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Vintage Television and Video Vintage television and video equipment, programmes, VCRs etc.

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Old 4th Jan 2019, 8:03 pm   #21
Graham G3ZVT
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Default Re: TV repair shops

There is one long standing repair business in Bury, Gtr Manchester but they gave up therir "High St" shop front over ten years ago and now operate from an industrial estate.
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Old 5th Jan 2019, 12:12 am   #22
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There was a permanent shortage of TV engineers so regardless of qualifications if you could repair TV's you could get a job. They were generally very easy to repair then and many engineers used to spend their evenings doing 'private' work and it was a good earner. A teenager owning a car in the '50s was a rare thing, if you saw one there is a very good chance he was a TV engineer.

Peter
Even in the 70s, working for most TV rental companies was a fairly well paid job. I had full private use of a new Ford Escort estate car while many people in my street had to manage with old "bangers". Company cars were not taxed in those days and I rarely had to buy petrol from my own pocket.
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Old 5th Jan 2019, 1:41 am   #23
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Coming to the end of my time in secondary education, I was looking around. 3 or 4 years to do a degree, and I heard the colour TV course at the local tech took six years. It wasn't a hard decision.

I'm still surprised TV repair people didn't transition to fixing automotive black boxes. Each car has several, each more expensive than a colour TV and garages just keep swapping them until they hit the right one. The customer pays for each one in turn. There is no swap to try stock.

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Old 5th Jan 2019, 2:15 am   #24
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Default Re: TV repair shops

Two things definitely changed the landscape for the economy of repairs of any kind, TV,radio, machinery, appliances.

Firstly mass production with cheaper materials driving the initial price downwards, then that coupled with changes in financing & loans, people being financed into things they could barely afford (hence the GFC).

So, it became very unattractive to repair aging appliances, even with small faults, which is why we have masses of them creating mountains of E-waste.

I heard a story from a TV repair shop in Greece, where a customer some 2 years before had bought a top of the line big screen TV for some thousands of Euros. It developed a fault and he took it in for repairs and was told it would be 350 Euros to repair. He said, don't bother, throw it away. He then went to a local appliance shop that was offering interest free and no payments for 2 years on big screen TV's and 4000 Euros credit. So he got a new one right away and was watching TV again that night and no doubt didn't worry if he couldn't make the payments in 2 years or it was repossessed.

A TV tech in my town that retired about 5 years ago, told me he was taking 10 to 15 faulty flat panel TV's to the dump for land fill each week. It was not that he couldn't repair them, the customers didn't want them repaired and wanted new sets.
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Old 5th Jan 2019, 3:21 am   #25
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The days of make do and mend are gone, maybe permanently. The aforementioned cheap finance and mass production on a global scale complement the latter day absence of guilt about debt, combine into a perfect storm. We may rue it, but the genie is out.
There should be no landfill these days, although reuse should always trump recycle in an ideal world.
I might add to that the absence of guilt about origin too. No One can be in any doubt where goods come from, it no longer matters to most. Global nowadays, not National, has been for a while.
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Old 5th Jan 2019, 5:31 am   #26
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Brand names are used to instil buyer confidence. That new telly sounds reassuringly Japanese, but was probably made in Turkey.

Dixons were at it in the late sixties with 'Prinz' trying to make cheapies from countries-of-convenience sound like they came from Austria! Then they floated their own Japanese-sounding brand name when Japanese-made started to mean reliable to joe public.

Nowadays parts and sub-assemblies are traded around the world to an amazing extent It's all slight-of-hand. Say you want to do the right thing, support jobs in our own country. It's hard to find a product with more union jacks crammed onto it than a new mini. Famously made in Oxford... but the engine unit comes from Brazil and the profit goes to Germany.

Maybe the best we can do is to try to prefer products where the badge bears some relation to who made it. I think Samsung and LG are still in that bracket, or have they too transferred their cheaper models to other countries or subbies?

At the end of the equipment's life (limited by irrepairability or just fashion) even the recycling process is globalised.

