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Old 26th Aug 2020, 11:02 pm   #121
Richard_FM
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

My Aunt & Uncle lived not far from Peterborough in Deeping St James for a few years, & could pick up 3 different ITV regions.

Some sets tended to be disposed of by the bigger rental companies when they bought out an independent company, and didn't want to be bothered with sourcing spares any non-standard sets.

I guess this process was sped up by some depot managers writing sets off for trivial reasons rather than making an effort to fix them.

I assume customers were offered a free upgrade to a standard set, rather than wait until the non-standard sets needed fixing and then were withdrawn.
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Old 27th Aug 2020, 7:08 am   #122
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

I remember Telpro`s, I spent 7 alful months with the London subsidiary of Telefusion and Trident, called TAM, Television and Audio Maintenance, Telpro`s were a cloned Decca Bradford 30, but were absolute rubbish, and with the thick heavy wood cabinet weighed a ton, the strange thing was the few common or stock faults suffered by the Bradford Chassis were corrected on Telpro`s, but they were totally unreliable, and a fair amount of flat Tubes as well.
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Old 27th Aug 2020, 11:12 am   #123
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

TAM! That was the firm in Leicester that I bought my Telpro sets from, I had been racking my brains to remember what they were called! I had forgot how heavy the Telpros were! And for some reason they were all a dark wood cabinet which was another sticking point with some customers when all their furniture was Teak!
The Telpros were not as old as most of the sets being disposed of as ex-rental at the time. This was when a lot of the disposal places were still flogging battered dual standard stuff. Most of the single standards sets were Mechanical tuner and full of faulty panels! If you bought, for instance, a Thorn 3000 you had to repair most of the boards apart from the IF panel and then you found the Tube was flat and had been boosted to death!
The Telpros were all in very good condition so I thought I got a bargain! I do remember the slider controls being a bit fragile but I didn't have much trouble with the sets generally, well not that I can remember....
Because they were so cheap in the first place I didn't keep them going for donkey's years.
I found a source of excellent used sets around 1985 so my cheaper rentals were changed when they became unreliable or the tube started to get poor. I had no need to recondition old sets as I had a plentiful supply!
Often I could get three or four years rental out of a second-hand set and then still flog it off as a "cheapie" for more than it had cost me in the first place! They were the days! Enough cash in the bank for a new Ford Escort every 3 years!
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Old 27th Aug 2020, 4:18 pm   #124
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

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The biggest problem I had was that they only had a 4 push button tuner and in Peterborough we could get Anglia and Midlands ITV so when channel 4 opened there weren't enough buttons!
You would think that most people wouldn't worry about two ITV channels that mostly showed the same programmes but there was the odd late night film that was different and if you had gone to the expense of a Midlands aerial you wanted Midlands! Some people also had Yorkshire ITV as well.
In the Wales/Shropshire borders in the 405-line 60s and 70s, 2 ITV chanels [ATV and Granada] was quite common: plenty of houses had a 3-element BI antenna/5-element BIII (or an Antex "X") for the main Midlands transmitters [Lichfield and Sutton Coldfield] along with a separate 7- or 9-element for BIII Granada.

Two, or sometimes even three, coax downleads! I had to resolder quite a few Belling-Lee sockets over the years due to the plug-swapping.
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Old 27th Aug 2020, 10:46 pm   #125
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

I remember Chris Bowden-Smith (Kif of Transdiffusion fame) once mentioning he grew up on the Wirral where it was possible to get Northern, Welsh and Midlands regional programming.
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Old 27th Aug 2020, 11:14 pm   #126
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

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I remember Chris Bowden-Smith (Kif of Transdiffusion fame) once mentioning he grew up on the Wirral where it was possible to get Northern, Welsh and Midlands regional programming.
I can vouch for that, well we used to get BBC Northern and Welsh, HTV and ITV then later Channel 4 and S4C. I think I managed too to get a grainy Midlands picture in my bedroom at one point.

In any case, all our equipment had at least 8 presets in use (one thing to be said in favour of the dreaded Amstrad CTV2200 which was mentioned earlier; we also had a JVC HR3300 with its 8 presets) and there were two aerials/ downleads. I eventually put in a 2 -way UHF switch box discreetly screwed to the rear of the TV stand.

