Beating on a television to fix it still works with modern plasma sets
 

I hope i am not breaking any rules by posting a youtube video link, but this made me laugh.

It takes a while but the person in the video seems to accomplish successfully what he set out to do.

Here's someone "fixing" a plasma TV with a baseball bat and not destroying the set!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKJcB...layer_embedded

(be warned there is some foul language on the soundtrack)

I've done it with a very hard palm slap directly to the screen of some Zenith 15" sets I have at the ballpark. They would be showing nothing on the RF side and "whack" they work. Loose or corroded connections after six years. I did it a few weeks ago in the press box to the amazement of a box full of writers. They were howling.

I have fixed a few....lots of cracked solder joints in the power supplys. I think the new lead free solder is crap and with the tin whisker factor all the new stuff will be gone once the whisker start growing.

"Dave A Fonzarelli"

Never been a fan of mixing PCB's with tubes, but the past few years I've had more and more guitar and bass amps brought to me with intermittent boards, all thanks to hairline fractures. These boards are assembled and wave-soldered by machine. The failure rate is high and usually happens within the first two years of purchase.

Bryan,

The "Fonzarelli" comparison was noted that night by the ancient scribes in the press box and I wear it proudly. I remember smacking a RCA TK-42 with the same fine results around 1973. Oh, I am getting old. "Bam!"

Oh yeah, had a RCA XL-100 console that required the occasional whack to get it to work.
Finally pulled and resoldered the tuner board, ending its problems.

My stupid GE CTC-177 still needs a slap every now and then. This is one of those infamous chassis with the poorly soldered tuner shield.

I also had a 12" Zenith B&W portable that had vertical lines on the left side of the pic after swapping some tubes from a busted 17". Slapping the 12" kept moving the lines to the left; after a few minutes, they were gone. Darn thing lasted another 15 years.