How about that? Montgomery Wards made some good stuff.
 

I found this 19" Montgomery Wards TV on the curb tonight. It was made back in 1987, model# JSJ12638. Apart from a dark picture which I expected from a 21 year old TV, it had shrinking vertical.

I opened it up, and I got the most pleasant surprise ever. The flyback and power caps are on a separate board! This meant that I could remove the board that I wanted to work on without having to worry about the flyback! I have NEVER seen this setup before, and I wish other manufacturers did the same thing.

Even better, the various sections of the PCB were CLEARLY labeled! Finding the vertical section was a piece of cake. There were a few lytic caps in that section. One of them, a 100uf @35 volts tested at only 69uf. I replaced that and BINGO! No more vertical issue.

A slight adjustment on the flyback brought the brightness up, and now I have the TV playing.

Ya know... It's almost like Wards designed this TV to be easily fixed... Who'd a thunk it? Now if only other manufacturers had done the same thing...

An '87 Monkey-Wards was either a NEC or Sanyo IIRC. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Nice to hear you saved it and that it was easy to work on!

Sounds like you turned up the screen control (G2) to brighten the pic. So long as you don't have retrace lines, you're probably good to go. Nice! How about a picture of the set?

That could also be a Sharp chassis. I've fixed a lot of '80's TV's and many of them are easier to repair than this crap they make now. Everything is so tiny in these modern sets! That set of yours will probably go for years! If you can post a picture of the set and the chassis, I may be able to tell you who made it.

BTW, many sets of the '70's and '80's were built on more than one PCB. In the '70's, many sets had several plug-in modules that could easily be replaced. If you had vertical trouble, you'd swap the vertical module. Color trouble, you'd swap the chroma module. That made it real easy for in home service and for technicians that were not familiar with troubleshooting solid state circuits to the component level.

No idea who made it but I have a 1988 Monkey Wards 27" that I bought new. Picture is still as good as it was 20 yrs ago. The remote however works pretty poorly these days.

Hm. This TV has a Sharp picture tube and IC's with the Sharp name on it. I'm guessing it's a Sharp chassis.

And no. No retrace lines. I only adjusted the G2 a bit. I won't save a TV if I need to crank the G2 up so much that retrace lines appear.

I'll go and snap a pic of it.

Try taking the remote apart and cleaning the contacts with rubbing alcohol.

I should start a thread titled "JC Penny made some good stuff", or more accurately "Technics made some good stuff for JC Penny". For some reason I'm not having a good time starting threads lately...

I had MCS components all thru college and then some, and liked it. My dad gave it to me.

Here's a pic of the TV for anybody interested:

http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o...3750/Montv.jpg

In spite of it looking too blue in the pic, the color on the TV is fine. It also has a decent black level in spite of the G2 being adjusted. It's pretty decent for a 21 year old CRT, certainly better then the 90's Zenith CRT's...

RCA made some good stuff for Penney too. Mom's got a 20" AccuScan from 1986 that I freebied for her. Plugs along pretty well for its age.

RCA, GE, Panasonic, Wells-Gardner, Toshiba, Samsung and NEC all made TV's for JC Penny during the '70's and '80's. I've actually had a few TV's and stereo's with the Penncrest name. I think JCP dropped Penncrest in the very early '70's.

I know some people turn their noses up at the MCS brand (as well as other store brands). IMHO, they had decent stuff and they had junk, just like everyone else did. Those store brands were generally rebadged equipment made by a well established electronics company.

That set has Sharp written all over it. I had a couple of late '70's Western Auto Truetone brand rebadged Sharp sets and they both had fantastic pictures even though they were 18-20 years old at the time. There are two early '90's Sharp TV's in the house and they continue to work fine.

BTW, you'll be interested to know that Zenith built some TV's for Monkey Wards during the mid to late '90's. No wonder MW went under, LOL!

Well, then I guess Sharp made some good stuff. It just surprised me how easy it was to fix this TV... no SAMS needed, no $80.00 service manual, etc.

Considering that Wards sold a lot of "Admiral" branded stuff in the late 90s, I wonder if Zenith might have made any of 'em? That would be some irony.

My in-laws had a 25" Wards from the early/mid-80s that I wanted to at least tinker with. I was always curious who might have made it. I think it got tossed on their last move. I would like to find, just for fun, the last model built by Wells-Gardner, which was somewhere in that time frame.

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I hear you! I could fix a lot of those older TV's without a diagram. These newer TV's are often too complex to try to fix in the dark. A Sams is over $25 now. You're lucky if you can find a factory manual for only $25. I've also found that many companies will not sell you parts or service data if you are not an authorized repair center. Given the current situation regarding used CRT TV's, it's simply not worth the expense and headache.

That early '80's console could have been a GE. I had one that had the PC chassis in it.

The last W-G chassis I remember seeing was from the early '80's. It was a compact chassis with stand-up modules that plugged in side by side. Very hard to troubleshoot those chassis unless you replaced modules. I've seen some Teknika sets with that same chassis.