I had a couple of Panasonic recorders in for repair this week, this one was the combined DVD and VHS recorder, a very popular machine and definitely worth the effort to repair. It had the U81 fault code in the display, a common fault and one of the easier to sort ...
Continue Reading →I used to repair these videos by the dozen, a very common fault was not loading or ejecting the tape…and if the tape is stuck in the loading tray it makes getting the thing to pieces very difficult. Anyway, there’s a small sleeve on the spindle of the loading motor, it couples the motor to the worm gear, when it splits the spindle just spins with none of the force being transferred to the worm gear. Glueing isn’t ...
Continue Reading →I had this one in with distorted audio, plus with no disc playing it produced a bad hum through the amp. First thing to do was rule out the amp…all other sources worked perfectly so I was quickly able to rule that out. My first assumption was that the power supply was allowing ripple on to one of the secondary supplies, and on removing the case I was presented with four bulging electrolytics, as it turned out they ...
Continue Reading →This was an existing customer at an old manor house, they had used me for satellite problems in the past and now called me out to see if I could find somewhere more accessible for the satellite dish. It had started on the front wall of the house but was now on a pole so high it needed scaffolding to reach. Now, once again it was being blocked by the surrounding trees and they asked me to find ...
Continue Reading →
I had this lovely old tape deck dropped in for repair recently, my customer had recently bought it and had been told it needed belts, this seemed reasonable seeing as it was built around 1980, he even brought the belts for me to fit. But it was soon apparent that he had had a ...
Continue Reading →
I’ve had a couple of these in for repair over the last year, when working well they’re a pretty good Hi-Fi with a sought after retro vibe.
This one, however, arrived in a pretty poor state, it looked like it had been in someone’s outside shed for the last twenty years, the recessed screw holes in the back of the cabinet were full of debris, not sure what it was though, dirt / spider web or something ...
Continue Reading →A bit of a puzzle this morning, I had to go to Sticklepath near Washford where they were receiving a very poor signal from the Midlands. I discounted the Midlands remark, assuming they were just watching the ITV high definition channel, in which case you would get Midlands news. When I got there the main problem was in the Granny annex and was being caused by one of those moulded white aerial leads, they are usually bought from ...
Continue Reading →First job was out in Burrow, a quick set up of a second hand Sony tv she had been given by a friend. An easy enough job once I had run the gauntlet of six Jack Russells, once on the way in and once on the way out.
Only two jobs in the afternoon, a little advice in Staunton lane regarding the purchase of a new tv, plus the set up of a Humax PVR ...
Continue Reading →First call this year was a farm bungalow in Cutcombe suffering from no / poor signal. They had a pretty poor, but recently fitted, log periodic aerial on the chimney. In this area that was not going to be enough so we discussed alternatives such as a longer pole, a larger aerial and amplifiers, but I made sure they knew there was no guarantee it was going to be a perfect fix. In the end we settled on ...
Continue Reading →Since mid July I’ve been getting more and more reports of problems receiving the Carhampton relay. My first thought was that the relay had a fault and I reassured my customers that it would be up and running again in a couple of days…but it wasn’t. I had first been contacted by three of my customers in Old Cleeve and one in West Quantoxhead reporting a loss of local channels and it soon became clear that the fault ...
Continue Reading →These last few weeks have been very busy with the change of frequency on the Mendip transmitter. The BBC channels which were being transmitted on channel 49 have moved to channel 32, on the whole this hasn’t been a problem but I have come across a couple of instances where group C/D aerials were being used. Probably a good time to explain aerial grouping then.
In the past all frequencies from Mendip were in the C/D range, ...
Continue Reading →Another Sharp vertical HiFi in for repair, this one in very clean condition. According to it’s owner it had been bought new 36 years ago and then been stored behind a sofa for many years. All the belts needed replacing, the turntable belt was almost in a liquid state and had to be peeled from the platter, all the others…three on the tape deck and one on the door mechanism had lost their elasticity. New styli were fitted ...
