Fun with Griplets!
 

Remember the problems with GE sets back in the 80's.. The dreaded Griplets?

I bought an 1981 GE 19" color set from an Estate sale last week that had never been repaired, and likely never used since the 1980's!

It had intermittent Blue, and no sound.. I replaced the open speaker, and resoldered the griplets on the video board.. The thing looked like brand new inside. For as little as I will use the set, it will be fine for a couple years or more.. The proper repair was to run a wire through, and solder on both sides. Not something I wanted to do again, especially when I am not getting paid to do so!

It sure produces a nice picture though.. Watching Barney Miller on Antenna TV right now..

Would that be an EC chassis?

Yes, EC it is.

Now we're talkin', those sets can't be common at all. May I see a couple of photos?

No, EC sets don't seem to be common anymore because most of them probably went in the dump 20-25 years ago. Even the PC chassis (made from about '82-'86) are not that common anymore and I used to see loads of those sets.

Yeah...most saw their date with a packer truck LONG ago...,and many probably had good tubes too. Just those darn griplets...

I have an "EM set" --a console with cold power supply, but the rest is a LOT like the EC chassis. Not sure how good the tube is..

The CRT's seemed to stand up rather well.
I just got used to re-solder the griplets real well on both sides of the board.
When the sets were in warrantee, GE used to just furnish new boards. The dealers didn't have to return the defective boards. :sigh:

Lets see W17 A-B-C did every one in Middlesex county I think.
Much more trouble than the AA-AB-AC chassii. Tap it anywheres
& every symptom flashed before your eyes. And there was
that damn one knob 82 ch selector:puke2:
Well they did keep us fed for a few yrs so not so bad.
They did run good if you got all the ints.

73 Zeno:smoke:

So most of them are are up in Green Bay in and around Lambeau Field, eh?

My experience with GE CRT's from that era is that the 19" grey-faced tubes used in the EC chassis and early PC chassis held up the best. The later PC sets with the dark tinted CRT's didn't seem to hold up as well and I wonder if these later CRT's were from a different supplier (I have an idea that they may have been Matsushita-sourced)?

Make sure you do all the griplets on the power supply module too. EC extra crappy. lol. I bought a YM chassis set in 80 and it was great. Only thing I changed was the IC in the wideband amp and the Flyback and H output transistor. Replaced it with a Sylvania C9 Chassis. CRT was crap in 5 yrs.Dropped a JVC crt in it. Looked better than new too

We had a Montgomery Ward branded GE 19 inch set in 1980 that had the grey faced tube. I remember the color was fantastic. The set ran for three years before the white four lead safety cap shorted. After that was fixed the set ran trouble free for many years after. The plastic cabinet always felt rather flimsy but the set was a great performer. We never had trouble with any griplets. I suppose more of these sets would be around if they had better build quality but it was the Eighties after all when most electronics went through a quality slump.

If the Griplets had not been there, I think many more of this chassis would have survived. That one thing, the major weakness. The CRT was a good one, the design was otherwise decent. A little build quality and less cost cut nature would have made this chassis into one of the better ones.

That was true of many of the other GE products.
If a GE product isn't built to a price point, they're rather hard to beat. Look at their medical products, Jet engines ETC.

A picture of the 1981 GE, still working great.

What the heck is a griplet?

A griplet was a type of soldered rivet that connected traces on both sides of a double sided circuit board. For some reason, the heating/cooling of the set caused the connections to break and these GEs were full of them. All kinds of intermittent problems, especially with the video. I used to go over on service calls of customers who had those consoles, and spent sometimes hours or more soldering and repairing those simple griplet connections. Problem was you couldn't make any money at it, except for labor, as there were no parts to make a profit on. Just time, solder and hook-up wire. Sets were fairly good performers once all of the griplets were taken care of. Of course there was always the one or two that I would miss, and then had to do another callback, finding one more that was giving trouble. These were the type of sets too, that if you gave them a good thud with your fist, it would work again, (well for a while). Never the less it wasn't one of GEs good ideas. I think also they were found in other makes and models as well, but mostly in GE.

Thanks. Nice set for sure. Tin can cabinet?

I reckon a lot of the GE sets whose griplets failed early on were properly repaired and survived. I would guess that even then most people didn't want to toss sets quickly.

The cabinet is plastic all the way.. Metal would have cost too much! LOL!

The first one I bought in 1982 looked just like this, but had the dark, almost black woodgrain finish. It was less than a year old. I spent a whopping $75 for it, resoldered the connections, and resold it for $150.. Then, that money was spent at the local police auction on several cars to resell!

I guess I was a young Mr. Haney back then! LOL!

I didn't learn about the term "Griplets" until the mid eighties, at the tv shop I worked at before opening my own. I just called them feed through rivets.

Griplets, the technicians nightmare.

The only way we ever got these sets reliable was to take a small jewelers screwdriver and make a small hole for a wire to run down the top trace and connect all of the circuit together and only solder the bottom side. Just resoldering them was futile, would fail in a very short time.

The EC chassis with the power supply behind the chassis and directly under the neck of the CRT had to be removed and redone.

The griplets were everywhere even in the tuner circuitry, Workman (WEP) even made a repair kit for the Wide Band Amplifier module.

Before production ceased on this chassis there were replacement boards from GE that did not have the griplets. I think the deflection and video had been redesigned to use bare wire jumpers instead of griplets.

Worked on a lot of those sets pretty good performers but most people just tossed them when they gave trouble out of warranty.

The Horizontal circuit gave some trouble with the Flybacks.