We didn't get a watchable Channel 5 signal for years. No great loss some may say. Anyway, sorry about the tangent here!
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Old 27th Aug 2020, 11:46 pm   #127
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

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Two, or sometimes even three, coax downleads! I had to resolder quite a few Belling-Lee sockets over the years due to the plug-swapping.
Well, you've hit on the benefit of digital. Where I live we have three directions
of stations that are modestly close. i.e. don't need a 16 element single-channel Yagi at 24 feet.

With analog you needed an antenna on a rotor, or three antennas, to get rid of ghosts. Not a tower, mind you ... 12 feet would do..

Today, you need a double-bowtie with no reflector,
or a plain dipole cut for 101 MHz, which gets all channels plus FM!
The 182 MHz channel is strong enough to work with a UHF antenna
or horribly off resonance on the dipole (barely). Some channels on a spectrum analyzer look terrible ... but work.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 3:56 pm   #128
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

There has been some really interesting comments here.
As mentioned previously I was not a fan of the Thyristor line output stage probably because I did not understand how it worked and could not motivate myself enough to read up on this circuit. But in all fairness they were reliable and did not fail that often. I was also not enthusiastic about any of the Thorn syclops chassis such as the 9000, 9300, 9600. Very clever I suppose but could be nightmare. The pictures from those RCA inline tubes I found to be a bit soft and bleary and went down very quickly.
I thought the 9800 was actually a better set and was everything the 8800 should have been. Running the RGB outputs from a boosted 240v line much improved the picture. But I do admit they did throw up some strange faults and seem tike blowing up the decoder and IF chips.

Despite having a soft spot for the Pye Hybrid chassis I did not like the Pye 697 with that horrendous PCB PSU/Line output stage. I saw a number of burnt out Pye CT205's with some resulting in a severe house fire. They seem to like to combust very late at night or during the early hours when the occupants of the house were asleep. There was quite a few incidents when the customers and other occupants of the house narrowly escaped with their lives. What were the designers thinking off with the mains input going to the the line/PSU board first before going on to the on off switch. I know they did the same with the earlier dual standard and later 691/693 chassis but was never a problem on these earlier chassis.
The other fires we saw were on the Korting hybrid chassis and the ITT CVC8 chassis both of which I rather liked, From new they were fitted with a 220v 3 legged yellow mains filter capacitor which sadly would overheat and catch fire. It was very sad to see a burnt out CVC8. Many of you will remember having loads of the grey or white replacement three legged mains filter capacitors, rated at 250v, and would change on sight any of those yellow capacitors. It was unbelievable that such a component could be fitted to a television suitable for use in the UK and very disappointing for a company of such as ITT that we held in high esteem.
The other fire raising culprits were from the BRC Thorn stable. The width chain on the BRC1400 and some early 1500's where clearly the designers had not used their slide rules to the greatest effect with too much current flowing through the width chain causing the width control to hot, overheat and burn up. This would sometimes catch fire which was sometime serious. That large resistor on the 3500 convergence board would go open circuit with the large current flow finding another way around and causing a burn up and sometimes a major fire. The modification was to fit resistor of greater power rating. Then of course there was the 1600, or was it the 1615? large screen black and white all transistor chassis to replace the 1500 chassis. Apparently it was a burn up around the line linearity coil. This new chassis was not as nice as the 1500 and we did not get to see many as Thorn decided to recall most of these sets and most were scrapped.

