Loved it! I was the chief technician of a major service center in the US before I became disabled and forced into retirement. So I tell you the story I know you're going to get a kick out of it. So now I'm 62 and completely a quadriplegic from the neck down. I have 2 nurses that take care of me. So my female nurse age 56 was my technician for this project. Her son has a LG 65 inch 4k TV that he says powers up then shuts down. He tells me he's going to throw it away. Now he knows that I was a chief technician for a long time before I retired but he's determined he's not going to work on it it's something massively expensive and I'm telling him we can repair this if you will be my hands. So he decides you can have the TV if you want it. Absolutely I said! It sits in my house about a month. So I asked my nurse and she agrees to try. I have trained many technicians through the years your technique was beautiful. I wish we had worked together. Anyhow I downloaded a schematic diagram, looked it over for the most likely possibilities, capacitors, connections, and power supply sources and how to determine if the LEDs will trigger the main board to shut down the power supply to the driver board. We tested a few things and I determined the LED strips were bad. I figured my odds of getting her weld a LED on a strip that was defective was pretty slim so I just purchased the full array for $50 on eBay. At about this time her dad walks in the door and sees the exploded views. LOL at every step along the way she's saying what's next, what's next, what's next. This time when she said what's next, I looked over the TV, everything was connected, everything was mounted, all of the screws except for the ones in the back were all used. I said plug it up! Really, she said. I saw the LEDs come up and stay up this time I knew it was working and I said good job it's working. She had to look underneath but the smile on her face when she said wow it's got a beautiful picture. I told her dad I have trained dozens and dozens of technicians over the years. She did everything right, she didn't break anything, she put everything back exactly the way it was from the factory. I could not have done better. Anyhow about 200 screws later she did a fantastic job. I'm sure you have seen all kinds of butchered electronics where other technicians have worked on them. Unless you take fingerprints I'm willing to bet you that you would never know anyone was ever inside much less take had it completely apart the change the LEDs. I should have videoed the entire thing it would have made a great TH-cam video. A total of 4 hours later I have a working 4K 65 inch LG TV For a computer monitor. Like and subscribe I'll be watching other stuff you do I will be helping sitting here saying, check that I bet that's what's wrong with it! :-)
Women are ideal for working on delicate jobs due to having small hands , I got my daughter to replace the headlamp bulb in my car because I just couldn't get my hand into a very small space, in fact if you look back into the history of radio manufacture in the UK most sets were hand built by women, you did the right thing replacing all the LEDs, I tried just replacing the faulty ones years back but then a few weeks later the set comes back with a different failed LED and you have to do the job all over again , after replacing the strips always turn down the BACKLIGHT setting down to reduce the current passing through the LED S this will ensure a much longer life .
@@dperreno We don't know his financial situation and I'm sure we can both agree that someone who is quadriplegic from the neck down has a lot fewer options of how to spend their free time. He will definitely get more use out of it than she would.
30 year Aircraft Avionics Tech here. This is the about the best example of Troubleshooting I have yet seen on TH-cam. Nice to see a fellow Technician fighting the good fight against engineered obsolescence. Cheers form the U.S.A. !!!
A joy to listen to your expertise. Can I offer you a trick which I would use in a case like this with shorted parts: Use an infrared camera and inject a current into your circuit. The shorted part will light up in the heat sensitive display. You can get cheap IR cameras to attach via USB onto a mobile phone.
63-year-old controls engineer here. My apprenticeship was in electronics, and I was taught to repair to component level and it's a skill you never loose but one that does not seem to be taught much now, what with the culture of 'swapnostics' as I like to call it (i.e., replace a whole PCB or module until something works again). I had a faulty mouse the other week - worth £15 and my partner said, "just chuck it for goodness’ sake and get another" - but I couldn't resist taking it apart to see if I could fix it, and sure enough, it was just a bad solder joint. We throw away far too much kit nowadays, but as Michael Dranfield explains in this video, it doesn’t help that manufacturers do not provide schematics now.
@@TutterzoidExactly! These TVs are literally designed to fail and it appears that there's a deliberate intent to make them either uneconomical or too difficult to repair.
It may only be as simple as a faulty tiny cap. but finding the faulty cap is the hard part. Thats why these type of videos are so helpful to someone getting into the industry, or even a hobbyist.
We of the old school have been replaced by board changers, who have the nerve to call themselves technicians , who probably have had no training to component level, and this TV would have been a scrapper, I despair. marvellous video
The tables have turned full circle, there was board swapping in the 80s and lots of companies advertising in Television magazines selling used boards for thorn 3500 etc so anyone with no skill could repair a TV, then in the 90s all this disappeared with the single pcb and now 40 years later were back to board swapping!
Consider the value of a TV compared to the cost of the repair. It it took 2 hours to take apart, fault find, replace component and put back together again, that's about the value of the TV in used condition.. Most people don't want to pay more to repair something than it's actually worth, unless it's got some sentimental value in which case there's big money to be made off the customer
In the USA, we had all 3 major brands were boards. Vert, horz, audio, ect. RCA, MAGNOVOX, ZENITH, all board's. Then again, I'm 62 now @michaeldranfield7140
This is why there is so much e-waste. An expensive TV lost to a 5 pence capacitor. A great video, I'll bare this in mind when my 3D TV fails as I can't replace it now 3D is not a thing anymore. Thanks Michael for sharing.
57 year old ex Tv / Video Serviceman here from Australia, thank you for that excellent video , I have a ton of stuff waiting for me to fix & or at least attempt to repair, including a bunch of Flat screen LCD's , I cant stand the thought of chucking them out !!! , so maybe one day they will live again, I would much rather even giving them away to someone less fortunate, than just see them head for land fill!, your video has inspired me, I just need to get busy and sort out my work shop area's , so I have somewhere to work !, a mission in itself sigh!, oh well cheers & thanks, Paul from Australia :).
My hats off to your sir. As a retired TV repairman, you have my respect! It is nice to find someone on TH-cam that actually knows what they are doing. That meter you made is a lifesaver when it comes to troubleshooting shorts.
@@michaeldranfield7140 As I said I was a retired repairman. When everybody started going to surface mount components I knew the repair business was in trouble. I really don't miss the repair service but every now and then I come across a repair video and watch it. Yours was refreshing! A lot of the people making repair videos are noticeable amateurs with just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
Thank you for time, I have been teaching myself electronics for the last 5 yrs - I just love it and can't get enough of it. Im 66 and disabled trying to keep busy. I have to say I have seen al00000000000t of videos on TH-cam and I must say I love your approach, calm manner and very well put together teaching methodology. Thank You please keep it up!!
Great stuff. My TV had a "back light failure" on Tuesday. Turned out it was of warranty and I was told it'd cost hundreds to get the new boards in, from the distributor. Took the TV back home, opened it up and a popped capacitor is clearly visible on the board. I'm waiting for the replacement to arrive and my TV will be working after paying $0.85 for the part. All the talk of "climate what what", yet these corporations are creating billions of tonnes of trash each year that needn't be trash at all. Right to Repair action needs to be law in all countries and all the major manufacturers must be made to abide by it. Then we'll see a real change.
- Krakk3rJack You fail to understand a number of things. 1. CORPORATIONS and CORPORATE names are always written in ALL CAPS 2. CORPORATIONS are DEAD entities 3. CORPORATIONS cannot communicate with the Living 4. The DEAD do not care about the Living 5. The only environment CORPORATIONS care about is the economic environment There are many things you will fail to understand unless you study Law for the next twenty or thirty years. That is why Law is NOT taught in schools -- as it would let the cat out of the bag. There are thins that are not convenient for you to know. Thus common people are kept in a state of child-like ignorance and slavery.
@@michaeldranfield7140 It used to be that there were standard headlights that would fit multiple cars. Now we have aerodynamic sculptured non-standard projector crap that even _Consumer Reports_ said was expensive. I wonder with LED technology, could we require manufacturers to install "lifetime lights"? Maybe it is not so much all the morons driving with lights not working, but the manufacturers who could be to blame? Surely manufacturers can take more responsibility for safety.
I was an Electronics Maintenance Engineer for the BBC and ITN, repairing telecine machines, videotape recorders, and electronic graphics kit like the Quantel Paintbox and "Harry". We had service manuals for everything. Some so complex that they took up 2 feet of shelf space. We had courses, some lasting 6 weeks, to learn how the kit worked. We were good at what we did too. Sadly, the throw away technology makes component level repair extremely hard, especially if there are microprocessors doing the heavy lifting. When I began designing digital kit, I always wrote a start up diagnostic routine, even if it only helped me fault find my own kit. Modern TV's leave me stone-cold. No schematic, and it's down to luck or experience. Old school Engineers are a dying breed, I am 71...
Excellent tutorial. I'm 70 now and I'm not an engineer. I am a very experienced technician. By coincidence, my Samsung 65 inch flat screen also failed. Although it wasn't the same issue as yours. One of the LED's lenses came unglued and fell to the bottom of the TV. I was able to carefully glue it back on and BINGO - all was ok.
I have a Samsung TV that won't power on. Using this video, I'm going to try your troubleshooting technique. I don't have anywhere near your knowledge, but at least I may be able to narrow down the fault to a specific area. These TVs are so fragile and we've come to treat them as disposable appliances. I'd love to get mine working again.
Good stuff Michael. Just imagine how many flat screen tv's have been scrapped for the sake of such minor component failure! All intentional of course, and why detailed service info is not made available.
And when you scrap these, not so much material got back in use. At least those panels need rare earths metals and looks like China is way to get these. There is not much in one panel, but if you throw all away with junks, then those are gone. Not even sure does anyone try to get these off from electric waste to recover those materials, but I know many who took full flat from waste and fixed it to use :p If you could fix one flat per day and one fix fails and goes spare parts, you still could get living with that and if you have source to get these throw aways, then it's even better :p
@@michaeldranfield7140 So bad for the environment though, thousands of tons of various metals that are lost to landfill, some toxic of course. Plus plastics, glass and chemicals, all the energy involved in manufacture, distribution, delivery etc. An extremely wasteful and irresponsible policy. The right to repair legislation that is being debated in the USA currently, should be mandatory worldwide, with full, detailed service info being a legal requirement. We can wish anyway!
@@michaeldranfield7140 Made to break just after the warranty expires. I find that another common problem is the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply fail quite often or a heatsinked semiconductor.
Just watched your repair by the accident of randomly touching on my tablet screen! This is good old detective work needed to fault find anything and only learned from experience. Young technicians need mentors like you to pass on the knowledge. Thank you for sharing.
Only problem been there is no younger people going into TV repairs now , its a dying trade and any repairs now are supposed to be carried out by just swapping a board or in this case the correct procedure would have been to just fit a new LCD panel which would have been so expensive the customer would not have had it done .
Wow. When I was a young lad I used to deliver TV's for a local company. They had several engineers working in their repair shop. I thought things seemed complicated back then but the modern stuff seems even worse. One old guy called Norman used to work on the old valve sets & knew all the tricks of the trade. Including polishing scratches out of the tube with Brasso. (Mostly Philips tubes no matter what brand TV they were) Then the Japanese took over & only B&O were better. People used to ask me why do you need 100 channels? When we only had 4 to watch. (If you were lucky) most still had 3. How times have changed. You should be a tutor pal. Your video was excellent.
Back in the old days of proper service back up from the manufactures and individually spare part availability there was hardly anything that could not be repaired, now the tables have turned and I end up scrapping loads of stuff, the set you saw in this video was just one of the lucky ones fortunately.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Yes, my start as an industrial electrician was 1963. A proper electrical apprenticeship, including power generation on site, a steam engine driving the alternator, the first factory in the South West of England, possibly the whole of the UK allowed to generate in parallel with the Grid. I'm never forget I was trained by men who had fought a war in 1939 With 24 hour processing in a leather tannery the value in the cost of leather imported from across the world would have been horrendous. The Hours and responsibility to the firm and production workers was huge Thinking back to being 16. I can still remember being sent out on my own with the innevitable question, "How long will it take," before I had opened up the control panel. That era, a test lamp with a filament lamp, only the Electricity Board had the moulded test lamp for 415 or 240 AC. We were designing and manufacturing our own complex control panels, a lamp with a resistor was simple but never achieved. Neither did the department spend out our on the vital tool for our everyday safety. One AVO between two factories, two miles apRtt, and seven electricians.sharing that instrument and two Megger's for insulation testing. Steel Control panels were made to order from Brook Motors Huddersfield. A lead time of 23 weeks. I have mislaid my RS Components catalogue from 1966 which was A5 format pre metrication. 16 maybe 24 pages, resistors, including volume controls, capacitors, control panel wiring in 16 colours, transformers. An address in central London, I can almost remember th address. Damaging the AVO was unforgiveable because it took three months to get repaired.
I was brought up where you had things repaired, back in the 70 s I use to fit new elements into electric kettles, now you can buy a brand new kettle for £5.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Make do and mend it, I actually repair connectors and thermal switches now in Chinky kettles at home here in Thailand. Sad but true
That was absolutely brilliant and informative. You should consider doing learning workshops like Louis Rossman. He does these self help workshop classes where people come in with their faulty electronics to fix themselves and Louis donates his time to supervising and offering advice and guidance to help those people repair their own stuff. Knowledge should always be passed on even if one is retired because the knowledge and experience gained is priceless.
Excellent video and a fantastic master class of fault finding. Technicians change parts until the equipment works, an ENGINEER finds the problem, fixes it then finds out why it happened in the first place, you sir are an ENGINEER!
This is by far the best fault finding tutorial regarding modern TV's on TH-cam. Thanks Michael for some critical tips that can greatly reduce going down rabbit holes.
Great vid. I gave up repairing TV's in 2002 and followed my passion of repairing Rover 75 cars !! Still doing it today. Just found some RADIO AND TELEVISION SERVICING hard backs in the loft from 1960's onwards. Threw a lot away though as museums weren't interested!!
By God. That sounds like me. I had a 1956 Rover 90 and a 1958 105. Rebuilt both from scratch. Used to repair TVs and radios for friends and family as another hobby back when you could go to the manufacturer and buy service manual. Had the same set of books in my loft and only recently dumped them as no-one wants them. Gave up trying to repair electronic gizmos when CRTs disappeared and radios started to be one chip.
Hi there Michael I came across your video by accident BUT I really enjoyed it. Some of this terminology to me back to when were trading, I am now a retired Electro-Mechanical Engineer [ H N D ] I now repair laptops to keep my brain happy. Laptop screens are one of the many items for repair. I have now subscribed. Kind regards Tony
You are the best teacher. I have been a mechanic for around 40 years and have been teaching myself electronics. You attack diagnostics on circuit boards like I diagnose cars, and it makes it much easier for me to understand. Thank you! I remember the good old days walking down to Walgreens with a bag of tubes for the tube tester.
My job is as an electronics diagnostician. Liked and subscribed. Cracking video. A word to folks who fancy a spot of TV DIY… if you are not a professional or well versed in electronics, this level of diagnosis is best left to qualified folks. They are more likely to repair your TV and charge a modest fee. You are more likely to accidentally damage something and end up having to buy a new TV.
Thank you Michael. First time I've seen your channel. Used to have a Samsung Service centre about 3 Miles away in Rustic Mid Wales. Bumped into him and said got a backlight problem, ' No given up, Couldn't make it pay ' Bloody shame really. Tried people for miles around, but nobody wants to get involved in component repairs. One repair was again a capacitor, £ 20.00 quid job, but he worked liked you, eliminate, and know your stuff.
Just like the done thing these days is to replace the whole board when it has a fault if the backlights are faulty you should replace the whole LCD panel, and on some sets even with a separate T con board the T con is not listed as a replaceable item and it comes with the LCD panel, I don't make this pay either but its the only thing I have ever done so I can't stop!
My component-level knowledge is very limited, but I absolutely love watching videos like this. Great work in preventing yet another tv from a destiny of landfill.
@@michaeldranfield7140 We need to lobby government for a right to repair law, which would make it illegal for manufacturers not to supply the circuit diagrams. Same goes for car's with the stupid reprogramming the ECU when you fit a new battery. Pure Greed.😔
Brilliant video and great fault-finding. Think of all these sets that go to the bin because of a component costing a quid or 2! It's a pity and rare, stuff like this just don't get repaired in the world of today.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Possibly, but what isn't being said is the labor costs in fixing things. e.g motor vehicles being a big one. Plus I also remember when I had a Panasonic boom box decades ago and had to replace a volume potentiometer. Replaceable, but needed to be ordered from the manufacturer and expensive to boot.
