Sunday the wife sent the daughter to get me.
"Dad come look at the TV something is wrong."
OK! I'm thinking she's changed the input or something.
I stand in front of the set and press the power button.
NOTHING!!!
No Lights!
ZILCH!





This is not the TV in the kids room.
This is not the TV in the bedroom.
This is my 50" plasma in the living room!
I'm thinking what else next.




4 years old.




I check that there is power getting to the set. Good!
I go online looking for info about the set.
I find that there is a known problem with the power boards blowing capacitors.

Monday afternoon I remove the back cover and start troubleshooting the power board.
After cleaning the dust out and examining the capacitors I find no visible problems.
Doing a power test I find that the fuse on the board is blown.

After a prodigious search for a replacement, T8AH/250V ceramic fuse, I was left empty handed.

I was contemplating the delay that purchasing the needed fuse through E-bay would entail when the phone rang.
It was my B-I-L the copier tech.
He had some fuses that while not an exact replacement OEM we could try them.

Well to make the story only a little bit longer;

I installed the replacement fuse and pressed the power button.
The power indicators of the boards lit up green.
The feeling of relief was like a weight raising from my shoulders.

I fixed the set myself for free!


Yes I am proud of myself.
(Now I think I dislocated my shoulder patting myself on the back.)
I must thank my industrial arts schooling in the San Diego area schools.
Mike Rowe would have approved.

 

I too have a TV fix story..

Background: I own a hauling business. We clean out houses before the tenants move out, after the foreclosure process so the bank can resell it, or just because people have too much crap. We also do construction clean up.

One day we get a call to do a trash out (thats the industry term for it) on an apartment that the tenants had left in ruins. Among the stuff left behind was 3 beds, some garbage, and about 4 TVs, 3 of which were old CRT (tube) tvs. One TV stood out. It looked new, and was flat! I double checked.. "You want all the TVs to go?" "Yes everything." So we put the big TV in the truck, and separated it and kept it safe.. Just in case.

Got it home, plugged it in and.... RED power light.

Hmm. I opened the side door on the TV and what do ya know. Its not a LCD, Plasma or LED. Its a REALLY thin rear projection! I pulled out the bulb and it was shattered. I debated with myself because these bulbs can get costly! I looked on eBay and found an OEM bulb in Los Angeles (I'm about 60miles away) for $70! Cool, it should be here in just a few days!

Well a few days later me and my best friend/co-worker come home from work and find a package on the door step. He wasnt planning on staying, but when I told him it was the bulb, he got very interested and decided to stay. I inserted the new bulb and.. Nothing. I fiddled with it, tried unplugging it and turned it back on and GREEN! The power button was on! But the screen was still black. And it stayed black for what seemed like hours. Then, very slowly, I saw static. Fuzz. White noise. The happiest sight in the world! The bulb warmed up and displayed that black and white mess proudly!

I now have a $70, brand new SONY 42" 1080i Mostly Flat Screen TV. It even came with a remote. I decided to check the batteries in the remote. The TV was SO new, it still had the SONY brand batteries in the remote!

Well, needless to say, we had to hook up the XBOX 360 right away! Yupp. Thats me, with my work boots kicked up playing some Call of Duty!

 

Want a story about "fixing" a TV???

My father was an electronics engineer. I must have been 6 or younger because this happened in his basement workshop, before my parents divorced.

There was this great big (to me) color TV opened up on his workbench, so I climbed up on his stool and made sure it was unplugged before I started poking around inside it.

BAM!!!

You guessed it. I must have touched the big azz capacitor used to fire up the CRT and the next thing I knew I found myself 3' away on the floor.
Bawling my eyes out like a baby.
Man, that startled me!

Learned a lesson though, that I remember to this day.

"What the Hell" indeed....

 

I remember my dad fixing our TV all the time. He would take the tubes out of the back of the TV and we would bring them to the store and plug each one in the right socket on the machine and it would tell him if it was good or bad. Then he would find the right tube on the rack and bring it home and plug it in and we would watch Roy Rogers.

 

Rick, thanks for the trip down memory lane. My dad used to do that, too!

 

ewwww! xbox...

i dont have any stories to share, only time was when our new 47" for 3600$ had lines running through the screen the warenty replaces it with a 1000$ tv...2600$ dad didnt do anything about it

 

What did the world look like back before we had dirt old timer???

 

We had a RCA in a blond wood cabinet
Maybe a 20"/22" black and white CRT.
I'll never forget the sound it made when we turned it on.
The repair man would come to the house carrying a couple of toolbox looking cases.
When he opened them up they were full of tubes packed in neat rows.

 

We would turn the TV on and have to wait a few mins for everything to warm up in order for the picture to come on. We had 3 channels, ABC, CBS, NBC. We used to have to beat the crap out of the top for the picture to quit jumping. lol

 

TVs with tubes?............hell, I remember RADIOS in the house with tubes glowing in the back!
Remember our first color TV, looked really weird after all that black and white. First shows I remember in color were "All in the Family" and "Sanford and son".

 

We have an AM radio in the basement that has tubes in it. The dang thing still works too. It is a big unit. One of these days I want to pull it out, clean the dust and crap off the tubes and restore the thing.

 

Congratulations! Tv repairs are wicked expensive!

 

When I was a kid, almost nobody had TVs at first. We would often sit in the kitchen with only a small light on and listen to various shows. I've listened to some since -- a few great ones, but a lot were pretty bad.

We did get a TV when I was maybe 8 or so. There were only 2 stations at first, but we eventually got up to four.

Tube testers in every drugstore and tv repair shops every couple of blocks. One guy came to our house and replaced the same tube 7 times -- charged for every one. He didn't get called the next time.

ArdWrknTrk the picture tube IS a capacitor. Can take a couple of days to bleed all of the way down. The high voltage goes in through the big lead that's on the outside of the CRT -- has a rubber thing on the end to cover up the hole. Can be 50,000 volts -- fortunately, not much current.

Shorebird, I hope that keeps working for you.

hj

 

I'm good with electronics, so here are my two umm.... success... stories:

1: Got a 20" LCD for free from a local store, I found out one of the circuit boards needed repaired. I did not have the tools to do it, I sent it to someone and paid like $45 to have it repaired. I got it together and it turns on now! But there are lines running up and down the left side of the monitor. I pulled it back appart and one of the ribbon cables was pinched. I HATE ribbon cables I got an identical monitor a year later for a measly $60 on ebay, so I guess I have spare parts now.

2. Some guy had a 36" or so big projection TV, the picture was a little bit fuzzy. He wanted like $25 for it but we just passed, the same guy saw us later and told us we could have it free if we wanted it. We got it.. it lasted a year or so and was fine for playing video games. Well my brother decided to take it appart to "fix it" and opened up a component that contained oil, and it spilt on one of the circuit boards. Cleaning it up didn't fix it. Anyway, I found out how to adjust the fuzz out of the screen after this happened.

TV's obviously aren't my strong point but VCR's and Printers are worse.

 

ha, HA! I was thinking more like the Cisco Kid, Superman and Bonanza!