Finally down to another not so good design back in the early 1980's we took in a load of newish Siemens colour televisions. Apparently there had been a spate of fires and a suitable modification was released. The fault was the pcb tracks to the scanning plug/socket was to thin for the high scanning current and would run hot and catch fire. We had to drill out the pcb to isolate the plug and socket and hardwire the scanning coils. An unbelievable error for a company with years of experience in electronics. The pictures on these sets was nothing spectacular and after this debacle I think Siemens dropped out of the TV market.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 4:09 pm   #129
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

I never had any fires with the Pye 697 chassis but agree it was a poor designed PSU/Line output stage. PCB Areas around the thermistor seem to get damaged with the heat. Presume with it being a PCB it was much cheaper to manufacture than the 691/693 version.
The sets were only 6 or 7 years old when I left the trade so perhaps they got worse with age. The CDA panel in the 697 chassis was another source of PCB trouble, exactly the same design in the 691/693 seemed to to last ok.
The CRT’s in this chassis seemed to fail low emission much sooner compared to the earlier design.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 4:52 pm   #130
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

I think what caused the fire in the CT205 was the focus unit catching fire the black plastic one would often be found with a melted patch if the customer didn't switch off the set could catch fire . Due to the acrid smell of plastic most people did switch off in time. the later focus units and service replacements were grey plastic and didn't combust.
A friend ran a TV shop in one of the Villages they closed lunchtime and left a 205 on test over the lunch hour. that caught fire and badly smoke damaged the workshop and shop. There wasn't enough left of the set to see what had caused the fire but my guess would be the focus unit.
The Pye rep told me that Pye had found some unsold stock in the late 1970s , they were going to donate them to Hospitals until someone mentioned the fact that some had gone up in smoke, so they changed their mind and destroyed them!
Another set that had a tendency to self destruct was the dual and single standard GEC hybrid colour sets. There was a carbon resistor that fed the PL508 from the boost line. Unusually the resistor would go low in value causing the height to increase the VDR tried to stabilise the the rising voltage causing it and the resistor to glow red hot. Sometimes the resistor would go open but if it didn't and the set was unattended it could burn quite a big hole in the panel. I never saw a set that had caught fire but I saw a few panels burnt beyond repair.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 5:10 pm   #131
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

I always had a spare focus unit in the car for the Pye sets but again never saw a melted one, though I can’t remember the failure mode.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 7:05 pm   #132
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It was very sad to see a burnt out CVC8. Many of you will remember having loads of the grey or white replacement three legged mains filter capacitors, rated at 250v, and would change on sight any of those yellow capacitors. It was unbelievable that such a component could be fitted to a television suitable for use in the UK and very disappointing for a company of such as ITT that we held in high esteem.
To be fair, it didn't have anything to do with the voltage rating, as those capacitors caused continental european fires as well. I think ITT learned their paper capacitor making skills from RIFA and then improved on the fire starting capability.

Quote:
Finally down to another not so good design back in the early 1980's we took in a load of newish Siemens colour televisions. Apparently there had been a spate of fires and a suitable modification was released. The fault was the pcb tracks to the scanning plug/socket was to thin for the high scanning current and would run hot and catch fire. We had to drill out the pcb to isolate the plug and socket and hardwire the scanning coils. An unbelievable error for a company with years of experience in electronics. The pictures on these sets was nothing spectacular and after this debacle I think Siemens dropped out of the TV market.
They had already ceased manufacturing brown goods for quite some time by then, so those sets would have been bought in. Siemens bought their sets from Blaupunkt mostly, but they might have used some southern european manufacturer as well for non-northern european markets and I think their French and Belgian multi system sets were made by Barco.

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Old 28th Aug 2020, 11:47 pm   #133
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

I had completely forgotten about the Siemens sets of the 80s with the burn up of the print to the line scan coil connector. I should have remembered these as I did the modification to loads of them. I am pretty sure these sets were made in Italy but I don't remember the manufacturer.

Alan.

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Old 29th Aug 2020, 8:31 am   #134
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Hi Alan
These sets where made by Siemens . They where in the system Dixion's
at the time that CGS became the ones doing service for Dixions . F/s eng
only had to swap chassis around , W/s eng had to do all the hard work.I think that there where 4 different chassis but cannot be certain about this. It might have been good if these set where only sold to customer living within 1 mile of fire station
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 9:20 am   #135
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

One horror I forgot was the THANUSSI as my customer called his Zanussi 110 degree Thyristor line output 22" colour TV. He could not pronounce Z's and it was the only bit of humour that surrounded this pile of junk!