@@michaeldranfield7140 👍👏Your Sanwa is a bit more modern than the one I had! Like you I grew up on Sanwa, also a slide rule, Staedler I think, and later HP LED calculators (HP-45) in the days when you could buy brand new Mullard valves, and home kit transistors like OC71 & AC126, polythene variable gang caps and a time when car phones were enormous radiotelephones (Pye)! Tech progress has been amazing, not to mention the fall in price of high end kit, scopes, DMM etc. Best of all, being able to design & order your fully built custom PCB in a week!
Great video Michael and very informative. Ive repaired countless flat panel sets myself but have had absolutely no formal training other than the occasional youtube videos. With that said I’m lucky to still be alive! I do pride myself on not damaging a set any further when I get one in, and not having a set go out to its owner that would be a safety concern. Ive only had one set come back to me and it had a rather abusive owner. Other times I’ve spoke to old friends or acquaintances and they will tell me a story of how I repaired their tv, or playstation, or cell phone perhaps and that its still going strong years and years later. Often times I can’t even remember doing their particular repair since Ive done so many. Mistakes I’ve made, well two come to mind. #1 Never touch a heatsink to check for heat in order to tell if a component is being powered up! I had a plasma tv shock the daylights out of me once when I learned the hard way that some heatsinks can be live. #2 Never replace certain components without first realizing what may have caused them to fail in the first place. Other than watching your components fail you may actually pose yourself a safety concern as I once did when I simply replaced a pair of resistors without finding its fault and the new resistors exploded with what looked like a bolt of lightning that extended a good 12 inches or so out of the rear of the set. I tell you I could have cracked a walnut with my butt cheeks right about then but thankfully the good lord above spared my life and my shorts to say the least. As a hobbyist the hardest part can be locating the components Id say. Cross referencing has its limitations as well as you sometimes end up with cheap Chinese clones that can be very short lived. I wonder if the capacitor wizard I use would have been of use in your repair Michael, although I’m not sure it will do ceramic capacitors but it does test in circuit so for that aspect its a good and fast tool, on the contrary so are my eyes and my nose. I really liked the comment you made at the end of your video when you said what your customer might say when you present them with the fault. “Is that all it was?” Some people clearly don’t realize or can fully appreciate the expertise that a technician today must have in order to repair electronics at the component level. Board level is far too expensive and a waste of materials in my opinion. Prices on TV sets have come down so low these days that it’s not as common for people to repair them sadly, and the technicians are fading away as well it seems. I still search for my place in life out there. For reference I’m 45, USMC Combat Veteran as an 0811 field artillery deployed to Iraq in 03. a licensed general contractor in California for over 10 years, have 5 children all with the same mean lady classified as my wife of 16 years, and Ive worked as an AV technician for about 8 or 9 years. Been out of work for awhile since the pandemic started, and feel weighted by depression and the struggles of home life, most of which my wife creates in my opinion, but we all know life is hard and no body cares so I better save it right! Anyway great video Michael and thank you for sharing it with us. Take care bud.
you dont need much training to repair TV sets now, as long as you can plug in another board and have a very basic understanding thats all is needed, the makers no longer supply any service manuals or parts , just new boards, of course the whole idea is really just to get you to buy another set, but i will always try to find a problem first than rush in and buy a new board .
I think the capacitor wizzard is only for electrolytics ? but as MLCC caps tend to short out anyway generally just a multimeter is all that's needed, the biggest problem now with flat screen TV sets is trying to fault find without a circuit diagram .
Thanks for your expertise. People like yourself are helping to reduce the amount of electrical waste in landfill and saving an extortionate cost to the customer. I see many flat panels every time I go to the dump and from now on I'm going to assume 50% or more are repairable due to a tiny component.
There are some TH-cam videos of people dumpster diving and picking up some easily repairable equipment and TV's. Most of this equipment is thrown away by companies that are out of business or rebuilding a lab with the latest stuff. They don't want to carry over older equipment so it just gets put in the dumpster.
@@iworkout6912 I did it myself once where a company threw out all it's computers. I jumped in the bin and took them. A few needed fixed and others were fine. I made a fair bit of money from them.
Excellent real-world fault-finding and diagnosis! I once had a remote control that had a ceramic cap go short. It was for one of the early Freeview boxes, namely the Netgem iPlayer (nothing to do with the BBC service). Drained the batteries in no time!
Brilliant best I've seen someone talking sence,should do more videos please,talking about the problems,showing it even better..massive Respect back to my ham radio 73s...
It's knowing in advance the proper procedure of isolating (and the respected & expected results of each) that makes the fault apparent. Beyond that it's like a cow looking at a new gate, she doesn't know what she's looking at nor that there's any difference. The value of repairing anything isn't the saving of the device or cost of parts vs a brand new one so much....but rather, it's the repairman and his experience. Another prime example might be using a code scanner on your automobile. It's one thing to bring up the codes, but if you don't know what they mean or what they should be......they're just codes. Great video sir. Look forward to more....and best regards from Texas
and of course years ago I went on manufactures training courses and they taught you fault finding procedures, which parts to disconnect to narrow down faults to a particular area , however training courses no longer exist , a bit like workshop service manuals with waveforms and voltages clearly marked to assist in fault finding ,
@@michaeldranfield7140 Again, I agree.. Today's technology is intended to be disposable and smaller than 'repairable by human means'. It's nice to a degree (if you're flying to Mars in a capsule), but throw away nonetheless. BTW: I really enjoy the common ground and your video. From "one gear head / lightning rod" to another...Best wishes.
years ago there were thousands of people like me but they have all closed down now and got real jobs paying lots of money, and it I wasn't a life long addict to electronics I would be joining them , glad you liked the video .
Hi Michael, A great video. This is what I have used to find a faulty bypass capacitor on a computer board that has a bypass capacitor for each chip. Connect a variable voltage power supply via a resistor to the track. And slowely increase the voltage (until you are able to get a voltage reading as follows). Then use the volt meter to read the voltage to ground. And move in the direction where the voltage measured gets less towards the faulty bypass capacitor.
I think it's funny that every commenter is like me, an old man. I suspect a young man would have just thrown it in a skip! I am in awe of your diagnostic ability. It truly shows the difference between a lifelong (highly qualified) "Jack of all trades" like me and a real master. I am also in awe of you finding a space on your bench big enough for a flat screen TV. I can only dream of that!
singling out a single capacitor only works with a millohm meter if the short resistance is less than 1 ohm, if the short is above 1 ohm what I do is power the rail from a bench power supply and see what gets hot .
Great explanation. I used to do TV repair a long time ago but even I could see the end when flat screen tvs came along. As a career it was not going to be a challenge just replacing a whole board instead of component fault finding.
I never saw the end when flat screen sets came out and a 42 inch set was £7,000 to buy , I just saw an opportunity to make more money but it didnt take long ,look at sets now , less than £300 for a 42 inch set .
My dad was TV Radio repair guy from the early days when TV came out, and still serviced TV's and other electronics till he was in his 70's. Taught himself these things. Passed away in 2000. I'm the youngest of our family and picked up a lot of this from him and on my own. As of the past few years I decided to repair flat panel monitors and some of my TV's. Main problem is the capacitors often in the power supply side, and often none of them show any signs of leaking. So replacing all of the electrolytic type ones is the main cure. Problem is I now have many used monitors that are good, but people still want to buy the new stuff. This might change if our economy get much worse. Glad to know of someone that is till doing component repair. About 6 years ago I took a blue-ray player/surround sound system to a repair shop and they required a $80.00 deposit to even look at the unit, but told me if they can fix it then the $80.00 will go toward the repair cost. I knew it was one of the amplifier chips or something in that area since it had three amp chips, and two of the channels did not play. They told me they could not get the main board so it could not be fixed. I was pretty upset at that answer, I figured a professional shop would do component repair. If this is the that repair business then they really don't need much electronic talent if all they do is replace the circuit board and collect money. Thank you Michael for being one of the good repair guys!
Unfortunately these days there is no fault finding to component level, the shop will have had to replace the whole board because there is no circuit diagrams in the service manual, this is all done in an attempt to make an item not repairable so you just buy a new one, I only attempt component level fault finding because that's what I grew up doing and I still find it very exciting but in reality I come across lots of items I have to scrap simply because there are no circuits available and a new board exceeds the value of the item, all this takes time so you won't get many people attempting component level fault finding, you could easills spend an hour and not find the fault.
Thats exactly what happened to my refrigerator that costed me 7K when I bought new and the tech who looked at said the main system board needed replacement and would cost be $1200 to fix it. Well, this is what I did - Got a new freezer for $180 (that I needed anyways) - moved all the food to that freezer and got the board on my bench. Well, it used to be a bench in the early 90's, not anymore. The issue was with a shorted rectifier that blew the SMD fuse. I had to wait for 5 days to get the $3 parts and the refrigerator was humming like brand new. I agree, the component level fault finding talent is long gone, however some do retain that passion.
Brilliant effort. How things have changed. Experience plus perseverance = result despite obstacles. Shame of it is that we seem destined to replace whole units under insurance schemes rather than repair a perfectly good unit that has suffered a single component failure. How is this good for the planet? I have now subscribed for nostalgic benefit. I personally don't repair TVs anymore but admire those that do. All CRT in my day with like you said, good diagrammatic support, and part numbers.
Great interesting video. I enjoyed it very much. I remember how great service manuals used to be and enjoyed watching you show the differences. Miss the quality of the old service manuals.
Sadly all service manuals are now like that, the reality of it is the manifactures don't want people repairing sets they just want you to buy a new one.
I am a TV technician. So yes, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find some failures without diagrams. But the fault you show is a known and easy to find.
I know it's a very common and easily fault to find with the equipment but the video was to highlight how easy it is to make a wrong diagnosis as the back light lit whichever of the T con ribbons were removed which would lead some people to assume the main board is the problem when it's not.
It's good to still see someone actually tracking the fault to it's source, The new TV's are going backwards in repair, remember the old tube jerker days?
Enjoyed your video! Used to do component level repairs on cryptographic equipment. Shortly before I left the service, it was board swapping. Some of the comments below reminded me of a brilliant rocket scientist who lived frugally, and fixed everything himself. One day the washing machine broke down, and he was tearing it apart to fix the transmission, and his wife says, "I want a new washing machine." He's like "I can fix this and save a lot of money." Her: "I *WANT* a new washing machine." Him: (same response). Her: "*I* *WANT* *A* *NEW* *WASHING* *MACHINE*" She got her new washing machine.
Brilliant video, thanks. How much I agree with you, I was also used to repairing down to component level. I started off in the early 1960's. I progressed through from 405 -line TV' s then into the birth of the 625-line uhf & the dawn of colour in the UK. As engineers at that time people like you & I were kept very busy! I moved off into Broadcast Television engineering, until very late in my working life. Very technical & enjoyable it was as a career. However after a series of redundancies & nearing retirement, I found my way back into part-time domestic TV repair mainly Samsung, but also other makes. We had little access to service manuals, or spare parts, so I used to go online to download the various chip data-sheets & using a sort of 'reverse-engineering, work out how the various chips were interconnected etc. to aid fault-finding. Long-winded, but it worked. In the current 'green' climate, where there is supposed to be a 'repair culture' perhaps expensive domestic kit such as TV's etc should now again, be made more repairable, with spares & service data once again more available.
That's all I do now is download the data sheet for the chip in question where the fault is but with chips getting smaller the information they print on the top is very limited which makes tracking down the correct datasheets all the more difficult.
I remember those days well -- having been taught RADIO repair and driving at age 8 - That was 1949 -- Building radios at age 10/11 Took flying lessons at age 13 - A pilots license by age 13 - and joined the RAF in 1960 (Bomber command) - following the footsteps of one of my aunts - who was Russian Jewish. I served for 30 years in the Military - serving three countries - - My flying days are over - but I has the opportunity to study Electronics and Electro-Mechanical Engineering - Law - Psychology - Business Management - Risk Management - and Paramedics- PHILIPS was the CORPORATION that produced the Avionics fro Australia's FA/18 Hornet 4 years with PHILIPS and Sydney University - led to an attachment to the USAF working on joint USAF .NASA projects. ( The USAF has control over NASA ) Iife has been an interesting life - Many engineers - pilots and other Military personnel I have known have been gradually passing away since 2012 --- It is only June 2022 and I have attended ten funerals in this six months - one only on Wednesday, June 15, 2022 Time passes rapidly -- I don't worry too much - as I may not be here tomorrow There are no guarantees in life. The thing is to never give up and KEEP LEARNING everything you can - to keep the brain active and pass on your knowledge - as that will be your legacy to be remembered by. Good luck every"one" One day you will be some'body' and join all the other bodies in the cemetery.
Just wanted to say "Thank you" for taking the time and sharing the knowledge. This shows me I could fix faults beyond the ribbon cable delaminations/disconnections I got so far. Cheers! 👍
Very instructive video Micheal, being a now retired tech who started in the trade in the monochrome valve TV era I always relied on the ubiquitous and comprehensive service manuals that were current then.After many years experience the manuals were only referenced if the fault was a curly one as one became attuned to parts that commonly failed and most were carried in the service van and the majority of repairs could be done in the customers house. Only the curliest were taken back to the workshop. Nowadays though very little can be done in the house in the way of repairs and all sets get the workshop treatment. Prior to retirement about 5 years ago I was a service agent for several brands and got pretty good at component level fault’s especially on Panasonic plasma and lcd sets as I found them to be good at supporting their repairers with the required info. However the model life of sets is now only a few months as the technology is pushing ahead at such a fast clip and the number of brands being sold has escalated so the ability of any workshop to develop a working knowledge of any particular model becomes almost impossible unless you can survive by specializing in some of the more popular brands that are more likely to supply backup. Glad now that I can now tinker away in my workshop without any customer pressure. S
That's another problem as you say, you never see the same set twice so it's virtually impossible to be a specialist these days, valve days were much better.
Great fault finding skills there, one thing I would have done differently is replace all decoupling caps if they're exactly the same, if one failed, the rest will follow
That is good advice but unfortunately customers are now much more price conscious and seem to want everything doing for next to nothing , this is why I only replaced the faulty part, however in the case of backlight failure where its a big job removing the panel without damaging it I only ever replace all the backlight strips , I never replace individual LED s as some people do .
@@michaeldranfield7140 This is an ever increasing problem - Consumers imagine because the device they purchased is relatively inexpensive - that it should be also inexpensive to repair - where in reality it is becoming more difficult on many levels - including lack of service information - NO service Manuals - No Service Bulletins - Lack of major replacement parts after four years (which is the Statute of Limitations in respect of warranties) so anything beyond that is NOT covered - despite Manufactures claims of extended warranties. Law is Law. The general population has no concept of the knowledge and skills required to earn and understand how these technologies work - the time taken to learn and keep up to date with developing technologies and the high cost of investment in equipment - and its replacement and maintenance costs - addition and replacement of equipment and $$ invested in stock that may soon become obsolete - and considered an economic loss - Then there is the cost of Stock control and administration of a business - insurance of various kinds - accountants fees - Office requirements & supplies. + one has to make a better than average living - That is the whole purpose of a business. PLUS the business has to make a profit to allow for future expansion and growth. Plants need Liquid water -- Business needs Liquid assets. It is not the cost of the replaced part -- it is the cost of knowledge and experience and the cost of doing business. Life is difficult - Business is equally difficult - Customers can be difficult EXAMPLE: ▶ ‘We cannot survive’: Businesses struggling with costs th-cam.com/video/qUn5rGfOIyQ/w-d-xo.html Jun 16, 2022 05:54 ----------------------------- CHANNEL: Sky News Australia th-cam.com/channels/O0akufu9MOzyz3nvGIXAAw.html ; Appetite Five Dock Co-Owner Phillip Salhab says his business ; “cannot survive” as his venue struggles to hire staff and deal ; with rising cost of living prices.
