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Old 20th Jul 2021, 11:39 am   #61
Nuvistor
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

I was fixing 11u sets within their service life and found them very straightforward and easy to fix and quite reliable. Refurbished the slightly later chassis that used frame grid valves and used it as our TV when first married , served us well.
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 12:03 pm   #62
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

I'm sure we all remember having our first CT200 in for repair and trying everything to make it work to a reasonable extent, going through the manual and setting everything up to no avail. And who hasn't been fooled by the smart looking Philips 570? Paying £30 for one in the Eighties still smarts today...
The Pye 697 should have been great - a development from the excellent 'Pye Colour Chassis' as they put it, but cost-cutting was the problem. Lots of Evo-Stik needed before you even got to repairing the burn-up.
To answer the OP's question literally, Sony TVs could be very hard to work on with panels everywhere, all hard-wired. Sets like the old Decca dual standard colour (a bit before my time) had short wires that could break and come off when you slid the chassis out. Any PCB that didn't have reference numbers on it (e.g. Fidelity ZX3000) was a pain.
And an award for the most difficult back to replace surely belongs to the Indesit mono T24EGB. Lie it down and hit it was the preferred method!
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 12:14 pm   #63
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

I always thought Painter was because it produced the picture by DSP, building the picture by painting it (reconstructing it) out of a frame store, although that might be a load of poppycock.
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 1:23 pm   #64
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

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Originally Posted by Andrew2 View Post
Speaking of the dreaded (and poor performing) Rank A823 chassis, I remember the awful thyristor PSU which would get an attack of the 'bounces' at certain beam currents. There must have been an 'official' fix, but I can't recall it. I do recall it causing us no end of wasted bench time.
And (I know I've banged on about this before) the pictures produced by this chassis were deadly. Dull, grey and lacking any sort of sparkle or life, no matter how you tweaked it it would never look nice. Alongside say a Thorn 3500 or a G8 on the soak bench it looked truly awful.
Some g8's also suffered from the juddering pics, was usually fixed by replacing the diac.
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 3:35 pm   #65
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

Wasn't there a report from the Electricity board that the amount of sets using thyristor power supplies was causing a problem for them? I can't remember exactly what the problem was but along the lines of the load being erratic due to lots of thyristors all conducting at the same point on the AC waveform?
When you think about it there were a lot of transistorised sets with a thyristor PSU. G8. GEC 'solid state'. Rank 823 to name a few, all of these sets sold (or rented) in large numbers so there would have been a lot in operation all at once.
It is interesting to see the views of other engineers on the various chassis' discussed. It seems everyone had their favourites and nemesis. familiarity bearing a part in opinions. I was dropped in at the deep end when I entered the trade in '77.
Used Colour sets were in demand . The government spending control on new sets being rented played a part, I had to keep the older sets going as they were 'decontrolled'. The firm had a lot of not so well off customers who often had a set on coin meter, they even rented aerials!
I bought quite a few ex-rental sets from work, you weren't supposed to do 'private jobs' but everyone did and the service manager didn't mind so long as you bought the parts and didn't do them in work time.
I took advice from the older engineers and mainly bought GEC dual standards avoiding the G6 because most had LOPT problems and the Pye sets because the panels had been robbed to fix the single standard ones and they still had the smokestack ! I liked the GEC dual standards, they had a tripler!
By late '78 the firm was flogging off the early single standards - anything that wasn't Pye and later on the earlier Pye single standards with the mechanical tuner if the tube was low. Over the years they had bought out other companies' rentals so there was plenty to go at. I got some really nice 3500s as they disposed of them on sight!
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 4:59 pm   #66
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

Well I must be the odd one out! To be honest I never found the PYE CT200 [A4] all that bad! OK if you turned the contrast up full and the brightness the EHT regulation was poor but I never found it bad within normal viewing conditions.
It did suffer from bad assembly of the I.F. unit, frustrating and annoying. The ELC1043 suffered from dry joints but this was common with all makers.

