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 ...
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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 go ...
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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 →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.
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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 →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 ...
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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 ...
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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 →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 ...
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I’ve had several of these now, refusing to come out of standby. At switch on it’s possible to see the screen light for a split second, sometimes doing this several times before going back to standby. You may need a darkened room to see this. The reason it does this is failure of some of the backlight LED’s, at switch ...
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So I had a Panasonic Plasma in for repair, lot’s of short circuits on the Y-Sus panel. A pretty common fault on Plasmas, and not always a viable repair, but after checking the screen for damage, ie blown pixels / tiny cracks in the glass, I decided it was worth a gamble on the repair of the panel.
Not an easy job, the short circuit FET’s ( field effect transistors ) require a lot of heat for ...
Continue Reading →No Picture (LED failure)
Before going any further, this isn’t intended to be a tutorial for a DIY repair! I regularly get contacted by unqualified people asking my advice, usually when they realise they’re in above their head or have damaged the screen or the power supply. This is merely intended to show that this kind of repair is possible by a qualified engineer!
Depending on the make and model of TV, LED failure can present itself in a couple ...
Continue Reading →This 40″ LED TV from Toshiba seems to be turning up in ever increasing numbers with no picture, either permanently or intermittently. If you talk to Toshiba they will probably confirm that you have a faulty screen, however, that’s as far as it will go, as far as they are concerned screens are not repairable items and the price of a new one would be far more than the price of a new TV.
The problem with ...
Continue Reading →A PS42A457 Plasma TV. Stuck in standby would be a better description and once again, the customer wasn’t really sure if it would be worth repairing. The standby light was on but there was none of the normal clicking from the power supply relays and no response to the remote or front controls.
Due to the lack of relay activity this was probably, but not certainly, a power supply problem. What the relays do is feed the ...
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Well you see all sorts in this trade but this was a first for me. I’m in touch with fellow engineers from around the world and this poor Gecko was found in the back of a TV in Albania. The TV was wall mounted and should have had a cover fitted where the stand ...
I was called to this recorder because it was locking up, it would stick on one channel at switch on and not allow any channel change or menu operations until it had been switched off and back on at the mains, even then it would only operate for a few seconds until it locked up again. ...
A quick video showing the internal workings of the turntable section, more about the small motor and pulley at the bottom left drive the tonearm guide wire. Complete with a little AC/DC to keep you interested….
[embedyt]http://youtu.be/C2GhSWHoq9U[/embedyt] Continue Reading →Ok, so I’m not sure Hi Fi is quite the word for a Sharp VZ-3510, it’s an all in one unit with an upright turntable, very cutting edge back in the eighties, but perhaps a bit gimmicky!
This one had been purchased from eBay and the radio worked, the cassette deck worked and the turntable door would open and close but it would not play the record. This took me back to a day where I had ...
Continue Reading →Yes, I know Google can be very helpful for all sorts of things, I use it all the time for finding useless information, and believe me, when it comes to TV repairs most of the advice on there is just that…useless, written by people with no formal training or skills, or even regard for their own…and others, safety!
Most trades are regulated in some way, you can’t, or shouldn’t, even install a 13 amp socket or an ...
Continue Reading →Well I say ‘old’ but these days anything over five years old seems to be considered ‘past it’. Well this seven or eight year old TV was brought into me completely dead, no standby light, nothing. This was expected to be terminal by its owner but was infact just a very small capacitor in the power supply. No, it wasn’t bulging as most of the youview and Google ‘experts’ would have you believe, actually in the last few ...
Continue Reading →Well the first three days of this week were spent in Paris, leaving me just a couple of days to catch up on all the work. There were multiple messages left on the answerphone, as we expected, so Yvonne got cracking on those straight away. I find it unbelievable that people knew from the message that we would be back at work on Thursday but couldn’t actually wait that long, aerial work had gone elsewhere and a possible ...
Continue Reading →Anyone that’s read my earlier posts may be aware of the problems with Panasonic DVD Recorders recording a favourites list rather than the selected timer program. This only happens with BBC channels and the theory is that it was an update the BBC had done to their red button / digital text service. Up to now nothing seemed to provide a cure for this but Panasonic have just made us aware that an over the air software update ...
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