I repaired a tape deck (from the early nineties) that not only had an exploded view in its service manual that explained the order to do things in, the thing also had a specific little notch to rest the new belt on while you reassembled a very compact mechanism, to finally slip the belt onto the flywheel later, and skip a world of awkwardness. That's _extra thought_ put into the most likely failures to an almost unnecessary degree - I would have managed without, just with a _lot_ more awkwardness. I love the fact that that was once the standard.
I think that most electronics equipment with small parts have tiny mechanical assemblies that have to be completed using special jigs. All the details have to be planned for manufacturing, but there is no financial incentive to make any of the fiddly parts re-reassemblable by the customer or a serviceperson. In any case, due to mechanical or electrical failure with time, customers are forced to accept early failure and discarding as inevitable. And, of course, not even mentioning the failure of manufacturers to test an adequate number of units coming off the assembly line or to provide incentives to assemblers for improving the quality of the final products.
Some lovely faultfinding and explanation there. Amazing that a complex device with thousands of components can be taken down by the failure of one simple, small, common part... and equally amazing that if the flimmin' thing would only fail open circuit instead of short then it seems things would have carried on working in this case! I wish I'd studied electronics; it must be a great buzz to revive something like this that would otherwise be scrapped as the manufacturer wishes!
My grandfather opened a radio repair shop (Taller Marconi) in 1936 in a tiny town in Colombia. Needless to say, there wasn't much in the way of technical support from manufacturers so he figured out all the internal workings of the radios and made a living fixing them. When TVs came out he did the same thing and figured it out. Then VHS came out ( BETA in Colombia) and once again, they found a way to repair them down to component level. My father and two of his brothers eventually learnt the trade and took over from him when he retired. Thank you for your video and the memories. I remember my dad replacing tiny components in PCBs to get them back to work.
In those days all electronic components were big things and as you quite rightly say a lot of stuff could be repaired without a service manual, however today with micro sized component, some so small there is no space to print a part number on them a service manual is the only hope of doing a repair.
@@michaeldranfield7140 And even when you find the part and replace it, you can get stuck with locked software adjustment that don'"t allow you to adjust calibration (Apple enjoy so much this to forbid you to use a screen or even just the closing screen sensor on an other computer of the exact same model) I think the "board" replacement thing started in the 1960"s promote by IBM for their big computer made of thousands of small cards, they explain and even have software to find the faulty board, and replace it as the board fault finding is too complex and would took time and qualification, with theirs brand new approach, no qualification was required to perform maintenance, the board was at this time be eligible to be re-manufactured. Talking about waste reduction, it's a huge reduction from a TV set to a rice seed waste size !
Thanks for the video. I'm an old hand at repairing CRT TVs but been very nervous of flat-panels. You've given me more confidence. BTW, the customer says "Is that all? How much do those cost then? 20 pence? Why have you given me a bill for forty quid, you ripoff merchant!"
I have spent 55 plus years in the repair field, and I was astounded by the lack of support and parts availability for the sets here in the States in the last 15 years or so. I am glad I am retired from the repair business. Even if one would get a "tested" board from a "recycler" who said their boards were tested and worked" I often had to repair the replacement board. Even "rebuilt" boards were most often bad. They never even scrubbed the dirt & dust off of them. Just pulled the boards from a junk set & shipped them without testing. What a scam! I generally went to the component level for repairs on the flat screen sets, but when a power surge hit the sets, it often burned the power supply board, badly charring it beyond repair.
@@FrozenHaxor Absolutely correct , if you see someone advertising a board from a plasma TV and it says removed from a smashed screen TV but fully tested, ask them how they managed to test it when a plasma produces no picture at all with a smashed screen .
@@michaeldranfield7140 I spoke to a guy tonight who said that "dielectric oil" might sort the solder problem. Sounds odd to me (WD40???), but I'll do some more research. Not mad keen on the idea of an oven without a temp reading doing the biz.
Thanks, Michael! Great troubleshooting! Often I troubleshoot by looking up the make and model of the TV on the internet to see what typically fails :-) Years ago, I fixed our TV by replacing a few discrete components which were known to fail, the next TV I had to replace the bulging caps on the power supply board, but only spent a couple of dollars. For the more recent flat-screen TV's which died, I had to find used circuit boards on eBay for $30 to $40. They keep making it harder and harder to fix anything 😞
I have hundreds of used boards from broken screen TV sets but the problem is you hardly ever see the same set twice now the models change so often and sometimes the symptoms can be very miss leading and you end up replacing a board that's not faulty at all , so where ever possible I try to find the fault first before buying new boards .
I simply love this... I've always had a good analytical mind, and it's exactly this type of progression through circuits - knowing roughly what to expect at certain points, and then 'stumble' across an error. I think it's horrendously bad that so many consumer electronics have become practically unserviceable... Especially when the weakest link turns out to be a humble little capacitor. Imagine how many screens have been skipped unnecessarily... Such a waste.
Great video really enjoyed this, some great tips in it. I no longer work directly in electronics repairs but still do my own plus odd few others. The vast majority of the "TV repair" shops have now closed down in my local area, only the odd one or two left. When people ring up these places they sometimes get quoted silly money figures and most people dont take their stuff in for repair. Only the other week I fixed a small 19" TV for someone who was quoted £70 (over the phone) plus any parts for a dead fault. In the end it was just one diode in the PSU board, took me less than 30mins to fix. I charged them £35 and they were over the moon. Things are getting more complex to fix, and where possible I do tend to avoid surface mount repairs. Even by the late 90s early 2000's suppliers were just recommending board swops, I worked in a place and we did a lot of insurance repairs and they just sent us boards out for faults. In my first job we didn't have service manuals for a lot of stuff we fixed, and there was no internet as it was the early 90s, but stuff seemed a lot easier to fix back then, we fixed anything that came in the door with a plug on it!
£35 for a repair to a 19" tv.. There's the issue. I've given away many 22" Tv's FOC as they are so cheap and not even worth selling.. It's a disposable world.. If we had RTR then we'd invest in bigger stuff thats supposed to last have have second hand resale value..
Where I am there is no other shops within 20-30 miles radius, I'm the last man standing, in the 80s when I opened my first shop it was a very brave move as there were repair and rental shops everywhere , in the 90 s with the event of single board TV s there was no swapping , every fault had to be to component level but now were back to panel swapping , the whole industry has turned full circle but the real truth of the matter is the manufactures don't want TV s to be repairable they just want to sell another set ,what they don't understand is if a customer buys say a Samsung TV and it only last 13 months and then is declared un repairable they are not likely to buy another Samsung so by not supplying parts and service manuals they are not doing themselves any favours.
@@michaeldranfield7140 My Samsung plasmas and LED LCD TV's from 2013 and 2015 respectively still work fine though we don't really watch TV. I watch baseball on it sometimes, and play android tv stuff on the LCD sometimes. Occasionally we watch movies on them.
73 year old retired electronics tech (radio communications) here. I am still impressed that the fault for such a large device was just one tiny component. I am not surprised the fault was a capacitor, since they seem to be the one component that time expires over the years. In old 1960s transistor radios the electrolytic capacitors almost always eventually fail. I saw a video where a chip capacitor was causing a Dodge truck to shut down.
Very informative thanks! I don't repair tellies as a job, but an interesting repair story to share; a neighbour gave us their old LG LCD TV that had a really blue cast to the screen, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the red and green signals were missing or it had been set up wrong or something, but upon further disassembly, it turned out that it had been run so long that the phosphor on the backlight leds had degraded to the point where it was no longer making yellow light, leaving just the blue! New LEDs now on order.
Its a common fault on LG sets , no doubt caused by cutbacks in production , if you look at a LED in an earlier model of set the yellow phosphor is held in around the edges in a plastic carrier on the newer LG sets the phosphor is just push fitted on top of the LED element and the heat from the led caused by running the backlights at 100 % causes micro cracks in the phosphor which eventually just falls off .
Great repair video with clear explanations , you're good at this stuff. I was thinking before disassembling the tv you could've just checked the screen with a flashlight and if the lcd was still working you should've be able to see the image faintly. If the screen was faulty which is your case, then you shouldn't be able to see anything with the flashlight.
Great stuff! I'm a consumer electronics repair guy myself and I'm about your age. Problem is, our job was doomed by the price erosion of e.g. TV sets. In the 70th and 80th a modern A brand TV was about 1.000 Euro what represented a full monthly paycheck for an average worker at that time. Today a TV is about 500 Euro and that's merely 50% of the average monthly pay ignoring the inflation over 40 years. So in theory a TV should cost about 2.000 Euro today and that would make repairs profitable. Besides, your insight in electronics and understanding of schmeatic diagrams and signal flow path in combination with effective SMD soldering skills is amazing and hard to find nowadays. However, I'm afraid students leaving school today are rather studying electronic engineering and get a high payed job in the industry then sitting in a TV repair shop.
I dont think anyone in there right mind will be going into TV repairs now , as you quite rightly say a TV is now cheaper than it was 40 years ago but cars and houses keep going up in price white TV s keep falling , in the 70 s TV were so expensive compared to wages most people rented ,today most people with a real job can buy a new TV for just a couple of days wages .
Also as technology advances fast it makes less sense to put money on repairing old than buying new. If one at the cost of repair gets a new bigger TV why repair. Also one cannot ignore the ease of buying flat panels. No need to organize transport. Just pick one and put in a car and you are done in an hour.
@@okaro6595 you do have a point but I come across a lot of people that are not happy just buying a new set, usually when they have only had the set for 18 months and its failed, they just dont think they have had there moneys worth ,.
Hi Michael, I was (almost) going to abandon watching your video at 1 minute into it, but so glad that I watched and listened to your every word! Just like you, I have lost faith in buying new TV's because of the problems that you describe. I am self-taught (from books and YT), but it becomes terribly frustrating when you spend scores of fruitless hours on the same TV, realising that you lack the ability to find the cause. Most Flat Panel TVs that have been given away (to me), have been simple fixes - like Capacitor replacement of PS Board. It's the most fantastic feeling when it comes to life again! I won't entertain the Chinese 'cheapies' but like to fix LG. You are amazing with your knowledge, and it's clear that the backlights weren't working because the power supply was compromised. I am currently looking at a 42" LG with picture on the left half only. On the faulty half, just a lot of vertical coloured lines. As you say, most people simply replace the Boards. I replaced the T-Con Board, but the problem remains. Justanother one for the Tip I guess. Thanks Michael - for teaching me that little bit more. Greetings from Sydney.
One of the reason I knew that my days as a bench engineer were numbered was that it was cheaper to buy new machine than repair the old one ..also I don't really want to be a board swapper !!
no one else within 20-30 miles radius from me , everyone has closed down for that very reason but this is the only thing I have ever done so I cant help myself !
Excellent piece! I would never give the component back to the customer. They will take one look at it and say, "Here's a couple of bucks for your trouble. The repair obviously wasn't anything major, so your work isn't not worth the hundreds you are asking."
Fascinating Michael, you’ve amassed an amazing amount of knowledge to enable such a repair. The lack of appropriate service information is obviously an attempt to encourage the purchase of a replacement item. In fact it wouldn’t be impossible for manufacturers to build in a fault code display system similar to that used in CAN bus automotive systems.
Sadly all my knowledge is pretty worthless now as people prefer to throw things away and buy a new one , a lot of sets do have built in diagnostic these days but most of the time its to broad to be of any real use , as an example I had a sharp set last week and luckily it was over 10 years old and so a proper service manual with diagrams in was available, the error flagged up was "communication problem between the sub micro and main micro " which could be caused by a million things .luckily the cause was only due to a faulty regulator chip supplying the micro core voltage , it should have been 1.3 volts but was only 1 volt.
I don't think it's an attempt to discourage repair but more because it is way too complicated, especially with the speed of change. But it certainly discourages troubleshooting.
@@michaeldranfield7140 not that I'm giving these horrible manufacturers any ideas but what is going to be a real pain is when they start encasing every circuit board in epoxy where you won't have access to the circuit at all. One maker will do it then the rest will follow.
An excellent repair demonstration! This is the first time I've come across this channel, I've subscribed and will be looking out for more of these. Thanks so much for selfless tuition ...
It really chaffs my ass when I can remember working on sets that had the full parts and schematics inside the back cover. I can even remember vaguely my mother taking me down to the repair shop to buy a new tube for less than a candybar. Trouble shooting the tube types was easy, just look for the tube that doesn't glow and isn't hot. 5 steps forward on technology, 10 steps back on sustainability.
I know what you mean, large components that were easily tested, most SMD parts these days are so small there's no space on them to print the value or part number so without a service manual your stuffed.
That reminds me of a joke a TV repair shop had on the radio years ago, it said something like" Yes ma'am we found the problem with your TV, it has all these little black things in here." Referring to the new components I presume. Still funny. The shop no longer is open, obviously. Odd that there seem to be shops opening up for phone and computer micro-soldering (not in my area) but nothing for TV's. Perhaps because of the cost difference, a phone is as much as a car and tele is almost disposable. I never purchase the extended plan only because I know it is how they make their money.
I was the chief technician at a major service center for a number of years, GE was one of 40 different manufacturers that we serviced and GE used to put a schematic diagram folded up and have a little plastic cover that attached the schematic to the back of the TV. That certainly helped we did not have to subscribe to at least GE TV schematics, most of the other manufacturers you had to purchase them or if you're lucky a Sam's on them
@@toxicooze2220 In the UK Grundig always put a circuit diagram inside the TV set which was an excellent idea, the only problem been the first person to service the TV would keep the diagram .
Great repair tip Michael 👍 This is the first video I came across on TH-cam. Nice to hear from you again. I remember your articles in Television magazine.
Right to repair is suppose to sort this problem out, however I don't think anything at all will change, all manufactures need to do is price parts so expensive that no one buys them and for them it's problem sorted.
Well done, as always. I also have doubts about these ceramic caps which I use in my own designs and, as you say, they break down regularly. I doubt that the stated voltage ratings are correct and I now regularly use a rating three times higher than the expected voltage. If you heat these capacitor types with just a short duration burst of hot air their leakage currents increase substantially. I do like your homemade milliohm meter.
I did hear once that these caps could damaged by the reflow process and this is the reason I prefer hand soldering to hot air, I made that milliohm meter over 10 years ago and never used it because a set of kelvin probes were about £100, I only started using it a couple of years ago when I found you could get some probes on Aliexpress for a tenner!
Arrived here by chance but watched to the end, what a brilliant piece of fault finding so have subscribed. When I last did component level repairs capacitors had wires 😂
"is that all it was?"... and then they expect an equally cheap price for the repair when you've spent considerable time without a schematic to find the problem. I used to repair TV's and stereo's back in the 80s/90s when things were simpler and actually had schematics. It's fun solving the puzzle, but not fun when people didn't want to pay or expected some low ball price. Great troubleshooting!
@@dennisbjones When I was in the business I learned to be "economical with the truth". If customer asked what was wrong I'd say something like "do you understand how a multilayer ceramic capacitor works?" On receiving the blank look I'd say, "oh, well, never mind. It's fixed now".
customers have never appreciated how much time can actually be spend like you say tracing the 10p resistor in years gone by , but I have found most people more appreciative these day when I give them a plastic bag and say that's your old faulty part and they say what's that there's nothing in the bag , and I say take a closer look at that thing the size of a pin head, to which people say how on earth did you find that.
@@michaeldranfield7140 This has been a long discussion topic between technicians and customers all over the world, through the passed years... The (wrong) customers' opinion about the price they had to pay on a repair was based on a simple fact called "ignorance", as it is related to the nature of the repairs job itself. Especially in the past decades, they had the impression that technicians knew in advance exactly what to replace or adjust or call their intended action as you like, as soon as the customers were describing the symptoms of their faulty devices. They had the impression that the "magician will perform his trick and then ask 50$ for that magic performance, having about 5 minutes of duration"... Of course this thinking stands on the base that an experienced technician knows his job and has faced the described problem perhaps many times before, which might be true, but the missing link here is that the same symptom may well be caused due to a different cause, or simply, the cause might be the same as the known one, but in this specific case the faulty device might be a brand new model and therefore the supposed specific experience on that one is missing. This means much more time to be spent on troubleshooting until valuable new experience is obtained...but the customer either doesn't know that or, worse than that, he is not interested to know about. He only expects the "magician to perform..." Nevertheless the tragedy of our modern days, on one hand, is that repairs in general are dying as specific professions, while on the other hand the cheap (let them be) products cannot be so easily thrown away, because for buying new ones people need relatively much more money than the average cost of a repair. Worse than that, the continously increasing unemployment (based on the mass and fully automated production) "erases" the existing job places one after the other, at an amazingly high speed. And the simple question is: how can one buy a (let it be cheap) new TV, when being unemployed, looking only for how to survive?" Or, in other words: "what kind of job can one do, in order to be capable to replace his (let it be cheap) TV upon its first failure", keeping in mind that there are many other priorities to be covered first, with that faulty TV to be replaced being perhaps the last one?...Let alone the environmental pollution problem, the waste on resources at the expense of the new generations to come e.t.c...