I used to set the H.T about ten volts below the manual setting and I discovered that this prevented that stupid fluorescent lamp starter from firing blowing the main fuse.

It's all down to the Great British public penny pinching when it comes to purchasing items. It's never a problem when buying holidays, beer and fags!

Again the PYE 691/693/697 was a very good colour receiver. I used to execute all the known stock faults with one blow of the soldering iron. Boost cap, Mains filter cap, 4 X stand off valve bases for the PCL84s and the PL802. 3 X 12K 11 watt square ceramic resistors for PCL84 anode loads. 4.7M base bias resistor to sync separator transistor. It was all cheap items and could transform a potentially unreliable receiver into a very reasonable one.

As I have mentioned before I did not like many of the Continental chassis finding them liable to burn up particularly the chassis fitted with line output thyristors. give me a good old BU208A anytime!

The ITT CVC5-9 was probably the most reliable TV of the period. I was not an ITT dealer at that time and obtained my stock from another dealer/mate that belonged to a big buying group. It's nasty copy was the 26" 'Combi Color'. Designed to run on 220V and were rarely modified for the UK. LOPTs were only available from Germany and cost about £50 back then!

No need to add to the horrible picture on the later RBM 823A chassis. How did they get out of the factory? They always appeared to have had their I.Fs and decoder twiddled.

I didn't have much time for odd 'exotica'. They took up too much workshop time when you had a heavy stream of service repairs to cope with. Oddly the customers were not prepared to pay a worthwhile repair charge but were quite happy to pay £80 [back then] an hour to service their fancy cars!

On the whole the British manufacturers did a good job considering the competition over pricing. I managed to cope with just about anything that came in the door and included a fast turn round with reliability. All my work carried a six month parts and labour guarantee that mostly involved a couple of quid for a tripler or dropper the costs of which were easily covered by the work load and gave customers satisfaction. It did away with the understanding comment that the set had only been repaired two weeks ago and it must be the same fault!

Just to end the PYE saga, I hated the 725 and 731. I had six 725s delivered while the PYE rep was in the shop. I asked my mate to open them and give them a test. Not one worked correctly if at all and the mains filter choke on one example made a noise like a machine gun! I closed the account and the rep agreed with me...Quality control did not appear to exist.
Strange how TOSHIBA managed to deliver pristine boxes from Japan and on unpacking 100% worked perfectly requiring no adjustment. These were heavy 18" models into the bargain.

I always had a liking for Thorn. Great chassis, fantastic manuals, one of the best technical back up departments and speedy spares service. [OK I've buried the terrible 16" 1600 series and the 4000 colour chassis.] Just two bad models from 1946 to 2000. Not a bad record.
Regards, John
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 6:05 pm   #67
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

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I was fixing 11u sets within their service life and found them very straightforward and easy to fix and quite reliable.
Yes Frank the 11U chassis was a delight to work on. I can still remember the stock faults and there were few. [L28 BBC2 sound-156ohm mains dropper etc. All basic and predictable stuff. There was an incredible number of models in the PYE, EKCO, Ferranti, Invicta and Dynatron to say nothing of the custom models built for rental companies and the shutter switch models. It had a low gain [HOPT] UHF tuner that needed a good aerial even in Wimbledon to give a grain free picture but nobody watched BBC2 so there were very few complaints.

The 40F was a stinker! As mentioned the tiny I.F. panel patterned and had odd AGC action to say nothing of the risk of being shot by the push buttons. PYE had a modification.. A six inch nail! Honest. Eventually they made fine tuning knobs with Aluminium ends that prevented the retaining circlip being banged off to launch the button. The Ferranti was the worst culprit due to the tuner being angled upwards making a good aim for yer face! The actual timebase board was very reliable. They should have launched it as a PAM. Happy Days! John.
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 9:31 pm   #68
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nuvistor View Post
I was fixing 11u sets within their service life and found them very straightforward and easy to fix and quite reliable.
Yes Frank the 11U chassis was a delight to work on. I can still remember the stock faults and there were few. [L28 BBC2 sound-156ohm mains dropper etc. All basic and predictable stuff. There was an incredible number of models in the PYE, EKCO, Ferranti, Invicta and Dynatron to say nothing of the custom models built for rental companies and the shutter switch models. It had a low gain [HOPT] UHF tuner that needed a good aerial even in Wimbledon to give a grain free picture but nobody watched BBC2 so there were very few complaints.