They were a delightful elderly couple. His wife piped up as soon as I entered the living room for the first time.
'He won some money on the Premium Bonds and rushed out and bought the first colour TV he laid 'is eyes on. It broke down three times under the guarantee..' [I think they bought it from British Relay.]

It was really nasty with a very milky tube after just 3 years. Covered with dry joints that had to be dealt with using a high wattage iron on heavy wound components. Thyristor failures could cause a massive increase in boost voltage burning out the A1 presets that were connected across the boost supply with serious results. [Grundig].

Thyristor line output stages are just plain nasty with heavy current flowing through wound components causing arcing and fires. There were only a couple of good ones, the Rediffusion coming to mind. When the tube fell below viewing quality if it ever was, they purchased a Scantic 22" B2 chassis from me and never looked back. John.
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 9:41 am   #136
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

To be fair there were not many real horrors considering the complications of the average colour receiver of the time.
Armed with the makers service manual and some model experience most of the preventative maintenance procedures were common to many makes and models.

It cost very little to change a handful of small components or carry out a makers recommended modification when servicing say a Thorn 900/950/1400/1500. This would prevent call backs that were a nuisance and very rarely charged for.

I did encounter some horrendous so called repairs usually carried out by rental 'panel jerkers' that used anything they had in their service cases to bring a picture back on the TV in the other room..

I must admit I did find that almost every colour receiver I encountered from Europe was of poor quality compared with the product from the UK. It would have been very easy for UK manufacturers to improve component quality but of course the price would have increased by maybe 10-15% and being very aware of the intense competition were reluctant to do this and let's be honest, the repairs this scenario produced provided us with a lucrative income. As we all know, the Japanese proved them wrong.

All water under the bridge. Regards, John.
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 10:08 am   #137
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Thyristor line output stages are just plain nasty with heavy current flowing through wound components causing arcing and fires. There were only a couple of good ones, the Rediffusion coming to mind.John.
Hi.

Yes, they certainly suffered dry joint problems. I have to admit to liking the Grundig sets with thyristor line output stages. I don't remember them being too much problem. Their last generation thyristor line timebase sets, the GSC100/200 series were actually quite reliable if the dry joints were properly dealt with ie removing all the old solder, cleaning the pins on wound components etc and resoldering. ISTR the capacitors in the line output stage were quite critical for correct operation.

Agreed the Rediffusion Mk3 was a good chassis, and easy to work on.

Regards,
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 10:19 am   #138
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Did anyone mention the sony kv1810 yet?, they were a bit of a horror story if you didn't know the right procedure to fix them, no problems with the innovative circuitry but any deviation from the right servicing techniques resulted in very expensive failure of the gate controlled switches, who can forget the thunk of doom as the circuit breaker operated!.
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 2:21 pm   #139
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Default Re: Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

Ref- post #134. Hi Derrick, Thanks for jogging my memory there. Your right, it was about the time we were still under the banner of CGS (Currys Group Service) and had just taken over the service for Dixons. I dont think Dixons had fully taken over Currys at that time but I may be wrong,- memory not so good these days.
Your also right about the chassis variations of these Siemens sets just like the Thorn TX100s. There was a basic 20inch 90 degree deflection chassis non remote going up to the 26inch 110 degree teletex models. I remember now the plug in EW correction board on this large screen chassis giving intermittent problems. A good blanket resolder on all the wound components and a cleaning of the pins where the board plugged in to the main board usually did the trick.

Alan.
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 3:33 pm   #140
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Ref- post #134. Hi Derrick, Thanks for jogging my memory there. Your right, it was about the time we were still under the banner of CGS (Currys Group Service) and had just taken over the service for Dixons. I don't think Dixons had fully taken over Currys at that time but I may be wrong,- memory not so good these days.
Alan.
Dixons Stores Group acquired Currys in 1984. However, it wasn't fully integrated into Dixons until several years later.

After the Dixons takeover, Mastercare (Currys Group Service) took over responsibility fo Dixons brown goods servicing.

Mastercare had previously acquired (circa 1982) the Rank Radio International (Bush/Murphy) parts operation, but after the takeover by Dixons, this was soon offloaded to HRS in Birmingham (a distributor of radio, TV and video parts).
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