Nice. I hate that there seems to be an "understanding" from manufacturers that things should not be repaired. Got an old LG tv that don't start up. It used to take several tries to get it started until it died on me. Time to take it apart and change the faulty bit I guess :)
@@michaeldranfield7140 Yes. That is part of the problem. But from a enviromental standpoint we should repair more things. I personally hate that things get thrown away when they could be repaired. It's a waste of resources.
It didn't take as long as it did to make the video , and as soon as I realised the backlight were not faulty its only a simple matter of unplugging things and when I arrived at the screen it can only be 2 things causing the problem COF or cap .
Excellent Video, Electronics Tech Started in The 70's, We Had Howard Sams Manuals Severeral TV, Radios Each Month. Used From 70's to 80's Great Manual Like you Had, Showed Compont Side, Foil Side, Component List, Waveforms, Test Points, The Best, Was Like Cheating. When Flat Screen TV's Came Out, Couldn't Find Manuals or Schematics Online. Will Have Try Again. Electrical Contractor/Master Electrician Almost 30 Years Now. Mostly Electrical Contracting Now. Any Electronics When Needed. 67 Now, But When a Teen in Vegas, I Bought a Fender Twin Reverb for $40, as is, and You Can't Bring it Back, I Said OK, Pulled the Tubes to Test, Noticed 1 Socket Had Been Changed, And the key For the Tube was 180° Flipped Around. So I Desoldered The Wires, Lifted Socket, Rotated 180°, Soldered Back Where they Were. Didn't Even Test the Tubes, Plugged In, Worked like a Charm. Been Troubleshooting Ever Since, As New Technology Came Learned them, VCR's, CD Players, Microwave Ovens, 70's Repaired Car Stereos, Craig Powerplay, Pioneer Super Tuners, Rockford Fosgate Came out, Had Load of Radio Turn on. 8 Track Players Were Cool, Ratcheting Head Switched By Metal Taped Where Spliced. Dumpster Dive All The Time, Rescued Many Electronics, If zi Nice Washer, or Dryer, Will Fix and Keep. I See Most Post are From Techs Which is, I Don't Many, Actually Nine Now. Regular People(Non Electronics Don't Know How Cool it Is To Save Some Extremely Expensive Electronics, Needing only 1 Part, and Get To Keep. Now Its SMD's, Some Really Cool Solder Paste Recently Reduced Makes SMD Work Easy. Cell Phone Power Connector. But With Cell Phones, Xacto Fine Point Can Remove The Lint in Many Cases. Plus You Save a Boat Load Of Money Fixing Your Own Electronics, Not Need To Replace. I'm 67, Excellent Video, Obsessed With Learning. Was Mostly a Hobby That I got Paid For. Am Sure You Worked Tube TV's as Well. Take Care
Very instructive! I’m confused about the troubleshooting though. The backlight died when both timing cables were attached, but ok if either one of them was plugged in separately. But replacing just one cap on one side fixed the problem. Wouldn’t the behavior mean that there was a partially-bad cap on both sides, so only the two of them together would kill the LEDs, but not each by itself? Regardless, a very instructive and handy video, thanks! (I have a half-dozen TVs and monitors sitting in my basement waiting for me to get a chance to look at them 😁)
It's not discussed because there is no service manual to explain it, if I knew I would have said, my best guess is there is some control line back to the microprocessor?
Nice work. I'm a comms and data/TV troubleshooting person (but I don't do component level repair work), it pains me to tell people that most likely, their TV is dead and economically not repairable.
A lot of circuits now switch off the supply when they see a short but it would be possible to apply power from a bench power supply and see what heats up .
What a coincedence! I saw the preview and marked it as "watch it later" for no reason, just to broaden my knowledge. Next thing I go outside to throw garbage and found an (almost) working 60' smart tv that someone left. Now, after watching the video, I opened it up And it had EXACTLY the same problem. ))
Great Video! I was a T.V repairman in the 1970's. I would have been pretty tempted to replace all four of those 17V bypass caps since they surely all came from the same lot and are all exposed to the same power rail. IDK. What do you think?
Of course you are right and many years ago when sets were expensive and people didn't mind paying a sensible price for my time I would have done just that, replaced them all, but now sets are so cheap I'm working for next to nothing it's not possible anymore.
Now days if the repair costs increase $10 they say might as well buy a new one. So if you decide to replace them you better have gotten a little extra in the estimate.
That was the best down to earth fault finding video I have ever seen. Well done sir. I only work at the level of "replace the board" but even that is often not possible because I cannot find matching part numbers.
Without component level fault finding you would have had to replace the screen in my set as the board the cap was on is part of the screen and not replaceable.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Exactly what I was thinking. Replacing the T-con board wouldn't have fixed this, so you'd be out the money for that and no closer to a solution.
Nice. Reently seen the opposite level of damage here where a failed mains bridge repair was attempted by the owner who tried to stop the fuse blowing by wrapping it in al-foil. Needless to say, the entire input section of the power supply was 'toast'. Samsung service manuals haven't impressed in some time. Every TV seems to have different connections and timings for no valid reason or I'd stock up on boards from dead screens regardless of model and just swap them in. They should learn a thing or two from PC board makers. (PS: wouldn't it be nice if the led boards screwed in from the back or slid in sideways without the need to remove the screen from the frame. Just sayin. )
I wouldn't be that difficult to have a rear access to the backlights but the reality is the makers don't want you repairing sets, everything is designed now to encourage you to just buy a new set.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Or sent to a service center which I worked at. Some ended up component repair, while others was board replacement for the same reasons here, economic. It just meant we'd have all the parts needed.
I have an RCA 65” that has bad LED Backlight diodes. With this model you can access the LED strips from the back with the screen flat down on your table. You take off the small covers 1st which also revels the boards, then you remove the large metal back cover. This cover lifts up with the 12 backlight strips attached to it with a cheap white cardboard reflector then glued over the strips with holes in it for each LED. After you tear the hell out of the cardboard reflector to get to the backlight strips to work on you can then tape the reflector back together where it tore from the backside as to not change the reflective properties of this backlight reflector. You’ll get a few years then a couple more LEDS will then burn out again! I say STAY AWAY from Thompson Consumer Electronics “RCA” products altogether if possible. I always recommend Samsung, LG or Visio. Symptom of this tv was flashing backlight strips that would not stay on, audio fine. If you unplug the plug with the 4 small wires that feed the backlight strips the power then remains continuous on the power boards output receptacle pins for these 2 pairs of wires.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Right, but for now we at least have inspection holes, “at least in the ones I’ve serviced so far.” However you are kind of just guessing what holes the light should come through. Another way is to lift the Television up and shine a bright penlight at just the right angle through the front of the screen and you can actually see “very dimly” if the LCD panel is working & producing video. I will press the menu button and look for the faint lettering.
Thumbs up for the video, Mr. Dranfield :-) It is always heart-warming to find someone who does care and does promote repairs of simple faults. Actually I suspect a major part of failures in modern-day electronics are of this sort: power supply capacitors, typically electrolytic, but tantalum and even MLCC are sometimes to blame as well. A TV is still a relatively complex piece of kit, but there are many smaller and simpler devices (say SoHo Ethernet switches) that are prone to capacitor failures just as well, and overall trivial to repair without a schematic, because the block schematic is very universal/repetitive. They are often used deliberately to implement "planned obsolescence" - and it's not sloppiness on part of the board designers, it is intentional and it is an art in its own right, only noone admits this on record, for obvious legal reasons. In reality, I doubt that the orders for this do not come from the board of directors of the corporations involved. I'm fine with a leaked capacitor that I can simply replace. What infuriates me are "design sabotages" that cannot be repaired, such as mechanical design details that result in a destructive failure, not repairable by a glue gun and duct tape: a ball bearing on a name-brand lawnmower high-RPM electric motor, seated in a plastic housing, where the large injection-molded plastic part is a major structural component of the motor assembly, not available for replacement... or a fragile plastic hinge in the microphone arm in an expensive name-brand headset (earphones + microphone). This kind of thing should be sanctioned :-) In TV's and PC monitors, notebook PC's, fondleslab telephones and many other devices, repairability gets outright precluded by mechanical design that (almost or literally) prevents disassembly, or if you disassemble, prevents plausible re-assembly. Such as, TV chassises made of plastic that hold together by a myriad fragile flippers that are intended to snap together, with no clear way to get them un-snapped if repair is needed. In the way of repairability, I'd love to see some improvements on this front = easy access inside, to get my hands on serviceable parts - be it individual boards, or backlight LED stripes or whatever. To replace some popped caps, in the PSU, you often don't even need a schematic. One particular brand though comes to mind, that *does* make board-level schematics still available in service manuals: the Vestel of Turkey. To those who are not in the repairs business, this company makes on the order of 50% of the cheap flat-panel TV sets sold on the European market by various "household names" (that no longer run their own factories to make electronics). I.e. many of the EU household name TV's sold in Europe share the same motherboards, power supplies and principal inner mechanical construction. I've noticed small differences in the component sets soldered on boards, such as a protective Zener on a motherboard (Vestel T816 PVR) to protect the mobo against the +5V PSU output going fuzzy as the elyt caps dry out. One brand did have the zener, the other just had an empty position... On the first box, I did exactly that "find a short on a PCB" analysis, as explained by Mr. Dranfield in this video :-) and then I replaced all elyt caps in the other box preventatively. Unfortunately, genuine repair techies, able to diagnose and repair small-signal electronics, are a dying profession. In rich countries, kids don't get to play with a soldering iron anymore. I know several old bards, say born in the fifties or older, who have experienced a great part of the history of modern electronics on their jobs, and keep their "ethos". I myself was born in 1976 and I was possibly lucky that I spent my childhood on the eastern side of the iron curtain, so I got my hands dirty and I was able to pick up some DIY skills from the old bards... Nowadays, the trouble is: consumer electronics is hardly worth repairing anymore. Industrial electronics still is, considering the cost of replacement (including various "strings attached", such as software licenses). As for consumer electronics, the problem is in the flip side of the "economies of scale" - in mass manufacturing and global mass distribution. It just got so efficient and cheap, per unit, at that scale, to produce and distribute new pieces, that a repair of individual random pieces just cannot compete. Repair takes too much human attention, and it takes a *skilled* techie who can diagnose microelectronics, at least at the level of power supply rails and proper general troubleshooting. Consider how much such a professional needs to earn, net pay per an hour of work, in a modern-day western country. Multiply by three to allow for taxes and similar costs and some profit for the employer company. A repair of a cheap TV set easily just does not pay off in a rich country, considering the amount of skilled work required. Even in my post-commie home country, where wages are still relatively low, I can venture to repair my own cheap stuff in my free time as a hobby, but noone would pay my employer for me to do that same on a commercial basis - because buying a new one is just cheaper. In private, I delight in removing the more trivial "planned obsolescence sabotages" and giving my devices a new lease of life (often immortality, in the sense that moral obsolescence comes earlier). Sometimes I even go so far as void the warranty on a new gadget (after a quick initial test), "pop the hood" and look for the obvious culprits inside - cheap elyt capacitors and the like. And I remove those sabotages on a new device, before it had a chance to fail. E.g., I've had a cheap SoHo WiFi AP run for about 10 years in my parents' house, before some third party scrapped it for his commercial reasons (and out of technical ignorance). I do this in cheap Ethernet switches that I'm using in-house, and do not want to remember where they're located for the next 10+ years. Solving an emergency (device outage) that occurs at random is just much less convenient than preventing a failure (planned obsolescence) as part of initial deployment. Speaking of capacitors, for the record, for innocent and excited tinkerers to come: when replacing leaked or suspicious elyts, note that you should *not* take capacity (microFarad) as the only or even a crucially important guide. In power supplies, the capacitors typically have to sustain a high AC current (and pulsed at that). There are a special variety of wet elyt capacitors for those positions, called "low impedance". And don't just rely on those words in a catalogue, do actually take a look at the Esr value and the permitted ripple current (two sides of the same coin). And, compare. You will notice how vastly better the Solid Polymer capacitors are in those respects, compared to "wet" Al elyts. When refurbing elyts, I strongly prefer solid polymer to a wet elyt. Unfortunately, solid poly doesn't work at high voltages. So the primary side of a mains PSU has to be fitted with a wet elyt. Speaking of quality wet elyt, remember Panasonic FR and Nichicon CS or CY. And Nippon Chemicon in general, but I won't suggest a particular model/family. With wet elyts, brand does matter (not so much with solid poly, especially when replacing wet elyts). Also, be aware that while most elyts nowadays are in power blocking positions, some may still be used for analog timing or signal filtering - in these positions, you'd better stick to a legacy wet aluminum elyt (choose a quality brand and model) or MLCC if the size and voltage allow. (And, keep the original capacity.) Solid polymer tends to have a higher leakage current that might hamper timing or filtering applications. In some rare cases, you may notice that after replacing a wet elyt with solid poly on the secondary side of a PSU, the PSU's regulation loop becomes slightly unstable - maybe just within a certain range of loads. The PSU starts to whistle. That's bad luck - it happens due to the significantly lower Esr of the solid poly or MLCC that you used for replacement. The lower Esr has improved the Q of the regulation loop, thus promoting some resonant pole... Hardly ever a problem though.
Your comment about Vestel supplying circuit diagrams is the reason I have always liked vestel sets but recently I have noticed they have stopped publishing schematics for the latest models and this is very worrying especially as vestel make a lof of the TV s in use today.
Loved it! I was the chief technician of a major service center in the US before I became disabled and forced into retirement. So I tell you the story I know you're going to get a kick out of it. So now I'm 62 and completely a quadriplegic from the neck down. I have 2 nurses that take care of me. So my female nurse age 56 was my technician for this project. Her son has a LG 65 inch 4k TV that he says powers up then shuts down. He tells me he's going to throw it away. Now he knows that I was a chief technician for a long time before I retired but he's determined he's not going to work on it it's something massively expensive and I'm telling him we can repair this if you will be my hands. So he decides you can have the TV if you want it. Absolutely I said! It sits in my house about a month. So I asked my nurse and she agrees to try. I have trained many technicians through the years your technique was beautiful. I wish we had worked together. Anyhow I downloaded a schematic diagram, looked it over for the most likely possibilities, capacitors, connections, and power supply sources and how to determine if the LEDs will trigger the main board to shut down the power supply to the driver board. We tested a few things and I determined the LED strips were bad. I figured my odds of getting her weld a LED on a strip that was defective was pretty slim so I just purchased the full array for $50 on eBay. At about this time her dad walks in the door and sees the exploded views. LOL at every step along the way she's saying what's next, what's next, what's next. This time when she said what's next, I looked over the TV, everything was connected, everything was mounted, all of the screws except for the ones in the back were all used. I said plug it up! Really, she said. I saw the LEDs come up and stay up this time I knew it was working and I said good job it's working. She had to look underneath but the smile on her face when she said wow it's got a beautiful picture. I told her dad I have trained dozens and dozens of technicians over the years. She did everything right, she didn't break anything, she put everything back exactly the way it was from the factory. I could not have done better. Anyhow about 200 screws later she did a fantastic job. I'm sure you have seen all kinds of butchered electronics where other technicians have worked on them. Unless you take fingerprints I'm willing to bet you that you would never know anyone was ever inside much less take had it completely apart the change the LEDs. I should have videoed the entire thing it would have made a great TH-cam video. A total of 4 hours later I have a working 4K 65 inch LG TV For a computer monitor. Like and subscribe I'll be watching other stuff you do I will be helping sitting here saying, check that I bet that's what's wrong with it! :-)
Women are ideal for working on delicate jobs due to having small hands , I got my daughter to replace the headlamp bulb in my car because I just couldn't get my hand into a very small space, in fact if you look back into the history of radio manufacture in the UK most sets were hand built by women, you did the right thing replacing all the LEDs, I tried just replacing the faulty ones years back but then a few weeks later the set comes back with a different failed LED and you have to do the job all over again , after replacing the strips always turn down the BACKLIGHT setting down to reduce the current passing through the LED S this will ensure a much longer life .