Continue Reading →I had this one in for repair recently, according to it’s owner it was bought second hand in the 1980’s and has never gone wrong, if only modern equipment was that well built!
It had gone down on one channel and was brought in with it’s tuner which had no backlight to it’s display. The tuner was an easy place to start, apart from a tricky dismantling job the bulbs behind the display were easy enough to ...
Continue Reading →A lovely B&O 1001 turntable from the early 70’s I was working on earlier, the beauty is in it’s simplicity, a motor, a very simple mechanism and a tonearm is all it needs to sound superb. And the brown envelope? It was inside the case and contained a wiring diagram, it had never been opened and it proves that companies like this expect their products to go on for decades, and at some point to be repaired.
Continue Reading →
This tangle of wires was what I found in someones loft, all I had gone there to do was to get one socket working and add a new socket in a downstairs room, all the other sockets in the house were working fine.This was a converted bungalow with a bedroom in the loftspace and just a ...
Continue Reading →
I had quite a few repairs building up, most of them needing parts fitted, the first two this morning required some really delicate soldering, an AS-15 Gamma Correction chip on a Samsung t-con panel, around 1cm x 1cm with 48 pins, each one smaller than the tip of my soldering iron. This is an IC ...
Continue Reading →First call today was a nice drive up to Wheddon Cross, some channels missing and others breaking up. The main problem was that the tv’s were all tuned to the Welsh, this can cause problems as the tide rises and falls, mainly because the signal is coming in on the side of the aerial. A bit of a retune to Mendip sorted most of the problems out, except for one tv…all the mendip frequencies had good strength and ...
Continue Reading →
First job today was a problem with too much signal, yes it’s just as bad as not having enough! Obviously something common to the aerial because all three tv’s in the house were breaking up. Measuring the signal I could see plenty of strength but only around 50% quality, that usually tells me there’s something being ...
Continue Reading →I was brought this old turntable because it was cutting out on one channel, this was cured by replacing the phono leads, an easy enough job, but another fault was that it wasn’t lifting off at the end of the record. Being direct drive there are no mechanics under the platter to accomplish this so everything is done with electronics. To sense when the tonearm is at the end of the record there is a lamp and optical ...
Continue Reading →A recent arrival at my workshop, the backlights were working but the picture had a lot of shading on the right hand side and bottom of the screen. It seemed there were a few LED’s out…as it happened there were only five of the eighteen LED’s actually working. On inspection one LED had burned up completely and the other twelve had probably died of shock at the same time. They were all short circuit and it was a ...
Continue Reading →
I bought this some months ago with a view to restoring it. I was relaxing in the south of France and just looking through some old hi-fi on eBay, this one caught my eye as it was not far from where I live in the uk and it was going very cheap. Supposedly fully working except for needing a cartridge. Normally that wouldn’t be much of a problem, but in the case of B&O only the original cartridge ...
Continue Reading →
Of course, I have a personal interest in seeing televisions and other electronic items getting repaired, but consider this:
We are constantly being told to save the planet and recycle, every week I seperate all my recyclable rubbish into paper and card, plastic and glass etc. and feel I’m doing my bit to cut down on the ...
Continue Reading →
It’s not everyday I get called on to travel so deep into the countryside, but recently I’ve had a couple of calls that took me up two of the roughest dirt tracks I’ve ever travelled (on four wheels). I’m not sure my poor van enjoyed it as much as I did though, perhaps a Land Rover ...
Continue Reading →It looks like Mendip is due for a major retune on March 31st, all frequencies will be moving on that date. I have no more information at the moment regarding time of day etc. At the moment it looks like the local relays (Porlock, Carhampton etc) are not going to be affected.
Please give me a ring if you’d like my help on or after that date
Thank you.
Continue Reading →A very good question, and unfortunately the most common answer these days is not to repair. I’m not sure if that’s because people think tv’s can’t be repaired any more, or they think it will be too expensive, or they think there are no engineers left to carry out the repair. I understand also that a lot of people use the demise of their tv as an excuse to replace it with the latest all singing, all dancing smart tv.
Well ...
Continue Reading →