The 40F was a stinker! As mentioned the tiny I.F. panel patterned and had odd AGC action to say nothing of the risk of being shot by the push buttons. PYE had a modification.. A six inch nail! Honest. Eventually they made fine tuning knobs with Aluminium ends that prevented the retaining circlip being banged off to launch the button. The Ferranti was the worst culprit due to the tuner being angled upwards making a good aim for yer face! The actual timebase board was very reliable. They should have launched it as a PAM. Happy Days! John.
Still got a full set of those aluminium capped buttons!.
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 9:37 pm   #69
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

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Yes Frank the 11U chassis was a delight to work on.
Change that to 'is'! I've still got one working well.....
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 10:01 pm   #70
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

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This was the reason I disliked the ICC** series of chassis. We ran a busy repair workshop . We would provide a swift economic repair which we guaranteed. This meant the workshop was always busy. I hadn't got the time or the inclination to rebuild a badly designed badly built set only to have it come back for a different- intermittent or serious fault. It wasn't profitable and that was the point of offering chargeable repairs.
Doing it as a hobby or as a part time side line for interest is a different matter.

Quote:
If you did all the common faults on a Thompson you would be on it all day!
Not at all! I thought the ICC5 was quite an elegant design , most could be repaired reliably inside of about an hour or so, once you knew the weak points, I know some I repaired lasted about 10 years because I was still repairing their owners third VCR/ satellite receiver/CD system by then.

I say most could be reliably repaired in an hour or so, because the odd one (as Glyn alluded to) could be right swines!, more so as the chassis aged and you started to get some real 'nasties', still very few escaped my bench not fixed! and I was full time TV/vcr engineer working in fairly busy shops,

The French built ICC5 IMC version was a very different animal though! and as that set aged it was starting to get difficult and time consuming to repair.

In fact what ended up happening I got most ICCX sets sent along to me from other shops! along with a lot of Sharp and Sony stuff too!
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 10:15 pm   #71
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

The BBC liked to use Pye 11Us as prop sets in the late 1960s early 70s.

I presume for the above reasons they could be relied to work on cue & easily fixed when they didn't.
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Old 20th Jul 2021, 10:17 pm   #72
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

It was the same actually with the Philips Charlie deck and Panasonic G decks, a lot of engineers hated these and avoided them like the Plague, I did my homework and could re-build both decks (separately of course!) on a good day from between 20 mins to half an hour (obviously with the relevant spares kits to hand)

Then... you would come across the odd machine that would fight with you with some other obscure/weird problem and it could then take you all day!
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Old 21st Jul 2021, 8:35 am   #73
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

Interesting that one of the most hated designs is apparently Japanese - the Sharp CS. Obviously the normal mythology is that the UK TV manufacturers were wiped out by the Japanese with their superior reliability. Was the CS a Japanese design?

I've always been professionally involved in industrial electronics rather than domestic stuff, but I well remember back in the 80s that if you told someone you were an electronics engineer the next question was often 'could you take a look at my TV?'
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Old 21st Jul 2021, 9:35 am   #74
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

It only takes one manufacturer with superior reliability to wipe out all the others, you don't need an entire nation full of manufacturers. In the public opinion of the time, probably Hitachi could have done it on their own.

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Old 21st Jul 2021, 10:27 am   #75
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

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Interesting that one of the most hated designs is apparently Japanese - the Sharp CS. Obviously the normal mythology is that the UK TV manufacturers were wiped out by the Japanese with their superior reliability. Was the CS a Japanese design?
I understand the Sharp CS was designed and made in Spain. Evidently, from the production planners point of view it was a very clever design.
Pity they hadn't factored reliability into it.