@@michaeldranfield7140 sounds like you should replace all the LEDs at once.
@@mrtechie6810 of course , I never replace individual strips in the backlight , its all the strips or nothing .
You should have given the TV to your nurse!
@@dperreno We don't know his financial situation and I'm sure we can both agree that someone who is quadriplegic from the neck down has a lot fewer options of how to spend their free time. He will definitely get more use out of it than she would.
30 year Aircraft Avionics Tech here. This is the about the best example of Troubleshooting I have yet seen on TH-cam. Nice to see a fellow Technician fighting the good fight against engineered obsolescence. Cheers form the U.S.A. !!!
Many thanks for that.
A joy to listen to your expertise. Can I offer you a trick which I would use in a case like this with shorted parts:
Use an infrared camera and inject a current into your circuit. The shorted part will light up in the heat sensitive display. You can get cheap IR cameras to attach via USB onto a mobile phone.
@@heel57 Good day! How does that infrared camera look like and what is the cost?
63-year-old controls engineer here. My apprenticeship was in electronics, and I was taught to repair to component level and it's a skill you never loose but one that does not seem to be taught much now, what with the culture of 'swapnostics' as I like to call it (i.e., replace a whole PCB or module until something works again).
I had a faulty mouse the other week - worth £15 and my partner said, "just chuck it for goodness’ sake and get another" - but I couldn't resist taking it apart to see if I could fix it, and sure enough, it was just a bad solder joint. We throw away far too much kit nowadays, but as Michael Dranfield explains in this video, it doesn’t help that manufacturers do not provide schematics now.
*lose*
I reckon A Swapnostic Technician would not have fixed this tele .. He would have said, "It's the Panel .. Best buy another Tele!"
@@TutterzoidExactly!
These TVs are literally designed to fail and it appears that there's a deliberate intent to make them either uneconomical or too difficult to repair.
lose, not loose
It may only be as simple as a faulty tiny cap. but finding the faulty cap is the hard part. Thats why these type of videos are so helpful to someone getting into the industry, or even a hobbyist.
Glad you liked it.
SMD componant longevity is the issue with all modern day electronics i service retro audio units built in the mid 60's still going with scratchy pots
there are plenty of videos of Indian Servicemen fixing any types of fault on flat TV , unfortunately it's in Indie language ( Tamil )
We of the old school have been replaced by board changers, who have the nerve to call themselves technicians , who probably have had no training to component level, and this TV would have been a scrapper, I despair. marvellous video
The tables have turned full circle, there was board swapping in the 80s and lots of companies advertising in Television magazines selling used boards for thorn 3500 etc so anyone with no skill could repair a TV, then in the 90s all this disappeared with the single pcb and now 40 years later were back to board swapping!
Consider the value of a TV compared to the cost of the repair.
It it took 2 hours to take apart, fault find, replace component and put back together again, that's about the value of the TV in used condition..
Most people don't want to pay more to repair something than it's actually worth, unless it's got some sentimental value in which case there's big money to be made off the customer
In the USA, we had all 3 major brands were boards. Vert, horz, audio, ect. RCA, MAGNOVOX, ZENITH, all board's. Then again, I'm 62 now @michaeldranfield7140
@adrinathegreat3095 I think that is the focus of his consideration at least for the video. That is highlighting the exact problem.
This is the clearest and best explained video on TH-cam. No nonsense or rambling, just clear and concise explanation. Excellent work 👍🏻
Thankyou for that , I try not to spin out videos over long periods .
This is why there is so much e-waste. An expensive TV lost to a 5 pence capacitor. A great video, I'll bare this in mind when my 3D TV fails as I can't replace it now 3D is not a thing anymore. Thanks Michael for sharing.
Just imagine how many more sets that could be repaired if manifactures supplied service data and spare parts.
You make a very good point “is that all it was!” Had that experience!
Yep that's all it was, a less than 10p cap.
57 year old ex Tv / Video Serviceman here from Australia, thank you for that excellent video , I have a ton of stuff waiting for me to fix & or at least attempt to repair, including a bunch of Flat screen LCD's , I cant stand the thought of chucking them out !!! , so maybe one day they will live again, I would much rather even giving them away to someone less fortunate, than just see them head for land fill!, your video has inspired me, I just need to get busy and sort out my work shop area's , so I have somewhere to work !, a mission in itself sigh!, oh well cheers & thanks, Paul from Australia :).
No problem at all , many thanks for watching .
My hats off to your sir. As a retired TV repairman, you have my respect! It is nice to find someone on TH-cam that actually knows what they are doing. That meter you made is a lifesaver when it comes to troubleshooting shorts.
I wouldn't imagine there are many people still repairing TV s for a living, everyone I know has closed down years ago.
@@michaeldranfield7140 As I said I was a retired repairman. When everybody started going to surface mount components I knew the repair business was in trouble. I really don't miss the repair service but every now and then I come across a repair video and watch it. Yours was refreshing! A lot of the people making repair videos are noticeable amateurs with just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
Thank you for time, I have been teaching myself electronics for the last 5 yrs - I just love it and can't get enough of it. Im 66 and disabled trying to keep busy. I have to say I have seen al00000000000t of videos on TH-cam and I must say I love your approach, calm manner and very well put together teaching methodology. Thank You please keep it up!!
Many thanks for that
Great stuff. My TV had a "back light failure" on Tuesday. Turned out it was of warranty and I was told it'd cost hundreds to get the new boards in, from the distributor.
Took the TV back home, opened it up and a popped capacitor is clearly visible on the board. I'm waiting for the replacement to arrive and my TV will be working after paying $0.85 for the part.
All the talk of "climate what what", yet these corporations are creating billions of tonnes of trash each year that needn't be trash at all. Right to Repair action needs to be law in all countries and all the major manufacturers must be made to abide by it. Then we'll see a real change.
Would be nice if the right to repair took us back to spare parts availability and service manuals, we can only wait and see.
I agree, you've said it all for all of us Sir 🤞
Precisely
- Krakk3rJack
You fail to understand a number of things.
1. CORPORATIONS and CORPORATE names are always written in ALL CAPS
2. CORPORATIONS are DEAD entities
3. CORPORATIONS cannot communicate with the Living
4. The DEAD do not care about the Living
5. The only environment CORPORATIONS care about is the economic environment
There are many things you will fail to understand unless you study Law for the next
twenty or thirty years.
That is why Law is NOT taught in schools -- as it would let the cat out of the bag.
There are thins that are not convenient for you to know.
Thus common people are kept in a state of child-like ignorance and slavery.
@@michaeldranfield7140
It used to be that there were standard headlights that would fit multiple cars. Now we have aerodynamic sculptured non-standard projector crap that even _Consumer Reports_ said was expensive. I wonder with LED technology, could we require manufacturers to install "lifetime lights"? Maybe it is not so much all the morons driving with lights not working, but the manufacturers who could be to blame? Surely manufacturers can take more responsibility for safety.
I was an Electronics Maintenance Engineer for the BBC and ITN, repairing telecine machines, videotape recorders, and electronic graphics kit like the Quantel Paintbox and "Harry". We had service manuals for everything. Some so complex that they took up 2 feet of shelf space. We had courses, some lasting 6 weeks, to learn how the kit worked. We were good at what we did too.
Sadly, the throw away technology makes component level repair extremely hard, especially if there are microprocessors doing the heavy lifting.
When I began designing digital kit, I always wrote a start up diagnostic routine, even if it only helped me fault find my own kit.
Modern TV's leave me stone-cold. No schematic, and it's down to luck or experience.
Old school Engineers are a dying breed, I am 71...
Excellent tutorial. I'm 70 now and I'm not an engineer. I am a very experienced technician. By coincidence, my Samsung 65 inch flat screen also failed. Although it wasn't the same issue as yours. One of the LED's lenses came unglued and fell to the bottom of the TV. I was able to carefully glue it back on and BINGO - all was ok.
I have a Samsung TV that won't power on. Using this video, I'm going to try your troubleshooting technique. I don't have anywhere near your knowledge, but at least I may be able to narrow down the fault to a specific area. These TVs are so fragile and we've come to treat them as disposable appliances. I'd love to get mine working again.
The unplugging technique is a good start for narrowing down.
I have an RCA with the same problem, won't turn on. Timer turned it off and next morning couldn't get it to turn on.😪😪😪😪
Good stuff Michael. Just imagine how many flat screen tv's have been scrapped for the sake of such minor component failure! All intentional of course, and why detailed service info is not made available.
And when you scrap these, not so much material got back in use. At least those panels need rare earths metals and looks like China is way to get these. There is not much in one panel, but if you throw all away with junks, then those are gone. Not even sure does anyone try to get these off from electric waste to recover those materials, but I know many who took full flat from waste and fixed it to use :p
If you could fix one flat per day and one fix fails and goes spare parts, you still could get living with that and if you have source to get these throw aways, then it's even better :p
absolutely right and all designed just to sell another one as you say .
@@michaeldranfield7140
So bad for the environment though, thousands of tons of various metals that are lost to landfill, some toxic of course. Plus plastics, glass and chemicals, all the energy involved in manufacture, distribution, delivery etc. An extremely wasteful and irresponsible policy. The right to repair legislation that is being debated in the USA currently, should be mandatory worldwide, with full, detailed service info being a legal requirement. We can wish anyway!
@@michaeldranfield7140 That's what they mean when talking about "sustainability".
@@michaeldranfield7140 Made to break just after the warranty expires.
I find that another common problem is the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply fail quite often or a heatsinked semiconductor.
Just watched your repair by the accident of randomly touching on my tablet screen! This is good old detective work needed to fault find anything and only learned from experience. Young technicians need mentors like you to pass on the knowledge. Thank you for sharing.
Only problem been there is no younger people going into TV repairs now , its a dying trade and any repairs now are supposed to be carried out by just swapping a board or in this case the correct procedure would have been to just fit a new LCD panel which would have been so expensive the customer would not have had it done .
Wow. When I was a young lad I used to deliver TV's for a local company. They had several engineers working in their repair shop.
I thought things seemed complicated back then but the modern stuff seems even worse.
One old guy called Norman used to work on the old valve sets & knew all the tricks of the trade. Including polishing scratches out of the tube with Brasso. (Mostly Philips tubes no matter what brand TV they were)
Then the Japanese took over & only B&O were better. People used to ask me why do you need 100 channels? When we only had 4 to watch. (If you were lucky) most still had 3.
How times have changed.
You should be a tutor pal. Your video was excellent.
Back in the old days of proper service back up from the manufactures and individually spare part availability there was hardly anything that could not be repaired, now the tables have turned and I end up scrapping loads of stuff, the set you saw in this video was just one of the lucky ones fortunately.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Yes, my start as an industrial electrician was 1963.
A proper electrical apprenticeship, including power generation on site, a steam engine driving the alternator, the first factory in the South West of England, possibly the whole of the UK allowed to generate in parallel with the Grid.
I'm never forget I was trained by men who had fought a war in 1939
With 24 hour processing in a leather tannery the value in the cost of leather imported from across the world would have been horrendous.
The Hours and responsibility to the firm and production workers was huge Thinking back to being 16.
I can still remember being sent out on my own with the innevitable question, "How long will it take," before I had opened up the control panel.
That era, a test lamp with a filament lamp, only the Electricity Board had the moulded test lamp for 415 or 240 AC.
We were designing and manufacturing our own complex control panels, a lamp with a resistor was simple but never achieved.
Neither did the department spend out our on the vital tool for our everyday safety.
One AVO between two factories, two miles apRtt, and seven electricians.sharing that instrument and two Megger's for insulation testing.
Steel Control panels were made to order from Brook Motors Huddersfield.
A lead time of 23 weeks.
I have mislaid my RS Components catalogue from 1966 which was A5 format pre metrication.
16 maybe 24 pages, resistors, including volume controls, capacitors, control panel wiring in 16 colours, transformers.
An address in central London, I can almost remember th address.
Damaging the AVO was unforgiveable because it took three months to get repaired.
As an old tv repair man, it's really refreshing to see, today's throw-away society no longer tries to fix anything. I do try before I give up.
I was brought up where you had things repaired, back in the 70 s I use to fit new elements into electric kettles, now you can buy a brand new kettle for £5.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Make do and mend it, I actually repair connectors and thermal switches now in Chinky kettles at home here in Thailand. Sad but true
That was absolutely brilliant and informative. You should consider doing learning workshops like Louis Rossman. He does these self help workshop classes where people come in with their faulty electronics to fix themselves and Louis donates his time to supervising and offering advice and guidance to help those people repair their own stuff.
Knowledge should always be passed on even if one is retired because the knowledge and experience gained is priceless.
I repair for a living so doing self help wouldn't pay my bills, we do have a repair cafe in my town where volunteers do exatcley that and for free.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Braindead reply. Anything more than 15 miles away ain't coming to you mate.
Excellent video and a fantastic master class of fault finding. Technicians change parts until the equipment works, an ENGINEER finds the problem, fixes it then finds out why it happened in the first place, you sir are an ENGINEER!
unfortunately now fault finding is more good luck than skill as no one produces schematic diagrams now and everything is board only replacement .
This is by far the best fault finding tutorial regarding modern TV's on TH-cam. Thanks Michael for some critical tips that can greatly reduce going down rabbit holes.
with no service manual I sometimes wonder how I managed to find these faults at all .
Great vid.
I gave up repairing TV's in 2002 and followed my passion of repairing Rover 75 cars !!
Still doing it today.
Just found some RADIO AND TELEVISION SERVICING hard backs in the loft from 1960's onwards.
Threw a lot away though as museums weren't interested!!
Everyone I knwe in the TV industry has packed it in now.
By God. That sounds like me. I had a 1956 Rover 90 and a 1958 105. Rebuilt both from scratch. Used to repair TVs and radios for friends and family as another hobby back when you could go to the manufacturer and buy service manual. Had the same set of books in my loft and only recently dumped them as no-one wants them. Gave up trying to repair electronic gizmos when CRTs disappeared and radios started to be one chip.
Excellent troubleshooting presentation, just the "old school". Thank you for sharing. My respects from PR.
No problem, many thanks for watching.
Hi there Michael
I came across your video by accident BUT I really enjoyed it.
Some of this terminology to me back to when were trading, I am now a retired Electro-Mechanical Engineer [ H N D ] I now repair laptops to keep my brain happy.
Laptop screens are one of the many items for repair.
I have now subscribed.
Kind regards
Tony
You are the best teacher. I have been a mechanic for around 40 years and have been teaching myself electronics. You attack diagnostics on circuit boards like I diagnose cars, and it makes it much easier for me to understand.
Thank you!
I remember the good old days walking down to Walgreens with a bag of tubes for the tube tester.
Unfortunately with no service manual or circuit diagram this is the only way you can diagnose modern electronics.
You did a fantastic job 😊and I understood your technical banter, and you made me smile when you said some customers will quote: Is that all it was!
My job is as an electronics diagnostician. Liked and subscribed. Cracking video. A word to folks who fancy a spot of TV DIY… if you are not a professional or well versed in electronics, this level of diagnosis is best left to qualified folks. They are more likely to repair your TV and charge a modest fee. You are more likely to accidentally damage something and end up having to buy a new TV.
With no service manual some repairs are just down to good luck than actually knowing what your doing.
Fantastic video! I'm no electrical engineer, but I am fascinated by fault finding.
Glay you liked it, many thanks for watching.
