Electronic servicing.

[margaret]

I serviced, repaired all kind's of brown good's in the 70's, people who repaired white good's would ask if i could replace the blackened resistor's from a washing machine card (pcb), i explained that a cct diagram is needed to give the value's blackened, ...relationship's could become soured easily then, ... a minority armed with the schematic would ask for R 14, R32,... try to explain that further problem's lie within land on deaf ear's, give them the resistor value's asked.

Tv's in the valve era i missed, servicing hybrid set's (mixture of valve & transistor's mono/colour/solid state chassis's/radio's/record player's/ amp's/mono/stereo/recorder's,..a variety of customer's would call into my shop, young & old with toasting machine's, kettle's, electric heater's, valve radio's, radio cassette's, amp's , etc,...these were time's i will remember alway's,... the variety of people and the character's that passed thro my shop will remain sharp in my memory.

Have now stopped all repair's due to a trembling hand and constantly staring at copper track's and the neighbour's who live above, m own tv a toshiba 33in w/s blah blah, is now out of guaranttee, it has worked impeccably since i got it, should a fault develope i hate the idea of just removing the back cover.

A few year's of inactivity accept for changing the fuse in table lamp's from 13A to 3A?. my neighbour asked why he was rapidly ejected from his laundry room,... as he put it a loose wire as his washing machine refused to work, he had recently added an extra skt himself, and on checking the wiring to this i found that the live& neutral were transposed, effectively bypassing the skt sw that he thought would be isolated simply by switching off at the skt,..but the plug was still in the skt and on contact with the metal body of the machine and a live conductor he somehow escaped electrocution.

Getting back to electronic servicing, who will service brown good's in the 21st century? when these good's are so cheap to buy, logo's on equipment like sony, panasonic, aiwa, may appeal to the general public from earlier years of saturation, vtr's, cd, dvd, mini hi/fi, rec/disc's were all initially out of the reach of the working man, gradually as sale's globally reached out mass production enabled most to have these desired good's,... the american government in the race to get to the moon since they lost out to the ussr with the 1st satellite in orbit created the technology that is used in many good's today. so who nowaday's need's to pay inflated price's for a name alone. crt's are the heart of any tv, how they are driven is becoming smaller with smaller component count, surface mount component's are difficult to remove & replace without causing further problem's that may go unseen!...manufacturer's would prefer you to buy another rather than it being repaired.

 

[Russlk]

Amen, Margaret, I don't think there is a TV repair shop in this town anymore. Plenty of computer repair shops though.

 

[tansis]

I hate to think what it's like now, I decided to get out of brown goods back in the early 90's after opening up a Sharp 21" whose frame hieght needed adjusting,( a common enough tweek for many older sets) and was surprised to see a set only a couple of years old on the bench for such an ailment, marvelled at the single PCB slighter smaller than a sheet of A4, bewildered at the fact there was not one single pot on the board to adjust.
Three phonecalls later I got through to one of the "old boys" in the technical department...
"chuckle.. just unplug it and pop it into the post, I'll send a replacement out tonight... adjustment? ..oh no, it's factory set on one of the chips..."

Now I'm not techno-phobic but a reliance upon disposable electronics is a worrying trend, it does make one wonder if a working life shutdown timer has been squirrled into the hardware of certain chips.. after all it's become a common practice with software for some time now...

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I hate to think what it's like now, I decided to get out of brown goods back in the early 90's after opening up a Sharp 21" whose frame hieght needed adjusting,( a common enough tweek for many older sets) and was surprised to see a set only a couple of years old on the bench for such an ailment, marvelled at the single PCB slighter smaller than a sheet of A4, bewildered at the fact there was not one single pot on the board to adjust.
Three phonecalls later I got through to one of the "old boys" in the technical department...
"chuckle.. just unplug it and pop it into the post, I'll send a replacement out tonight... adjustment? ..oh no, it's factory set on one of the chips..."

That's not actually correct, most modern sets no longer have presets (or at least, not very many of them - perhaps one HT preset?). You adjust them from service mode, via the remote control - fairly obviously, there's no way anyone could send you a chip pre-adjusted for your TV, they need individually setting for each one (just as the old presets did).

Generally modern sets don't need adjusting once set, unless something has gone wrong - common faults are electrolytic capacitors drying out, and also EEPROM corruption (this is particularly common on Sharp TV's, which are reknowned for being very unreliable - much of the TV trade won't touch them anymore). Sharp have now finished making CRT based TV's, their current range are bought-in 'cheapies' from Vestel in Turkey (which is probably a step up from their recent sets). Sharp are now concentrating on LCD sets.