Like everything starting with the YM chassis.

You had to get a "grip" after a day of griplets !

Sure glad we had other brands to work on to break the pattern.

rrrhre2s

The other common sets with double sided boards were
mid 70's Toshibas. They put a stake through the board instead
of gripplets. Both the mother board & modules had them &
lots of intermitants showed up in a few years. They changed
to hard wire in a short time. RCA had some but they used plate through
& only problem I seen was a few burned. Also Maggy tuner
pkgs on C1 & C2 chassii IIRC. I know there were others but cant
remember now:scratch2:

73 Zeno:smoke:

I found these notes my Dad had from the days of Griplets. I can interpret if needed. :yes:

These cover the EC as well as the AA and AC chassis griplets. Pretty self explanatory if you have the set in front of you, gibberish if not.
EC Chassis

http://i1380.photobucket.com/albums/...pssqj4oukj.jpg

http://i1380.photobucket.com/albums/...psvjlesjxn.jpg

AC - AA Chassis

http://i1380.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3kbglwkn.jpg

http://i1380.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8ytg84qj.jpg

Unsure, probably AA/AB/AC chassis:

http://i1380.photobucket.com/albums/...pskvgfjcdh.jpg

Ahhhh I reckon it does!!

Good for you......... I hope she works along time :)

These GE's bring back memories. I made a load of money off of them. Most of the ones I saw just needed the feed-thru stakes soldered or hardwired.

I think I still have an EC chassis set in my storage building. I don't know why it's even still here. Maybe I missed it during one of the purges.

In the 80s I use to have a lot of GE's given to me, generally with an intermittent no-power problem. Back then I had no idea what to do with them and junked 'em all. I recall one particular console that, a couple times, worked when I picked one end up a few inches and then dropped it. If I'd known then what I know now I could have actually fixed some of them and made a few dollars.

I only ever profited from fixing one TV, time will tell if that ever happens again.

Captian Moody, I recall unpacking those in 1981. Fantastic value and saw many back in about 3-5 years for the inevitable failure of GE's wave-soldering to fill the feed thru griplets.

The place I worked had a solder station and bench spot just for griplet service.
Since I was the junior tech, I always got this job. Our standard griplet service included etching the trace adjacent to the griplets and we never saw one back afterward.

AA-AB-AC was the most popular Griplet set as it was Porta-color evolution set and likely got bounced around more.

EC and PC was definectly the "Griplet Plus" I think we used to count them when done to make sure we got them all.

PC Chassis doesn't use griplets. GE used jumpers to connect across the top of the board. There are no copper runs on the top of the PC chassis boards like the AA-AB-AC and EC chassis.

So that's why the console sets never did act up, just the vertical cap - trade secret.:D

C621, 100uF/50V, replaced with a 100V cap for call-back prevention. :thmbsp:

Sears had us use the EXACT replacement. It even had the GE part number. I think I re-replaced 2 of them.

My own repair jobs used the 100v cap.

I'm sure that GE exact replacement capacitor cost 3 times more than the better 100V version. Sounds like a case of the powers that be at Sears thinking that they know more than the technician who is actually doing the repairs.

....or liability, or for warranty reimbursement - the warranty contracts always stated we had to use OEM -supplied parts. GE upgraded the cap to a 100V cap in 1992-3ish - they "blue-sheeted" each package. The blue sheet was either a mod or special instruction, similar to RCA's SPS instruction sheets. They stuck with Marcon 105 degree caps for the replacements - we were using Panasonics from Digi-Key for all repairs by then, long after warranties had expired.

...

Generally yes - but not so for the C621 in the PC chassis. One look at it's location and you'll see why - placed about a mm off of a large heatsink, just baking, and with a 42V vertical (ramp) signal placed on the cap - 50V was marginal, and the original was already a 105 degree cap - back then, there were no caps marketed for Low ESR or for high ripple current. The blue sheet with the GE replacement walked you through a GE engineer's explanation about capacitance change (they generally lost about 50uF, along with an ESR jump above 3 ohms) and external heat - and about 4 years late...

PC chassis sets were the only ones we didn't seek warranty reimbursement for the replacement caps - the caps that GE supplied were the same 50V Marcons for about 3 years, and we knew they wouldn't last, so we ordered up a bunch of 105 degree 100uf/100V Panasonics from Digi-Key at 13 cents a cap in 100 quantities, and had to restock several times - so we probably saw 200-300 of the sets. GE finally replaced the cap with a 100V one(also a Marcon 105 degree), but it took about 3 years after the warranty period was over.

Out of warranty repair was $25.80 - 24.50 labor, plus the cap and tax. We could quote an estimate at the front counter on PC-chassis sets. GE reimbursed us about $17.00 per set for warranty repairs, and we did about 50-60 sets. Filling out the forms took longer than the replacement of the cap and a burn-in run. Two weeks later, here comes the payment from GE. Most sets failed outside of the warranty period. Fun times - like money on the street, just waiting to be found!

Interesting stories here! I've owned a 10", 13", and 17" AC chassis and I thought they had fantastic picture tubes in terms of contrast and color fidelity. But, the 17er had too coarse a phosphor layout for sure. I had to replace the filter capacitors on all of them due to being very sensitive to line voltage fluctuations which caused the pic to pull in momentarily.
I still have a 19" PC chassis which needs a horizontal output replaced and some other component level repair, after I stupidly used a metallic screwdriver to adjust its slight width problem.

Sent from my SM-G360V using Tapatalk

Classy looking set!