This could be the end of consumer electronic repair
 

I had an eye opening experience today that reminded me what I've been knowing all along. The TV repair business in not going to heck in a handbasket, it's already gone there.

A guy that is marrying my Cousin's Granddaughter brought me a very late model 32" RCA LCD set for repair. He said it was dead. I told him up front that I was not making him any promises.

This set was obviously not built with repair in mind. To open it, you remove all the screws on the back and then the front pops off. To gain access to the boards, you remove several more screws holding the LCD panel. The cables going from the panel are not long enough to move the panel out of the way for easier service. After unplugging the LCD panel, the power supply and the main PCB assemblies can be removed. Both of these assemblies are inside a metal shield; so, the shield must be removed before the PCB's can be serviced.

After not finding anything wrong with my meter, I went online and checked for a parts list for the TV so I could see what new boards would cost. They will not sell pats for this TV! The only thing you can do is send the TV and $319 to RCA and they will send you another TV. The owner was not happy about this and I could tell that he didn't trust me. He said he'd come pick it up and throw it away. I asked him if he wanted me to dispose of it and he laughed and said he'd come pick it up. I told him that I had no use for it and was just offering to get rid of it so he wouldn't have to make a trip over here. He was supposed to have been here in a few minutes and that was 3 hours ago.

It's pretty sad that parts are not available for this set and all the company will do is swap out the set. I understand that the few TV shops left around here "take in" these sets; but, they charge a very high check out fee up front. That's probably the only way they can make any money, especially if more of these TV's are not being repaired.

When we started selling plasma and lcd TV's at tweeter they told us straight up that screens were NOT repairable.

Evan

I don't expect brands like RCA or Zenith to produce much of anything good these days. Those brands are shells of their former selves. I think TV's made by Samsung and other foreign companies (with the exception of China and France) care more about quality then our domestic brands do.

RCA died in 1988. Thomson reanimated its corpse. Now RCA's corpse is deteriorating and the result is electronics that are no better then the Chinese junk for sale at Wal-Mart.

I thought there was a US Federal law requiring companies to supply parts for 7 years from the end of production.

I thought the same thing; but, several of my TV repair friends have had problems getting parts for TV's that were 3 years old or less. These were not all throw away junk. Many times, the sets were more expensive big screens, etc.

Recently, a friend of mine was asked to fix a Zenith HD RPTV that had convergence problems. There were some burned resistors on the convergence board. He could not find the value anywhere, even from Zenith. He tried to get a complete board from Zenith and they said it was NLA. Zenith did, however, provide the owners with a new set since the old one was "unrepairable".

I think it's now gotten to the point where companies must make the set good if it's under warranty. After the warranty expires, they don't have to give you the time of day if they don't want to.

I forgot to mention that this RCA was made in, you guessed it, CHINA!

000

There is the answer to your question, given the hourly rate of a good tech and what the assembly line people in China get paid it is cheaper to replace the whole set and probably not even worth the shipping charge to ship the old one back to China for repairs. What all this does to the landfills is another story.

Speaking of landfills, there is a warning on the back of this set stating that the product contains mercury and that the TV should be recycled properly. It seems to me like there would be a lot less electronic waste if they would build stuff to last longer and to be easily repairable when it does fail.

I asked a repair guy the same thing when told he couldn't find a volume unit for my Yammy made in 2000. He said he thinks car parts have to be kept available for 10 years, but then cars are much more expensive than most electronics and it's not just the wealthy that need cars... almost everyone owns a car or two.

I hear Tweeter Etc closed it's service center this week. It is difficult to make a buck repairing modern drek. People want it cheap. Guess what goes out the window?

what a coincidence... it was a Tweeter repairman down here in Houston I was talking about, working on my Yammy. Wonder if they folded up shop, too.

It's not just the new style TV's, I'm seeing it in the M.I. industry too. Have seen amps made by QSC, Ampeg, Crate, Line 6 and others that had boards full of SMC components and/or IC's where model numbers were obscured and worse yet a few where the chassis was folded up around the main PCB so they couldn't be removed! The jacks and pots protruded thru the front and back panels with less than 2mm of play. In the case of QSC and Loud Technologies (Ampeg/Crate) I was told that if the items failed under warranty, the customer was to return the item to them where they would NOT repair the item, but simply ship out a replacement. Post warranty, if the item was out of production, the customer was on their own. In the case of the in-warranty Line 6, the customer was sent a complete replacement combo amp, with instructions to "throw away" the bad unit! :sigh:

I bought one of those Roomba robots from Amazon. It was a re-manufactured unit and it did not work. After a couple of go-rounds with the customer service folks, during which time they sent me a new battery and a lot of dumb advice, they finally agreed to send a new unit. They said I was to reuse the removable dust bin part on the back and install it on the new unit. As to the rest I could keep it for parts or toss it.

The real shame of all this is that people who had been eeking out a living doing repairs are now on the dole or trying to find another occupation. The companies might have at least given them some warning.

Yes I have worked on those $200 Vox amps. They are unrepairable.