 

[spuffock]

I used to repair brown goods some 30 years ago, and I used to be pretty good at it. I recently tried to get back into it as a part time job, and it was a shock to find that I,m ABSOLUTELY USELESS! If anything goes out of spec the power supply shuts down, if you override the shutdown -BANG, and the sort of kit you might expect to see, like something to tell you which line went down first, nowhere in sight. Finding a fault has become a psychic thing. The weight of tvs hasnt changed much, though. A modern 32" still weighs about the same as an old philips G6!

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I used to repair brown goods some 30 years ago, and I used to be pretty good at it. I recently tried to get back into it as a part time job, and it was a shock to find that I,m ABSOLUTELY USELESS! If anything goes out of spec the power supply shuts down, if you override the shutdown -BANG, and the sort of kit you might expect to see, like something to tell you which line went down first, nowhere in sight. Finding a fault has become a psychic thing.

It's like most things, experience is what counts - unfortunately you don't have any

It's rather like going to NASA for a job servicing the Space Shuttle, with your only qualification in push bike repairing :lol:

Technology changes all the time (not always for the best), and if you stopped 30 years ago almost all TV's were valve (with the exception of Thorn sets).

The weight of tvs hasnt changed much, though. A modern 32" still weighs about the same as an old philips G6!

Actually the much larger modern sets weigh considerably more than the older ones - 36" sets can weigh 100Kg, the 30 year old 25" ones only weighed about 60-70Kg. I've carried an odd one or two over the years!.

The G6 was probably the most horrible TV ever built, we stopped selling Philips because of it :lol:

 

[margaret]

Weight a minit

The G6 was a formidable opponent with a maze of wires and enough heat from the rear that propagated my grannie's cannabis,...obviously these set's and their ilk were heavy due to the use of valve's rather than the transistor that eventually began to replace this glass evacuated envelope.

Hybrid tv's could boast that their cct's contained solid state technology. the complete plastic cabinet for large set's still had a wee while to weight?... the G6 had a wooden cabinet that if recycled nowaday's would build an excellent hutch for my grandaughter's 7 guinea pig's.... the total metal content from this set could probably contribute in the fabrication of a few vtr deck's,... who know's a scrap car from the 50's might well be part of that W/S tv sitting in your living room.

Today's tv's are large like it or not but unlike the G6,... modern W/S set's are heavy not because of chassis or circuitry or a wooden cabinet's but simply because the crt need in their slimline format to be able to project an image for the viewer in safety and that call's for more glass constructed to withstand the enormous pressure of an evacuated valve.

 

[Rescue1]

This is an interesting topic.I recently had a discussion with an "old timer" at a local radio shack.He agrees that todays techs.,as least most of them anyway lack that good troubleshooting knowledge.Anymore,you just replace a board and viola it works great.Hardly something to feel good about fixing.It is also ashame how there are no electronic stores around anymore(at least in N.J.),and radio shack is just pitiful.Electronic servicing is becoming a lost art as an industry and as a hobby.I am saying all this,and I am only 25 years old,so I was not even around when most of you gus were talking of,it must have been great..... :?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

This is an interesting topic.I recently had a discussion with an "old timer" at a local radio shack.He agrees that todays techs.,as least most of them anyway lack that good troubleshooting knowledge.Anymore,you just replace a board and viola it works great.Hardly something to feel good about fixing.

That's actually the wrong way round, certainly in domestic electronics, the 'board swapping' days are long gone (1970's - 1980's?). We've had to repair PCB's to component level (with a very few exceptions!) for a long time now.

Basically it's down to cost, the old sets were very expensive - so they could afford multiple board with plugs and sockets. In the never ending drive for cheaper sets they dropped all the plugs and sockets and built the entire set on one PCB.

Even back in the old days, you didn't just 'replace' a duff board, you then took the board back to the workshop and repaired it, ready to be used again. We would normally (for chargeable jobs) then return the customers own board, and charge for the actual work done, rather than a standard price.

I built jigs for the Thorn 3000 and Bush A823 series TV's, and fixed huge numbers of boards from those two sets :lol:

 

[spuffock]

The problem is with the economics. Your TV has packed up. A manual is going to cost £35. You have to search hard for a source of spares. The operation of the circuitry may be difficult to comprehend. when it is worthwhile to use 100 transistors in a chip to avoid the use of a capacitor.
A new set can be had for £100 or less. So this one buys a new set.
The people who produce the manuals have to put the price up by a penny because I haven't bought one. Likewise the people who try to make a living selling spares. And so it goes on. I dont think it ends anywhere. It's all made of sand, anyway.