[MadMan]

OK. Update time.

I got a new thingy. I followed the whole big horizontal adjustment guide on sams to a tee. The picture is not bad, but it's not really any better than before I did the whole procedure. The only noteworthy thing about the procedure was that I was unable to get the picture to slowly scroll horizontally, in the one step that asked for that. The picture either flies by all skewed, or the closest I got was the picture far to one side with a bit of a ghost image next to it. Also, I think it asked to see the retrace as a bar on the side, and I couldn't find that either.

It's hard to tell from the photos, but the picture is pretty blurry. I could be mistaken, but it seems like it gets a bit worse as the set warms up. The focus is turned all the way up, and it does get worse if I turn it down. Maybe one of the resistors associated with the focus is bad? There was a capacitor I mentioned earlier on that was double value on the same circuit, I replaced it with the specified one, and it did jack.

There's also a shadow of everything, if you look closely, especially noticeable in the darker image.

Turning the brightness down improves the clarity of the image, but even with the lights off in the room, the image would be too dark (and have too poor a contrast) at a level of brightness that produces a clear enough image. On the other hand, with the brightness all the way up, though the image is blurry, the screen is pretty damn bright. So... the crt is good, I guess?

The thought occurred to me at one point that the ion trap might be out of whack. Before doing anything to this set, the FIRST thing I did was mark where it was, so that's where it stayed. But I decided to mess with it, and while I don't know ANYTHING about adjusting an ion trap, the picture is at its brightest where it was rotationally, but I found that backing it up about 1/4" made it even brighter. Is that... ok? The photo below shows where I moved it to.

Also, the horizontal linearity slug doesn't seem to do much at all. All the way in or out, it has VERY little effect. And no matter what I do, the left side of the image is a bit stretched out.