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Old 21st Jul 2021, 11:15 am   #76
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

The Japanese manufacturers did have the odd problem set though, Hitachi Instavision with the directly heated tube, most failed prematurely a lot under guarantee. Sony 1810UB which could at least be fixed at a price... But again the tubes often weren't that good after a few years so repairing it was an expensive lottery.
I only saw a few but I remember a nasty little ( I think Mitsubushi ) 18" set that was full of plug in modules, all suffered intermittent lead through connections and intermittent plug / sockets mainly causing decoder and frame problems usually reappearing after passing a long soak test.
Later on Panasonic had a problem with the glue bonding the A1 and focus pots to the LOPT becoming conductive. (The 30AX chassis which had the tinted plastic door) Otherwise a superb set. I scraped the glue away and re-bonded the pot assembly with Araldite (Other two pack glues are available ) which provided a permanent cure. I am sure the glue was BEAB approved...

To a degree I think in the UK we probably expected sets to last too long back then, they were so expensive new that owners expected 10 years or so from them. I bet the Japanese sets produced for the home market were a lot cheaper and were replaced more often.
Nowadays it has gone the other way - not many modern sets are repaired on a commercial basis once it is out of guarantee.
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Old 21st Jul 2021, 11:41 am   #77
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

Strangely, the duff trinitron tubes were likely Japanese imports or at least manufactured in the UK by Sony themselves? Later on the 'Made in Germany' tubes gave problems but they were produced by SEL so that would at least make sense.

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Interesting that one of the most hated designs is apparently Japanese - the Sharp CS. Obviously the normal mythology is that the UK TV manufacturers were wiped out by the Japanese with their superior reliability. Was the CS a Japanese design?
It might have been a Spanish design. It's always a bit difficult in a multinational to see who designed what. The semiconductors used, can give a clue. I seem to remember Sharp designs with a BC327/BC337 class D output stage. That would have definitely been designed in Europe as their Japanese design team would have used some kind of exotic Japanese low-sat transistors.

Last edited by Maarten; 21st Jul 2021 at 11:48 am.
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Old 21st Jul 2021, 12:48 pm   #78
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

In the Course notes training manual for the CA10 chassis it mentions that the CS and CA10 were designed in Barcelona.

"As with the last Sharp colour television chassis ( CS ) the new CA10 design incorporates the latest technology from Japan and Spain where the receivers are designed and manufactured at the production plant in Barcelona"
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Old 21st Jul 2021, 2:24 pm   #79
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

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Interesting that one of the most hated designs is apparently Japanese - the Sharp CS. Obviously the normal mythology is that the UK TV manufacturers were wiped out by the Japanese with their superior reliability. Was the CS a Japanese design?
Sharp had a considerable presence in Spain, with at least one TV plant in the Barcelona area. In the 80s they made OEM sets (which were pretty decent mid-range sets) badged ELBE (Electronica Beltrán), or Zanela.

Theirs was the last of the foreign plants to close in 2011. Likewise, when I arrived here 20 odd years back there were five repair/service centres in my area. The last one to close, circa 2007, was the Sharp one two streets away.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that there were set designs like the CS originating here too. The CA10 was very popular. I still have one with some intermittent problem stored somewhere. Great picture when it worked IIRC.

In terms of the reliability, it seems that the likes of Toshiba, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Hitachi and to some extent Sony were, in the main, a step above the local product back in the late 70s. I was still picking up perfectly working sets from those brands as late as 2003, when they were only dumped as they didn't have an AV input and people bought Scart-only DVD players. In my view the only comparable sets from Europe in terms of longevity were the Grundig CUC series.
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Old 21st Jul 2021, 3:03 pm   #80
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Default Re: What was the worst CRT TV to work on and why?

The CS chipset and semiconductors were definitely European. The electrolytics were oddballs with the light blue ones failing regularly. They must have had a special factory to make the boards - very small high quality double sided with massive (for the time) use of SMD technology. The later DS gave us a larger chassis, single sided SRBP. A huge step backwards, of course, but a return to a fairly reliable predictable chassis.
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