner, with 'pop-off' covers, with the connector and you haven't made a mess of it, you can usually talk me into doing it for £15.

--
Ian Malcolm.   London, ENGLAND.  (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
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Yes, the other shops are charging $50 to just look at it, and that $50 will be applied to the repair. So, if I go that route I might only pay $50, but I am betting once they get the $50 they will charge me another $50. Nobody will quote me a price just to solder a connector on. I have to bring it in and then they will quote me a price. I wonder why TV repair shops have such a shady reputation?

fyb

Have to take the TV's back cover off and get tuner covers off and find another junk tuner that have similar connector. Solder the connector on and then solder the center pin. Check chassis for solder cracks & resolder if needed. Done.

Shop around with model number of this tv and get 3 to 4 estimates. 80 is too high for this easy jobs.

Cheers, Wizard

They do that because way too many people waste their time, if they gave free estimates they could easily spend all their time giving estimates, none of those guys are getting rich.

THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL YOU WOULD EVER GET A REPAIR ESTIMATE FROM US OVER THE PHONE. Your car breaks down, you phone a garage the other side of town to get it fixed, do you expect to get a quote to fix it that will be the same as what you actually pay? Some stuff I'll tell the customer it isn't worth it ovet the phone though.

Drag it down the shop that asked you to bring it in and let them look at it in front of you. Before they take the back off, ask at what point does the $50 charge apply. They are probably concerned that if the connector was yanked off the tuner the main board may well be cracked around the tuner mountings. It would be worth it for you to find out the replacement cost of the TV before walking into the repair shop. DONT ask for home delivery & collection, you WILL pay extra for it in the end.

We will normally inspect the damage visually and decide if its worth booking in for repair IN FRONT OF THE CUSTOMER if the customer is concerned that it may not be worth fixing. We INSIST on opening anything that has either been dropped or purchaced shrinkwrapped off a man with a white van so that the customer can see that we aren't bulls**tting about the cost of fixing it or worse accuse us of trashing it. I've seen TVs with the whole yoke and tube neck broken off and one customer had just said, "There can't be much wrong, It sounds OK. I just want you to put a new lamp in it." Its also funny how the TV with

2 bricks in instead of a circuit board was "working fine yesterday and just went off".

P.S. I hope the shop doesn't read sci.electronics.repair and connect you with this discussion. Noone likes being told they are a ripoff before any money has changed hands :-( As to our reputation as a trade, when was the last time you hired a plumber? There are a lot of us over here leaving this trade for plumbing as the hours are better with PAID overtime, better pay, more grateful customers and *far* less sh*t from them ;-)

--
Ian Malcolm.   London, ENGLAND.  (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk [at]=@, [dash]=- & 
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I do 2 a month on average in the home and it costs about 95.00cdn and nobody has complained yet. RCA being the most common broken one,s kip.

Been in this buisness for 38 yrs and have NEVER given an estimate over the phone NEVER.

Get a Life

And if you think plumbers can be bad, try HVAC. A neighbor paid $5500 to have a heat pump installed. I put a nicer unit in my house for $1300 and that included a few specialized tools, a tank of refrigerant, and the test to get certified to buy said refrigerant. Granted I did some scrounging and got some new scratch & dent equipment but even factory new it would have been less than $2k. The guys who do it for a living usually buy the stuff wholesale, double the price, and then charge $80-$150 an hour for the labor but it's not rocket science.

Sometimes mechanical considerations with this type repair become a nuisance. A different line of attack to consider is to forget the direct original connection type repair and simply remount a spare connector elsewhere on the back of the set or even run a short piece of coax outside the set. This makes the solder work in the tuner much easier and having a short length of coax (with a strain relief) outside the set is a real convenience. And while your at it, give the customer a push-on coax connector to avoid future damage. I've never had a return after this type repair.

Dennis Harper/ snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Bronxville NY

"kip" wrote in news:newscache$6ub8pi$opo$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfeed.niagara.com:

You are a god to me.

fybar

I tell people up front over the phone that if the tuner can be repaired by replacing the connector it is $68.50 ($60 labor, $4 standard materials charge, $4.50 for the connector). If the tuner is damaged or the set has an isolation block instead of the connector on the tuner directly it is going to be more, likely about $50 more for a rebuilt tuner. We get these all the time when students are moving. When you have limited likely costs and flat rate for specific repairs by category like we do, why not tell people up front what to expect? We charge $30 for an estimate and tell them up front that any guestimate we give before evaluating the unit is just a gues. Never had a problem because people know what to expect. We are clear with people that an estimate is not a promise to repair something and that many problems may be found only after repairing what we can see is bad. When you let people know what to expect you avoid misunderstandings.

Leonard

I agree Dave, but how many shops actually do a leakage test after the repair and even test the tuning on all channels with a know signal generator? A lot of the reputation that repair shops have is deserved. Of the dozen or so shops in a 30 mile radius of us, I wouldn't trust more than 3 of them with a repair.

Leonard

Has to be mostly large screens, then, I'd think, John. I don't remember getting anythin remotely close to that when I was in this business.

Tom

A few more words about repair costs. Each shop has its own set of circumstances that govern how prices are set. Some shops are very rigid and never vary from their pricing system. I know one guy that charges according to what kind of car keys he sees in the customers hands. No joke.

But in the end all shops are subject to a universal, unstoppable downward force. We all know what it is. It's the "I can get a new one from Best Buy for less" force. This, alone with the continuing trend of less manufacturer support (unavailable schematics, high priced parts, etc.) indicates to me this is a dying trade. No one tells their kids to consider getting into this business, unlike the many years after WW2 where the trade was viable and the manufacturers worked hand in glove with local shops. And products were actually made near their customer base.

I just came from a repair shop I visited today where the owner is about to close down from the aforementioned situation. He is extremely skilled but finds himself unable to stay afloat. His lifetime of skills are dropping in value everyday. He has a shop full of repaired working units that customers don't pick up, even after offering price cuts. Some might argue he needs to do this or that, but how can he reverse the above trends? Pesimistic, maybe, but I saw a man near death today, it was heart breaking.

Dennis Harper/ snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Bronxville NY

distar97 wrote: snip)

sad thing is, if ever there was a need for the repair industry it is now. With the pressures on earths' finate resources and the drive to more recycling, there ought to be a national subsidy programme for the repair industry. The benefits from an ecological point of view are enormous: two main ones being 1)keeping, where feasible, dangerous toxic electronic waste out of landill and 2) encouraging responsible consumption behaviour patterns i.e. repair rather than throwaway-and-replace. Itb would also of course keep thousands in work and even create more jobs. Since this is a threat to the whole capitalist surplus production system, we won't see this initiative coming from the electronics multinationals. It's going to have to be a grass-roots movement, with lobbying for such a programme to be implemented by government in the interests of the environment and the long-term reduction of pollution. ........just a few thoughts!

-B

No Tom... Here is a quick breakdown..

Service Call Local $39.95 Labour $40.00 RCA-F $2.65 PST and GST $12.39

Total $95.00 Now if thats a 32 rca isnt that better than replacing the tv.

Now if thats out of town costs goes up.

john