One man's junk is another man's treasure

[radiotvnut]

Well, in this case, it may not be a major treasure for me; but, it will help me raise the funds to fix some of my old treasures.

While coming home, I spotted a large BPC TV sitting on the curb in front of a house two doors down from me. I went to check it out and it was a 35" Sanyo CRT set from February, 2007. The only thing it needed was cold solder joints on the vertical IC to be resoldered. Now, it works just fine. I was hoping this set would have a DTV tuner; but, it's just one month too old. I think the Government required all TV's to have a digital tuner, beginning in March, 2007.

Then, another friend called to say that he picked me up a TV that was sitting by a dumpster and that someone had cut off the power cord. He brought it over and it is one of those dreaded 25" Zenith's from '97 (the bad CRT era). I connected a test cord to it and it fired up with a watchable picture. The tube was obviously weak; but, I've seen a whole lot worse. To make it look a little better, I "cleaned and balanced" it with my B&K 470 CRT tester. I figure the AC cord was cut off because either the owner needed the cord for something, wanted to make sure that someone was not able to simply plug in the TV and use it, or some copper scrapper cut it off. The guy that gave me the TV was complaining about how people always cut the cords off of stuff. I told him that there are times when I'm thankful when ALL they do is cut off the cord. Too many times, I've seen TV's that were smashed to pieces that could have likely been easily fixed before the scrappers got to them.

Right now, I'm going through a phase where people seem to be buying used CRT TV's if I price them cheap enough. Even though they don't bring nearly as much as they did 20 years ago, they still bring enough to buy capacitors and other parts for my older stuff. Some of the people who have bought these sets from me have said that they have had bad luck with flatscreens and that they are seeing too many flatscreens in the trash; so, they are sticking to the older sets.

[Wizard256]

You'll need a 100uF 35V capacitor in that vertical circuit.

Cheers, Wizard

[radiotvnut]

Yeah, that's the cap that causes lines and foldover at the top of the screen and will eventually kill the vertical IC. Even though the set is working OK, I'll probably change that cap for good measure. I see this cap fail in many brands of later TV's and it seems like 3-5 years is the age when these caps start to fail. I usually replace that cap with a high temperature cap with a higher voltage rating than the original.

[Zenith26kc20]

Also ESR the caps in the power supply. If memory serves me, the 63 volt cap dries out and kills the switching regulator. Been a long time since I have seen one of them though....