How about that? Montgomery Wards made some good stuff.

[radiotvnut]

Originally Posted by MRX37

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...

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.