A man who previously ran a firm operating in China told me, the other day, that China is getting expensive. So whither then 'cost effective manufacturing'? My guess is it'll bounce around until eventually Zimbabwe and N Korea carry the torch.

Is it a case that transport of goods is just too cheap?

David
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Old 5th Jan 2019, 11:25 am   #27
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Re post no. 26

David, if you look back in time you find that the cost and the speed of transport has determined lives for many centuries. The factors involved are many but let us take just one: Consider that the capital of the Roman Empire, Rome, had a size estimated to be about 1 million, I believe, at its height. That was only possible because of mass transportation (by boat) of grain and olive oil; both being foodstuffs that did not go off quickly. Incidentally, they could not have moved Milk by this method - far too slow. Could they have moved electronic parts and products (if they had had them then) by the same means? - yes they could, as time was not a factor. However, how much did it cost to move a ton of freight by boat then even over the comparatively short distances compared to today? - Answer a lot more. So if they could have made the things locally compared to far away they probably would have done so.

Fast cheapish air transport and very cheap merchant shipping are causing changes to the way of life of all of us to a greater extent than 'the coming of the Railways' did in the 19th Century.

Mind you, it does take a bit of imagination to see a TV repair shop opening up on the Via Appia in 1st Century Rome... Too much Christmas Sherry??
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Old 5th Jan 2019, 12:02 pm   #28
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I still work for an independent dealer We are quite busy, a proportion of work is from damaged LCD Tv's. Being an ASD for two major manufacturers has helped provide continuity of work. The recent boom in vinyl has given the audio side a boost too. I'm the oldest engineer at work now, and the last to go through the City & Guilds 272 course from the 70's. There's less done at component level than ever before. Even software updates which at first were done by engineers with interface boxes between PC and Tv, are now just USB or fully automatic. Very little of what's being sold today will be running in ten years time, because it's outdated, no spares or simply because it's no longer fashionable. I can't see any of todays gear being restored in 20 years time. Michael Gove has said that he would like to see more repair shops on the high street to reduce waste. Perhaps he should have spoken to a few us still at the 'sharp end' to see what things are really like. SJM
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Old 5th Jan 2019, 2:29 pm   #29
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Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler View Post
Is it a case that transport of goods is just too cheap?
Yes, that too.
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Old 6th Jan 2019, 11:44 am   #30
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After I retired about 15 years ago we bought a new Samsung smart TV thinking it might well see me out, not so, after about five years we started loosing the 'smart' aspect and had to buy an Amazon firestick which I'm pleased to say works well and has restored our lost channels.

The strangest thing was that after about 3 years it started loosing illumination around the edges which I suspect was due to failure of the LED's there, and I had to call out a TV engineer as it was under guarantee, first time in my life, very weird experience.

He brought a new display which is about 80% of the set and changed the boards over from the old one, nicer picture now I think they must have improved them. If it goes wrong again I will look on a certain on line auction and see if I can get one with a broken display, assuming that mine isn't, and make a good one up.

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Old 6th Jan 2019, 3:33 pm   #31
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One TV/audio repair shop still going in Kidderminster and he's got plenty of work. Thinking back to the 1990's I can remember 5 or 6 shops. There was a shop that had been in the town since the 1940's and they closed about 10 years ago.

Robin.
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Old 6th Jan 2019, 4:37 pm   #32
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I'm not aware of any left in Southampton... about 10 years ago I knew of two...

I kept saying to myself - "I must take my vintage storage oscilloscope to be looked at" (I still don't fancy tackling it - I've never seen another on ebay so don't want to risk destroying it). Of course they both closed before I got around to taking it....

Modern electronics almost never fails - especially things like TVs.... Standards move on faster than things fail.
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Old 6th Jan 2019, 5:49 pm   #33
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Default Re: TV repair shops

There is one just two miles from our village, they also do aerial installations.
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Old 6th Jan 2019, 5:54 pm   #34
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There Is one just two miles from our village, they also do Aerial installations too
Hmm I wonder who that could be?!