Thank you Michael. First time I've seen your channel. Used to have a Samsung Service centre about 3 Miles away in Rustic Mid Wales. Bumped into him and said got a backlight problem, ' No given up, Couldn't make it pay ' Bloody shame really. Tried people for miles around, but nobody wants to get involved in component repairs. One repair was again a capacitor, £ 20.00 quid job, but he worked liked you, eliminate, and know your stuff.
Just like the done thing these days is to replace the whole board when it has a fault if the backlights are faulty you should replace the whole LCD panel, and on some sets even with a separate T con board the T con is not listed as a replaceable item and it comes with the LCD panel, I don't make this pay either but its the only thing I have ever done so I can't stop!
My component-level knowledge is very limited, but I absolutely love watching videos like this.
Great work in preventing yet another tv from a destiny of landfill.
This was actually a relatively simple fault, I could repair more complex faults if I could get service data and some support from the manifactures.
@@michaeldranfield7140 any repair is of interest to me, no matter how big or small 😀
@@michaeldranfield7140 We need to lobby government for a right to repair law, which would make it illegal for manufacturers not to supply the circuit diagrams.
Same goes for car's with the stupid reprogramming the ECU when you fit a new battery. Pure Greed.😔
Brilliant video and great fault-finding. Think of all these sets that go to the bin because of a component costing a quid or 2! It's a pity and rare, stuff like this just don't get repaired in the world of today.
I would imagine most people would have wrote this set off after disconnecting the T con board thinking the LCD panel was faulty.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Possibly, but what isn't being said is the labor costs in fixing things. e.g motor vehicles being a big one. Plus I also remember when I had a Panasonic boom box decades ago and had to replace a volume potentiometer. Replaceable, but needed to be ordered from the manufacturer and expensive to boot.
My cousin had a booming business fixing sets years ago but transitioned to other stuff , it just petered out
You’re forgetting the old adage.
Cost of hitting boiler with hammer £1
Knowing where to hit it £999
@@aloysiussnailchaser272 Yes I have heard of that saying in the past .
Quite impressed Michael, and an analog SANWA meter too! That’s rare to see today! Rare as seeing the term EHT & filament these days!
I have always had Sanwa meters, there a very old company, as you have already noticed I'm a bit old school.
@@michaeldranfield7140 👍👏Your Sanwa is a bit more modern than the one I had! Like you I grew up on Sanwa, also a slide rule, Staedler I think, and later HP LED calculators (HP-45) in the days when you could buy brand new Mullard valves, and home kit transistors like OC71 & AC126, polythene variable gang caps and a time when car phones were enormous radiotelephones (Pye)! Tech progress has been amazing, not to mention the fall in price of high end kit, scopes, DMM etc. Best of all, being able to design & order your fully built custom PCB in a week!
Great video Michael and very informative. Ive repaired countless flat panel sets myself but have had absolutely no formal training other than the occasional youtube videos. With that said I’m lucky to still be alive! I do pride myself on not damaging a set any further when I get one in, and not having a set go out to its owner that would be a safety concern. Ive only had one set come back to me and it had a rather abusive owner. Other times I’ve spoke to old friends or acquaintances and they will tell me a story of how I repaired their tv, or playstation, or cell phone perhaps and that its still going strong years and years later. Often times I can’t even remember doing their particular repair since Ive done so many. Mistakes I’ve made, well two come to mind. #1 Never touch a heatsink to check for heat in order to tell if a component is being powered up! I had a plasma tv shock the daylights out of me once when I learned the hard way that some heatsinks can be live. #2 Never replace certain components without first realizing what may have caused them to fail in the first place. Other than watching your components fail you may actually pose yourself a safety concern as I once did when I simply replaced a pair of resistors without finding its fault and the new resistors exploded with what looked like a bolt of lightning that extended a good 12 inches or so out of the rear of the set. I tell you I could have cracked a walnut with my butt cheeks right about then but thankfully the good lord above spared my life and my shorts to say the least. As a hobbyist the hardest part can be locating the components Id say. Cross referencing has its limitations as well as you sometimes end up with cheap Chinese clones that can be very short lived. I wonder if the capacitor wizard I use would have been of use in your repair Michael, although I’m not sure it will do ceramic capacitors but it does test in circuit so for that aspect its a good and fast tool, on the contrary so are my eyes and my nose. I really liked the comment you made at the end of your video when you said what your customer might say when you present them with the fault. “Is that all it was?” Some people clearly don’t realize or can fully appreciate the expertise that a technician today must have in order to repair electronics at the component level. Board level is far too expensive and a waste of materials in my opinion. Prices on TV sets have come down so low these days that it’s not as common for people to repair them sadly, and the technicians are fading away as well it seems. I still search for my place in life out there. For reference I’m 45, USMC Combat Veteran as an 0811 field artillery deployed to Iraq in 03. a licensed general contractor in California for over 10 years, have 5 children all with the same mean lady classified as my wife of 16 years, and Ive worked as an AV technician for about 8 or 9 years. Been out of work for awhile since the pandemic started, and feel weighted by depression and the struggles of home life, most of which my wife creates in my opinion, but we all know life is hard and no body cares so I better save it right! Anyway great video Michael and thank you for sharing it with us. Take care bud.
you dont need much training to repair TV sets now, as long as you can plug in another board and have a very basic understanding thats all is needed, the makers no longer supply any service manuals or parts , just new boards, of course the whole idea is really just to get you to buy another set, but i will always try to find a problem first than rush in and buy a new board .
Bless you, you are still here to talk about it, please god you continue to do so m8.
Take care, keep at it.
I think the capacitor wizzard is only for electrolytics ? but as MLCC caps tend to short out anyway generally just a multimeter is all that's needed, the biggest problem now with flat screen TV sets is trying to fault find without a circuit diagram .
Thanks for your expertise. People like yourself are helping to reduce the amount of electrical waste in landfill and saving an extortionate cost to the customer. I see many flat panels every time I go to the dump and from now on I'm going to assume 50% or more are repairable due to a tiny component.
I could do much more if manufactures brought back service manuals with schematics in .
There are some TH-cam videos of people dumpster diving and picking up some easily repairable equipment and TV's. Most of this equipment is thrown away by companies that are out of business or rebuilding a lab with the latest stuff. They don't want to carry over older equipment so it just gets put in the dumpster.
@@iworkout6912 I did it myself once where a company threw out all it's computers. I jumped in the bin and took them. A few needed fixed and others were fine. I made a fair bit of money from them.
Excellent real-world fault-finding and diagnosis! I once had a remote control that had a ceramic cap go short. It was for one of the early Freeview boxes, namely the Netgem iPlayer (nothing to do with the BBC service). Drained the batteries in no time!
I have had caps faulty a few times in remote controls but in my case it was the electrolytic.
Brilliant best I've seen someone talking sence,should do more videos please,talking about the problems,showing it even better..massive Respect back to my ham radio 73s...
got more videos in the pipeline , repairing things with no circuit diagram is not easy though .
Absolutely outstanding. Explanation with the electronic diagrams is just epic!
Thankyou for watching .
It's knowing in advance the proper procedure of isolating (and the respected & expected results of each) that makes the fault apparent. Beyond that it's like a cow looking at a new gate, she doesn't know what she's looking at nor that there's any difference. The value of repairing anything isn't the saving of the device or cost of parts vs a brand new one so much....but rather, it's the repairman and his experience.
Another prime example might be using a code scanner on your automobile. It's one thing to bring up the codes, but if you don't know what they mean or what they should be......they're just codes. Great video sir. Look forward to more....and best regards from Texas
and of course years ago I went on manufactures training courses and they taught you fault finding procedures, which parts to disconnect to narrow down faults to a particular area , however training courses no longer exist , a bit like workshop service manuals with waveforms and voltages clearly marked to assist in fault finding ,
@@michaeldranfield7140 Again, I agree.. Today's technology is intended to be disposable and smaller than 'repairable by human means'. It's nice to a degree (if you're flying to Mars in a capsule), but throw away nonetheless. BTW: I really enjoy the common ground and your video. From "one gear head / lightning rod" to another...Best wishes.
I’m enjoying your longer videos another set saved from landfill pity there aren’t more people like you to save this equipment
years ago there were thousands of people like me but they have all closed down now and got real jobs paying lots of money, and it I wasn't a life long addict to electronics I would be joining them , glad you liked the video .
Hi Michael,
A great video. This is what I have used to find a faulty bypass capacitor on a computer board that has a bypass capacitor for each chip.
Connect a variable voltage power supply via a resistor to the track. And slowely increase the voltage (until you are able to get a voltage reading as follows). Then use the volt meter to read the voltage to ground. And move in the direction where the voltage measured gets less towards the faulty bypass capacitor.
If the short is above 1 ohm I use the bench psu method to see what gets hot or burns up !
If you use a high enough voltage/current, it makes magic smoke!
@@mrtechie6810 or burn your finger looking .
Sir
congratulations on a great video and a beautiful and thorough explanation
No problem, many thanks for watching.
I think it's funny that every commenter is like me, an old man. I suspect a young man would have just thrown it in a skip! I am in awe of your diagnostic ability. It truly shows the difference between a lifelong (highly qualified) "Jack of all trades" like me and a real master. I am also in awe of you finding a space on your bench big enough for a flat screen TV. I can only dream of that!
Great video! Especially liked the clever way to single out a faulty capacitor, thanks for the lesson!
singling out a single capacitor only works with a millohm meter if the short resistance is less than 1 ohm, if the short is above 1 ohm what I do is power the rail from a bench power supply and see what gets hot .
@@michaeldranfield7140 Do you use a thermal camera, or is this the finger test?
Great explanation. I used to do TV repair a long time ago but even I could see the end when flat screen tvs came along. As a career it was not going to be a challenge just replacing a whole board instead of component fault finding.
I never saw the end when flat screen sets came out and a 42 inch set was £7,000 to buy , I just saw an opportunity to make more money but it didnt take long ,look at sets now , less than £300 for a 42 inch set .
My dad was TV Radio repair guy from the early days when TV came out, and still serviced TV's and other electronics till he was in his 70's. Taught himself these things. Passed away in 2000. I'm the youngest of our family and picked up a lot of this from him and on my own.
As of the past few years I decided to repair flat panel monitors and some of my TV's. Main problem is the capacitors often in the power supply side, and often none of them show any signs of leaking. So replacing all of the electrolytic type ones is the main cure.
Problem is I now have many used monitors that are good, but people still want to buy the new stuff. This might change if our economy get much worse. Glad to know of someone that is till doing component repair.
About 6 years ago I took a blue-ray player/surround sound system to a repair shop and they required a $80.00 deposit to even look at the unit, but told me if they can fix it then the $80.00 will go toward the repair cost. I knew it was one of the amplifier chips or something in that area since it had three amp chips, and two of the channels did not play. They told me they could not get the main board so it could not be fixed. I was pretty upset at that answer, I figured a professional shop would do component repair. If this is the that repair business then they really don't need much electronic talent if all they do is replace the circuit board and collect money.
Thank you Michael for being one of the good repair guys!
Unfortunately these days there is no fault finding to component level, the shop will have had to replace the whole board because there is no circuit diagrams in the service manual, this is all done in an attempt to make an item not repairable so you just buy a new one, I only attempt component level fault finding because that's what I grew up doing and I still find it very exciting but in reality I come across lots of items I have to scrap simply because there are no circuits available and a new board exceeds the value of the item, all this takes time so you won't get many people attempting component level fault finding, you could easills spend an hour and not find the fault.
Thats exactly what happened to my refrigerator that costed me 7K when I bought new and the tech who looked at said the main system board needed replacement and would cost be $1200 to fix it. Well, this is what I did - Got a new freezer for $180 (that I needed anyways) - moved all the food to that freezer and got the board on my bench. Well, it used to be a bench in the early 90's, not anymore.
The issue was with a shorted rectifier that blew the SMD fuse. I had to wait for 5 days to get the $3 parts and the refrigerator was humming like brand new. I agree, the component level fault finding talent is long gone, however some do retain that passion.
Brilliant effort. How things have changed. Experience plus perseverance = result despite obstacles. Shame of it is that we seem destined to replace whole units under insurance schemes rather than repair a perfectly good unit that has suffered a single component failure.
How is this good for the planet? I have now subscribed for nostalgic benefit. I personally don't repair TVs anymore but admire those that do. All CRT in my day with like you said, good diagrammatic support, and part numbers.
Great interesting video. I enjoyed it very much. I remember how great service manuals used to be and enjoyed watching you show the differences. Miss the quality of the old service manuals.
Sadly all service manuals are now like that, the reality of it is the manifactures don't want people repairing sets they just want you to buy a new one.
I am a TV technician. So yes, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find some failures without diagrams. But the fault you show is a known and easy to find.
I know it's a very common and easily fault to find with the equipment but the video was to highlight how easy it is to make a wrong diagnosis as the back light lit whichever of the T con ribbons were removed which would lead some people to assume the main board is the problem when it's not.
It's good to still see someone actually tracking the fault to it's source, The new TV's are going backwards in repair, remember the old tube jerker days?
Enjoyed your video! Used to do component level repairs on cryptographic equipment. Shortly before I left the service, it was board swapping.
Some of the comments below reminded me of a brilliant rocket scientist who lived frugally, and fixed everything himself. One day the washing machine broke down, and he was tearing it apart to fix the transmission, and his wife says, "I want a new washing machine." He's like "I can fix this and save a lot of money." Her: "I *WANT* a new washing machine." Him: (same response). Her: "*I* *WANT* *A* *NEW* *WASHING* *MACHINE*"
She got her new washing machine.
Brilliant video, thanks. How much I agree with you, I was also used to repairing down to component level. I started off in the early 1960's. I progressed through from 405 -line TV' s then into the birth of the 625-line uhf & the dawn of colour in the UK. As engineers at that time people like you & I were kept very busy!
I moved off into Broadcast Television engineering, until very late in my working life. Very technical & enjoyable it was as a career. However after a series of redundancies & nearing retirement, I found my way back into part-time domestic TV repair mainly Samsung, but also other makes. We had little access to service manuals, or spare parts, so I used to go online to download the various chip data-sheets & using a sort of 'reverse-engineering, work out how the various chips were interconnected etc. to aid fault-finding. Long-winded, but it worked.
In the current 'green' climate, where there is supposed to be a 'repair culture' perhaps expensive domestic kit such as TV's etc should now again, be made more repairable, with spares & service data once again more available.
That's all I do now is download the data sheet for the chip in question where the fault is but with chips getting smaller the information they print on the top is very limited which makes tracking down the correct datasheets all the more difficult.
I remember those days well -- having been taught RADIO repair and driving at age 8
- That was 1949 -- Building radios at age 10/11
Took flying lessons at age 13 - A pilots license by age 13 - and joined the RAF in 1960
(Bomber command) - following the footsteps of one of my aunts - who was Russian Jewish.
I served for 30 years in the Military - serving three countries - - My flying days are over -
but I has the opportunity to study Electronics and Electro-Mechanical Engineering - Law -
Psychology - Business Management - Risk Management - and Paramedics-
PHILIPS was the CORPORATION that produced the Avionics fro Australia's FA/18 Hornet
4 years with PHILIPS and Sydney University - led to an attachment to the USAF working
on joint USAF .NASA projects. ( The USAF has control over NASA )
Iife has been an interesting life - Many engineers - pilots and other Military personnel I have
known have been gradually passing away since 2012 ---
It is only June 2022 and I have attended ten funerals in this six months - one only on
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Time passes rapidly -- I don't worry too much - as I may not be here tomorrow
There are no guarantees in life.
The thing is to never give up and KEEP LEARNING everything you can - to keep the brain active
and pass on your knowledge - as that will be your legacy to be remembered by.
Good luck every"one"
One day you will be some'body' and join all the other bodies in the cemetery.
Just wanted to say "Thank you" for taking the time and sharing the knowledge. This shows me I could fix faults beyond the ribbon cable delaminations/disconnections I got so far. Cheers! 👍
Very instructive video Micheal, being a now retired tech who started in the trade in the monochrome valve TV era I always relied on the ubiquitous and comprehensive service manuals that were current then.After many years experience the manuals were only referenced if the fault was a curly one as one became attuned to parts that commonly failed and most were carried in the service van and the majority of repairs could be done in the customers house. Only the curliest were taken back to the workshop.
Nowadays though very little can be done in the house in the way of repairs and all sets get the workshop treatment.