It was a good place to go when the old man had it but he retired to sunnier climes. The current proprietors sort of took over. Their aerial work was not something that I could recommend after going to many remedial jobs! I have no idea what their repair quality is like though. In fact I was unaware that they still did it.
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Old 6th Jan 2019, 8:32 pm   #35
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There are a couple in the Newcastle area, one run by Fernseh of this forum and another over at Hexham that is in an antiques shop and does a variety of radio, TV and Electrical repairs.

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Old 7th Jan 2019, 7:46 pm   #36
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler View Post
Is it a case that transport of goods is just too cheap?
Yes, that too.
I'd disagree: having grown up with parents who'd been imbued with the WWII "make-do-and-mend" live-with-poverty approach, I've been only too happy to live my life rejecting this.

Cheap global transport, and the benefits of low-cost manufacturing it gives us access to, mean that for the last few decades:

Now, Ordinary People can Easily Afford Nice Things.

And surely that's something to be celebrated!! Long gone are the days when buying a colour-telly cost several months wages for a 'white-collar' clerk [and probably needed several visits from the repairman every year].

Low-cost manufacturing freed us from enduring such nonsense. As to resource-utilisation, it's the case these days that over 50% of steel/aluminium requirements are fulfilled by recycling - so lessening the need for people to sweat their lives away working in old-fashioned horribly-polluting blast-furnaces/steel-mills/aluminium-smelters.

Also, the ubiquity of cheap electronics will provide loads of goodies for future generations of 'vintage' enthusiasts: I foresee in 50 years time a couple of twentysomethings discovering Grandad's iPod-1 in a box in the attic and being utterly perplexed at how they needed something so bulky to hold a mere 500 tracks of music - and how primitive it was that back then you listened to music via earphones rather than through a cranio-audial induction implant.
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Old 7th Jan 2019, 9:26 pm   #37
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As far as I know, there are no TV repairers around here. There were certainly several in Newbury in the 80s. I think the last was Andy Green who worked out the Faraday Road industrial estate. Not sure when he packed it in - early this century I think.

https://m.yalwa.co.uk/reading/ID_119...aday-Road.html

It would be a tall order in this area to maintain a high-street presence with the low cost of TVs and the high level of property rental and business rates.
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Old 7th Jan 2019, 10:20 pm   #38
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It’s not me BTW!
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Old 9th Jan 2019, 1:10 pm   #39
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This is a very informative and geographically interesting thread. I've posted elsewhere about the two brothers who ran a TV repair shop in Rammy from the 1970's and who sold very efficient Aerial Boosters at one time re TV/Radio Reception and also 2 Metres-I still have at least one. Their's was the type of personal service described here and for a long time Residents would get older TV's repaired or buy reconditioned ones [despite modern brands] on the basis of trust. They kept going but had not done any VCR/DVD repairs [for example] for a long time but I did get a very nice DVD recorder from them a couple of years ago for only £20. They would sell me the odd component etc even though they were not a Maplins type outfit. Well remembered.

The shop closed last October and is now [surprise surprise] yet another trendy Ramsbottom Cafe. "Yummy's" Chinese Takeaway [a few door's down and as featured in one of the crime thrillers starring John Simms] is an even more trendy bar with a canopy and outside lighting etc]. We do have a new shop that specialises in alternatives to plastic products which I suppose fits with the vintage basis of the Forum and at least there's only one [so far anyway]. This is all part of a project to turn a small Lancashire Town, which should be more like Skipton, into "New Chorlton" [the district in Vegan south Manchester!]

Graham [post 21*] mentioned a TV Repair shop that is now on an Industrial Estate in Bury. Which one is that? I can't think who you mean Here in the South East I've found a traditional repairer outlet near Hasting but I won't identify him as he is often very crowded with work as it is and I wait for the limited times that he is open before going round [eg he tends to close from Xmas to March re the back log]

Dave.

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Old 9th Jan 2019, 1:41 pm   #40
Edward Huggins
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Broadland Electronics in Lowestoft is still going. Good old fashioned service, been running for over 40 years. They change their window display about every 2 years!
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