Prior to retirement about 5 years ago I was a service agent for several brands and got pretty good at component level fault’s especially on Panasonic plasma and lcd sets as I found them to be good at supporting their repairers with the required info.
However the model life of sets is now only a few months as the technology is pushing ahead at such a fast clip and the number of brands being sold has escalated so the ability of any workshop to develop a working knowledge of any particular model becomes almost impossible unless you can survive by specializing in some of the more popular brands that are more likely to supply backup.
Glad now that I can now tinker away in my workshop without any customer pressure.
S
That's another problem as you say, you never see the same set twice so it's virtually impossible to be a specialist these days, valve days were much better.
NICE WORK!
Hi from Phuket - Thailand - Expat Australian here...
Great fault finding skills there, one thing I would have done differently is replace all decoupling caps if they're exactly the same, if one failed, the rest will follow
That is good advice but unfortunately customers are now much more price conscious and seem to want everything doing for next to nothing , this is why I only replaced the faulty part, however in the case of backlight failure where its a big job removing the panel without damaging it I only ever replace all the backlight strips , I never replace individual LED s as some people do .
@@michaeldranfield7140
This is an ever increasing problem -
Consumers imagine because the device they purchased is relatively inexpensive -
that it should be also inexpensive to repair - where in reality it is becoming more
difficult on many levels - including lack of service information - NO service Manuals -
No Service Bulletins - Lack of major replacement parts after four years (which is the
Statute of Limitations in respect of warranties) so anything beyond that is NOT
covered - despite Manufactures claims of extended warranties. Law is Law.
The general population has no concept of the knowledge and skills required to
earn and understand how these technologies work - the time taken to learn and keep
up to date with developing technologies and the high cost of investment in equipment
- and its replacement and maintenance costs - addition and replacement of
equipment and $$ invested in stock that may soon become obsolete - and considered
an economic loss - Then there is the cost of Stock control and administration of
a business - insurance of various kinds - accountants fees - Office requirements & supplies.
+ one has to make a better than average living - That is the whole purpose of a business.
PLUS the business has to make a profit to allow for future expansion and growth.
Plants need Liquid water -- Business needs Liquid assets.
It is not the cost of the replaced part -- it is the cost of knowledge and experience and the
cost of doing business.
Life is difficult - Business is equally difficult - Customers can be difficult
EXAMPLE:
▶ ‘We cannot survive’: Businesses struggling with costs
th-cam.com/video/qUn5rGfOIyQ/w-d-xo.html
Jun 16, 2022 05:54 -----------------------------
CHANNEL: Sky News Australia
th-cam.com/channels/O0akufu9MOzyz3nvGIXAAw.html
; Appetite Five Dock Co-Owner Phillip Salhab says his business
; “cannot survive” as his venue struggles to hire staff and deal
; with rising cost of living prices.
Kudos Squire. One of THE BEST diagnosis and repair vids around. Thank you.
I repaired a tape deck (from the early nineties) that not only had an exploded view in its service manual that explained the order to do things in, the thing also had a specific little notch to rest the new belt on while you reassembled a very compact mechanism, to finally slip the belt onto the flywheel later, and skip a world of awkwardness. That's _extra thought_ put into the most likely failures to an almost unnecessary degree - I would have managed without, just with a _lot_ more awkwardness. I love the fact that that was once the standard.
Those were the days when things were designed to be repaired and supported with spare parts, sadly long in the past now.
I think that most electronics equipment with small parts have tiny mechanical assemblies that have to be completed using special jigs. All the details have to be planned for manufacturing, but there is no financial incentive to make any of the fiddly parts re-reassemblable by the customer or a serviceperson.
In any case, due to mechanical or electrical failure with time, customers are forced to accept early failure and discarding as inevitable. And, of course, not even mentioning the failure of manufacturers to test an adequate number of units coming off the assembly line or to provide incentives to assemblers for improving the quality of the final products.
Some lovely faultfinding and explanation there. Amazing that a complex device with thousands of components can be taken down by the failure of one simple, small, common part... and equally amazing that if the flimmin' thing would only fail open circuit instead of short then it seems things would have carried on working in this case! I wish I'd studied electronics; it must be a great buzz to revive something like this that would otherwise be scrapped as the manufacturer wishes!
Just imagine how many more sets could be repaired if we had access to service data and spare parts.
My grandfather opened a radio repair shop (Taller Marconi) in 1936 in a tiny town in Colombia. Needless to say, there wasn't much in the way of technical support from manufacturers so he figured out all the internal workings of the radios and made a living fixing them. When TVs came out he did the same thing and figured it out. Then VHS came out ( BETA in Colombia) and once again, they found a way to repair them down to component level. My father and two of his brothers eventually learnt the trade and took over from him when he retired. Thank you for your video and the memories. I remember my dad replacing tiny components in PCBs to get them back to work.
In those days all electronic components were big things and as you quite rightly say a lot of stuff could be repaired without a service manual, however today with micro sized component, some so small there is no space to print a part number on them a service manual is the only hope of doing a repair.
@@michaeldranfield7140 And even when you find the part and replace it, you can get stuck with locked software adjustment that don'"t allow you to adjust calibration (Apple enjoy so much this to forbid you to use a screen or even just the closing screen sensor on an other computer of the exact same model)
I think the "board" replacement thing started in the 1960"s promote by IBM for their big computer made of thousands of small cards, they explain and even have software to find the faulty board, and replace it as the board fault finding is too complex and would took time and qualification, with theirs brand new approach, no qualification was required to perform maintenance, the board was at this time be eligible to be re-manufactured.
Talking about waste reduction, it's a huge reduction from a TV set to a rice seed waste size !
Thanks for the video. I'm an old hand at repairing CRT TVs but been very nervous of flat-panels. You've given me more confidence.
BTW, the customer says "Is that all? How much do those cost then? 20 pence? Why have you given me a bill for forty quid, you ripoff merchant!"
nothing to loose now by having a go as these sets have so little value .
They are much safer than CRTs as they do not contain dangerous high voltages.
I have spent 55 plus years in the repair field, and I was astounded by the lack of support and parts availability for the sets here in the States in the last 15 years or so.
I am glad I am retired from the repair business. Even if one would get a "tested" board from a "recycler" who said their boards were tested and worked" I often had to repair the replacement board. Even "rebuilt" boards were most often bad. They never even scrubbed the dirt & dust off of them. Just pulled the boards from a junk set & shipped them without testing. What a scam!
I generally went to the component level for repairs on the flat screen sets, but when a power surge hit the sets, it often burned the power supply board, badly charring it beyond repair.
You are right, the prople selling used boards say there working but in reality there just pulled from sets without even trying.
Sadly nowadays boards listed as "Used, Tested" means that you'll get to test it when you use it.
@@FrozenHaxor Absolutely correct , if you see someone advertising a board from a plasma TV and it says removed from a smashed screen TV but fully tested, ask them how they managed to test it when a plasma produces no picture at all with a smashed screen .
I fair enjoyed that! That's cheered me up enough to put my old LG's motherboard in the oven. Say a prayer...
Don't overcook it plastic parts melt very easily!
@@michaeldranfield7140 I spoke to a guy tonight who said that "dielectric oil" might sort the solder problem. Sounds odd to me (WD40???), but I'll do some more research. Not mad keen on the idea of an oven without a temp reading doing the biz.
Thanks, Michael! Great troubleshooting! Often I troubleshoot by looking up the make and model of the TV on the internet to see what typically fails :-) Years ago, I fixed our TV by replacing a few discrete components which were known to fail, the next TV I had to replace the bulging caps on the power supply board, but only spent a couple of dollars. For the more recent flat-screen TV's which died, I had to find used circuit boards on eBay for $30 to $40. They keep making it harder and harder to fix anything 😞
I have hundreds of used boards from broken screen TV sets but the problem is you hardly ever see the same set twice now the models change so often and sometimes the symptoms can be very miss leading and you end up replacing a board that's not faulty at all , so where ever possible I try to find the fault first before buying new boards .
I simply love this...
I've always had a good analytical mind, and it's exactly this type of progression through circuits - knowing roughly what to expect at certain points, and then 'stumble' across an error.
I think it's horrendously bad that so many consumer electronics have become practically unserviceable...
Especially when the weakest link turns out to be a humble little capacitor.
Imagine how many screens have been skipped unnecessarily...
Such a waste.
Great video really enjoyed this, some great tips in it. I no longer work directly in electronics repairs but still do my own plus odd few others. The vast majority of the "TV repair" shops have now closed down in my local area, only the odd one or two left. When people ring up these places they sometimes get quoted silly money figures and most people dont take their stuff in for repair. Only the other week I fixed a small 19" TV for someone who was quoted £70 (over the phone) plus any parts for a dead fault. In the end it was just one diode in the PSU board, took me less than 30mins to fix. I charged them £35 and they were over the moon. Things are getting more complex to fix, and where possible I do tend to avoid surface mount repairs.
Even by the late 90s early 2000's suppliers were just recommending board swops, I worked in a place and we did a lot of insurance repairs and they just sent us boards out for faults.
In my first job we didn't have service manuals for a lot of stuff we fixed, and there was no internet as it was the early 90s, but stuff seemed a lot easier to fix back then, we fixed anything that came in the door with a plug on it!
£35 for a repair to a 19" tv..
There's the issue.
I've given away many 22" Tv's FOC as they are so cheap and not even worth selling..
It's a disposable world..
If we had RTR then we'd invest in bigger stuff thats supposed to last have have second hand resale value..
Where I am there is no other shops within 20-30 miles radius, I'm the last man standing, in the 80s when I opened my first shop it was a very brave move as there were repair and rental shops everywhere , in the 90 s with the event of single board TV s there was no swapping , every fault had to be to component level but now were back to panel swapping , the whole industry has turned full circle but the real truth of the matter is the manufactures don't want TV s to be repairable they just want to sell another set ,what they don't understand is if a customer buys say a Samsung TV and it only last 13 months and then is declared un repairable they are not likely to buy another Samsung so by not supplying parts and service manuals they are not doing themselves any favours.
@@michaeldranfield7140 My Samsung plasmas and LED LCD TV's from 2013 and 2015 respectively still work fine though we don't really watch TV. I watch baseball on it sometimes, and play android tv stuff on the LCD sometimes. Occasionally we watch movies on them.
73 year old retired electronics tech (radio communications) here. I am still impressed that the fault for such a large device was just one tiny component. I am not surprised the fault was a capacitor, since they seem to be the one component that time expires over the years. In old 1960s transistor radios the electrolytic capacitors almost always eventually fail. I saw a video where a chip capacitor was causing a Dodge truck to shut down.
Imagine that in the 50s you often had the schematic glued on the INSIDE of the appliances ... good times
Very informative thanks! I don't repair tellies as a job, but an interesting repair story to share; a neighbour gave us their old LG LCD TV that had a really blue cast to the screen, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the red and green signals were missing or it had been set up wrong or something, but upon further disassembly, it turned out that it had been run so long that the phosphor on the backlight leds had degraded to the point where it was no longer making yellow light, leaving just the blue! New LEDs now on order.
Its a common fault on LG sets , no doubt caused by cutbacks in production , if you look at a LED in an earlier model of set the yellow phosphor is held in around the edges in a plastic carrier on the newer LG sets the phosphor is just push fitted on top of the LED element and the heat from the led caused by running the backlights at 100 % causes micro cracks in the phosphor which eventually just falls off .
Great repair video with clear explanations , you're good at this stuff. I was thinking before disassembling the tv you could've just checked the screen with a flashlight and if the lcd was still working you should've be able to see the image faintly. If the screen was faulty which is your case, then you shouldn't be able to see anything with the flashlight.
Some sets has a really dark tint on the screen and its very difficult to see if there is an image even with the torch test .
Thanks for this great video. I enjoyed your calm commentary on the “service manual” and learnt some new fault finding techniques.
Many thanks for watching.
Building a micro-ohmmeter that is sensitive enough to diagnose the resistivity of the copper traces is pretty amazing.
Its a good tool for short locating .
Excellent diagnosis and superb explanation of how it all works. Great stuff.
Co-starring Marcus Wareing and the Jester from Leicester as a bonus.
Many thanks for watching
Great stuff! I'm a consumer electronics repair guy myself and I'm about your age. Problem is, our job was doomed by the price erosion of e.g. TV sets. In the 70th and 80th a modern A brand TV was about 1.000 Euro what represented a full monthly paycheck for an average worker at that time. Today a TV is about 500 Euro and that's merely 50% of the average monthly pay ignoring the inflation over 40 years. So in theory a TV should cost about 2.000 Euro today and that would make repairs profitable. Besides, your insight in electronics and understanding of schmeatic diagrams and signal flow path in combination with effective SMD soldering skills is amazing and hard to find nowadays. However, I'm afraid students leaving school today are rather studying electronic engineering and get a high payed job in the industry then sitting in a TV repair shop.
I dont think anyone in there right mind will be going into TV repairs now , as you quite rightly say a TV is now cheaper than it was 40 years ago but cars and houses keep going up in price white TV s keep falling , in the 70 s TV were so expensive compared to wages most people rented ,today most people with a real job can buy a new TV for just a couple of days wages .
Also as technology advances fast it makes less sense to put money on repairing old than buying new. If one at the cost of repair gets a new bigger TV why repair. Also one cannot ignore the ease of buying flat panels. No need to organize transport. Just pick one and put in a car and you are done in an hour.
@@okaro6595 you do have a point but I come across a lot of people that are not happy just buying a new set, usually when they have only had the set for 18 months and its failed, they just dont think they have had there moneys worth ,.
Hi Michael, I was (almost) going to abandon watching your video at 1 minute into it, but so glad that I watched and listened to your every word! Just like you, I have lost faith in buying new TV's because of the problems that you describe. I am self-taught (from books and YT), but it becomes terribly frustrating when you spend scores of fruitless hours on the same TV, realising that you lack the ability to find the cause. Most Flat Panel TVs that have been given away (to me), have been simple fixes - like Capacitor replacement of PS Board. It's the most fantastic feeling when it comes to life again! I won't entertain the Chinese 'cheapies' but like to fix LG. You are amazing with your knowledge, and it's clear that the backlights weren't working because the power supply was compromised. I am currently looking at a 42" LG with picture on the left half only. On the faulty half, just a lot of vertical coloured lines. As you say, most people simply replace the Boards. I replaced the T-Con Board, but the problem remains. Justanother one for the Tip I guess. Thanks Michael - for teaching me that little bit more. Greetings from Sydney.
Glad you liked it, older electronic stuff is far more repairable than the new junk.
One of the reason I knew that my days as a bench engineer were numbered was that it was cheaper to buy new machine than repair the old one ..also I don't really want to be a board swapper !!
no one else within 20-30 miles radius from me , everyone has closed down for that very reason but this is the only thing I have ever done so I cant help myself !
Excellent piece!
I would never give the component back to the customer. They will take one look at it and say, "Here's a couple of bucks for your trouble. The repair obviously wasn't anything major, so your work isn't not worth the hundreds you are asking."
Fascinating Michael, you’ve amassed an amazing amount of knowledge to enable such a repair. The lack of appropriate service information is obviously an attempt to encourage the purchase of a replacement item. In fact it wouldn’t be impossible for manufacturers to build in a fault code display system similar to that used in CAN bus automotive systems.
Sadly all my knowledge is pretty worthless now as people prefer to throw things away and buy a new one , a lot of sets do have built in diagnostic these days but most of the time its to broad to be of any real use , as an example I had a sharp set last week and luckily it was over 10 years old and so a proper service manual with diagrams in was available, the error flagged up was "communication problem between the sub micro and main micro " which could be caused by a million things .luckily the cause was only due to a faulty regulator chip supplying the micro core voltage , it should have been 1.3 volts but was only 1 volt.
I don't think it's an attempt to discourage repair but more because it is way too complicated, especially with the speed of change. But it certainly discourages troubleshooting.
@@michaeldranfield7140 not that I'm giving these horrible manufacturers any ideas but what is going to be a real pain is when they start encasing every circuit board in epoxy where you won't have access to the circuit at all. One maker will do it then the rest will follow.
Some equipment has diagnostics built in. Remember the HP calculators?
An excellent repair demonstration! This is the first time I've come across this channel, I've subscribed and will be looking out for more of these. Thanks so much for selfless tuition ...
Many thanks for that .
It really chaffs my ass when I can remember working on sets that had the full parts and schematics inside the back cover. I can even remember vaguely my mother taking me down to the repair shop to buy a new tube for less than a candybar. Trouble shooting the tube types was easy, just look for the tube that doesn't glow and isn't hot. 5 steps forward on technology, 10 steps back on sustainability.
I know what you mean, large components that were easily tested, most SMD parts these days are so small there's no space on them to print the value or part number so without a service manual your stuffed.
That reminds me of a joke a TV repair shop had on the radio years ago, it said something like" Yes ma'am we found the problem with your TV, it has all these little black things in here." Referring to the new components I presume. Still funny. The shop no longer is open, obviously. Odd that there seem to be shops opening up for phone and computer micro-soldering (not in my area) but nothing for TV's. Perhaps because of the cost difference, a phone is as much as a car and tele is almost disposable. I never purchase the extended plan only because I know it is how they make their money.
I was the chief technician at a major service center for a number of years, GE was one of 40 different manufacturers that we serviced and GE used to put a schematic diagram folded up and have a little plastic cover that attached the schematic to the back of the TV. That certainly helped we did not have to subscribe to at least GE TV schematics, most of the other manufacturers you had to purchase them or if you're lucky a Sam's on them
@@toxicooze2220 In the UK Grundig always put a circuit diagram inside the TV set which was an excellent idea, the only problem been the first person to service the TV would keep the diagram .
@@michaeldranfield7140 😅
Great repair tip Michael 👍
This is the first video I came across on TH-cam.
Nice to hear from you again. I remember your articles in Television magazine.
Yep, that's me still doing the same job after all these years, I recognise you name from somewhere, we're you the rep for Charles Hyde.??
that is disgusting from manufacturers these days. Absolutely disgusting! I fully support the right to repair agenda!
Right to repair is suppose to sort this problem out, however I don't think anything at all will change, all manufactures need to do is price parts so expensive that no one buys them and for them it's problem sorted.
@@michaeldranfield7140 watch jenna joneses last video on the latest apple to repair suppsed embra ement
Great job,having this technique is very helpful to me,. I'm from the Philippines. Thanks for sharing this video Sir.
No problem , glad you liked it ,thanks for watching .
@@michaeldranfield7140 thanks for replying to me Sir.
Well done, as always. I also have doubts about these ceramic caps which I use in my own designs and, as you say, they break down regularly. I doubt that the stated voltage ratings are correct and I now regularly use a rating three times higher than the expected voltage. If you heat these capacitor types with just a short duration burst of hot air their leakage currents increase substantially. I do like your homemade milliohm meter.
I did hear once that these caps could damaged by the reflow process and this is the reason I prefer hand soldering to hot air, I made that milliohm meter over 10 years ago and never used it because a set of kelvin probes were about £100, I only started using it a couple of years ago when I found you could get some probes on Aliexpress for a tenner!
Arrived here by chance but watched to the end, what a brilliant piece of fault finding so have subscribed. When I last did component level repairs capacitors had wires 😂
Sadly all changed now , theirs not a lot of component level fault finding you can do these days without a service manual .
"is that all it was?"... and then they expect an equally cheap price for the repair when you've spent considerable time without a schematic to find the problem. I used to repair TV's and stereo's back in the 80s/90s when things were simpler and actually had schematics. It's fun solving the puzzle, but not fun when people didn't want to pay or expected some low ball price. Great troubleshooting!
"So that's 25c for the capacitor and $200 for telling you which one it was."
@@dennisbjones When I was in the business I learned to be "economical with the truth". If customer asked what was wrong I'd say something like "do you understand how a multilayer ceramic capacitor works?" On receiving the blank look I'd say, "oh, well, never mind. It's fixed now".
customers have never appreciated how much time can actually be spend like you say tracing the 10p resistor in years gone by , but I have found most people more appreciative these day when I give them a plastic bag and say that's your old faulty part and they say what's that there's nothing in the bag , and I say take a closer look at that thing the size of a pin head, to which people say how on earth did you find that.
Sadly even doing fixes for commercial can be like that. Industrial is a little better but there time really is money.
@@michaeldranfield7140 This has been a long discussion topic between technicians and customers all over the world, through the passed years...
The (wrong) customers' opinion about the price they had to pay on a repair was based on a simple fact called "ignorance", as it is related to the nature of the repairs job itself. Especially in the past decades, they had the impression that technicians knew in advance exactly what to replace or adjust or call their intended action as you like, as soon as the customers were describing the symptoms of their faulty devices. They had the impression that the "magician will perform his trick and then ask 50$ for that magic performance, having about 5 minutes of duration"...
Of course this thinking stands on the base that an experienced technician knows his job and has faced the described problem perhaps many times before, which might be true, but the missing link here is that the same symptom may well be caused due to a different cause, or simply, the cause might be the same as the known one, but in this specific case the faulty device might be a brand new model and therefore the supposed specific experience on that one is missing. This means much more time to be spent on troubleshooting until valuable new experience is obtained...but the customer either doesn't know that or, worse than that, he is not interested to know about. He only expects the "magician to perform..."
Nevertheless the tragedy of our modern days, on one hand, is that repairs in general are dying as specific professions, while on the other hand the cheap (let them be) products cannot be so easily thrown away, because for buying new ones people need relatively much more money than the average cost of a repair.
Worse than that, the continously increasing unemployment (based on the mass and fully automated production) "erases" the existing job places one after the other, at an amazingly high speed. And the simple question is: how can one buy a (let it be cheap) new TV, when being unemployed, looking only for how to survive?" Or, in other words: "what kind of job can one do, in order to be capable to replace his (let it be cheap) TV upon its first failure", keeping in mind that there are many other priorities to be covered first, with that faulty TV to be replaced being perhaps the last one?...Let alone the environmental pollution problem, the waste on resources at the expense of the new generations to come e.t.c...
Nice. I hate that there seems to be an "understanding" from manufacturers that things should not be repaired. Got an old LG tv that don't start up. It used to take several tries to get it started until it died on me. Time to take it apart and change the faulty bit I guess :)
It's because electronics have not kept up with inflation, if TV s had a set would cost£2000 and the manifactures would support them like they use to.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Yes. That is part of the problem. But from a enviromental standpoint we should repair more things. I personally hate that things get thrown away when they could be repaired. It's a waste of resources.
My inner Louis Rossman is getting angry
I've really enjoyed watching this video and it will help me a lot in case my older LCD won't start up anymore! Thank you very much!
Glad you liked it, many thanks for watching.
A great lesson for my Sunday morning - Thank you MD. Out of interest, how long did it take you to find this fault?
It didn't take as long as it did to make the video , and as soon as I realised the backlight were not faulty its only a simple matter of unplugging things and when I arrived at the screen it can only be 2 things causing the problem COF or cap .
@@michaeldranfield7140Thanks for being Old School Michael
@@thisismyuniquestory Dont think I will ever change , I don't like this new technology throw away stuff, give me valves back any day .
Excellent Video, Electronics Tech Started in The 70's, We Had Howard Sams Manuals Severeral TV, Radios Each Month. Used From 70's to 80's Great Manual Like you Had, Showed Compont Side, Foil Side, Component List, Waveforms, Test Points, The Best, Was Like Cheating.
When Flat Screen TV's Came Out, Couldn't Find Manuals or Schematics Online. Will Have Try Again. Electrical Contractor/Master Electrician Almost 30 Years Now. Mostly Electrical Contracting Now. Any Electronics When Needed. 67 Now, But When a Teen in Vegas, I Bought a Fender Twin Reverb for $40, as is, and You Can't Bring it Back, I Said OK, Pulled the Tubes to Test, Noticed 1 Socket Had Been Changed, And the key For the Tube was 180° Flipped Around. So I Desoldered The Wires, Lifted Socket, Rotated 180°, Soldered Back Where they Were. Didn't Even Test the Tubes, Plugged In, Worked like a Charm. Been Troubleshooting Ever Since, As New Technology Came Learned them, VCR's, CD Players, Microwave Ovens, 70's Repaired Car Stereos, Craig Powerplay, Pioneer Super Tuners, Rockford Fosgate Came out, Had Load of Radio Turn on. 8 Track Players Were Cool, Ratcheting Head Switched By Metal Taped Where Spliced. Dumpster Dive All The Time, Rescued Many Electronics, If zi Nice Washer, or Dryer, Will Fix and Keep. I See Most Post are From Techs Which is, I Don't Many, Actually Nine Now.
Regular People(Non Electronics Don't Know How Cool it Is To Save Some Extremely Expensive Electronics, Needing only 1 Part, and Get To Keep.
Now Its SMD's, Some Really Cool Solder Paste Recently Reduced Makes SMD Work Easy. Cell Phone Power Connector. But With Cell Phones, Xacto Fine Point Can Remove The Lint in Many Cases. Plus You Save a Boat Load Of Money Fixing Your Own Electronics, Not Need To Replace. I'm 67, Excellent Video, Obsessed With Learning. Was Mostly a Hobby That I got Paid For.
Am Sure You Worked Tube TV's as Well. Take Care
Very instructive! I’m confused about the troubleshooting though. The backlight died when both timing cables were attached, but ok if either one of them was plugged in separately. But replacing just one cap on one side fixed the problem. Wouldn’t the behavior mean that there was a partially-bad cap on both sides, so only the two of them together would kill the LEDs, but not each by itself?
Regardless, a very instructive and handy video, thanks! (I have a half-dozen TVs and monitors sitting in my basement waiting for me to get a chance to look at them 😁)
This is what I can't work out for myself but as there is no circuit description in the service manual I don't have an answer.
Same confusion ! Apart from that very nice and informative video ! I really didn't know that those tiny ceramic caps are "so" prone to failure... 🙂
This was very confusing in the video. Especially since it was glossed over and not discussed.
@@geraldh.8047 Maybe there is a ground or power "loop" that is only completed when both connectors are connected?
It's not discussed because there is no service manual to explain it, if I knew I would have said, my best guess is there is some control line back to the microprocessor?
Nice work. I'm a comms and data/TV troubleshooting person (but I don't do component level repair work), it pains me to tell people that most likely, their TV is dead and economically not repairable.
Thermal Camera might be able to see the Cap getting hot as it is shorted and acting as shunt (generating heat)
A lot of circuits now switch off the supply when they see a short but it would be possible to apply power from a bench power supply and see what heats up .
What a coincedence! I saw the preview and marked it as "watch it later" for no reason, just to broaden my knowledge.
Next thing I go outside to throw garbage and found an (almost) working 60' smart tv that someone left.
Now, after watching the video, I opened it up
And it had EXACTLY the same problem. ))
This is getting to be quite a common fault on lots of different models , not just samsung , glad I was able to help you .
Great Video! I was a T.V repairman in the 1970's. I would have been pretty tempted to replace all four of those 17V bypass caps since they surely all came from the same lot and are all exposed to the same power rail. IDK. What do you think?
They tend to fail because of thermal stress - mostly caused by having solder pads that are far too wide.
Of course you are right and many years ago when sets were expensive and people didn't mind paying a sensible price for my time I would have done just that, replaced them all, but now sets are so cheap I'm working for next to nothing it's not possible anymore.
Now days if the repair costs increase $10 they say might as well buy a new one. So if you decide to replace them you better have gotten a little extra in the estimate.
That was the best down to earth fault finding video I have ever seen. Well done sir. I only work at the level of "replace the board" but even that is often not possible because I cannot find matching part numbers.
Without component level fault finding you would have had to replace the screen in my set as the board the cap was on is part of the screen and not replaceable.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Exactly what I was thinking. Replacing the T-con board wouldn't have fixed this, so you'd be out the money for that and no closer to a solution.
Or worse when numbers are scratched off.
Nice. Reently seen the opposite level of damage here where a failed mains bridge repair was attempted by the owner who tried to stop the fuse blowing by wrapping it in al-foil. Needless to say, the entire input section of the power supply was 'toast'.
Samsung service manuals haven't impressed in some time. Every TV seems to have different connections and timings for no valid reason or I'd stock up on boards from dead screens regardless of model and just swap them in. They should learn a thing or two from PC board makers. (PS: wouldn't it be nice if the led boards screwed in from the back or slid in sideways without the need to remove the screen from the frame. Just sayin. )
I wouldn't be that difficult to have a rear access to the backlights but the reality is the makers don't want you repairing sets, everything is designed now to encourage you to just buy a new set.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Or sent to a service center which I worked at. Some ended up component repair, while others was board replacement for the same reasons here, economic. It just meant we'd have all the parts needed.
I have an RCA 65” that has bad LED Backlight diodes. With this model you can access the LED strips from the back with the screen flat down on your table. You take off the small covers 1st which also revels the boards, then you remove the large metal back cover. This cover lifts up with the 12 backlight strips attached to it with a cheap white cardboard reflector then glued over the strips with holes in it for each LED. After you tear the hell out of the cardboard reflector to get to the backlight strips to work on you can then tape the reflector back together where it tore from the backside as to not change the reflective properties of this backlight reflector. You’ll get a few years then a couple more LEDS will then burn out again!
I say STAY AWAY from Thompson Consumer Electronics “RCA” products altogether if possible. I always recommend Samsung, LG or Visio. Symptom of this tv was flashing backlight strips that would not stay on, audio fine. If you unplug the plug with the 4 small wires that feed the backlight strips the power then remains continuous on the power boards output receptacle pins for these 2 pairs of wires.
@@repairfreak if only all TV s had a backlight inspection flap , the world would be a better place .
@@michaeldranfield7140 Right, but for now we at least have inspection holes, “at least in the ones I’ve serviced so far.” However you are kind of just guessing what holes the light should come through. Another way is to lift the Television up and shine a bright penlight at just the right angle through the front of the screen and you can actually see “very dimly” if the LCD panel is working & producing video. I will press the menu button and look for the faint lettering.
Thumbs up for the video, Mr. Dranfield :-) It is always heart-warming to find someone who does care and does promote repairs of simple faults.
Actually I suspect a major part of failures in modern-day electronics are of this sort: power supply capacitors, typically electrolytic, but tantalum and even MLCC are sometimes to blame as well. A TV is still a relatively complex piece of kit, but there are many smaller and simpler devices (say SoHo Ethernet switches) that are prone to capacitor failures just as well, and overall trivial to repair without a schematic, because the block schematic is very universal/repetitive. They are often used deliberately to implement "planned obsolescence" - and it's not sloppiness on part of the board designers, it is intentional and it is an art in its own right, only noone admits this on record, for obvious legal reasons. In reality, I doubt that the orders for this do not come from the board of directors of the corporations involved.
I'm fine with a leaked capacitor that I can simply replace. What infuriates me are "design sabotages" that cannot be repaired, such as mechanical design details that result in a destructive failure, not repairable by a glue gun and duct tape: a ball bearing on a name-brand lawnmower high-RPM electric motor, seated in a plastic housing, where the large injection-molded plastic part is a major structural component of the motor assembly, not available for replacement... or a fragile plastic hinge in the microphone arm in an expensive name-brand headset (earphones + microphone). This kind of thing should be sanctioned :-)
In TV's and PC monitors, notebook PC's, fondleslab telephones and many other devices, repairability gets outright precluded by mechanical design that (almost or literally) prevents disassembly, or if you disassemble, prevents plausible re-assembly. Such as, TV chassises made of plastic that hold together by a myriad fragile flippers that are intended to snap together, with no clear way to get them un-snapped if repair is needed. In the way of repairability, I'd love to see some improvements on this front = easy access inside, to get my hands on serviceable parts - be it individual boards, or backlight LED stripes or whatever. To replace some popped caps, in the PSU, you often don't even need a schematic.
One particular brand though comes to mind, that *does* make board-level schematics still available in service manuals: the Vestel of Turkey. To those who are not in the repairs business, this company makes on the order of 50% of the cheap flat-panel TV sets sold on the European market by various "household names" (that no longer run their own factories to make electronics). I.e. many of the EU household name TV's sold in Europe share the same motherboards, power supplies and principal inner mechanical construction. I've noticed small differences in the component sets soldered on boards, such as a protective Zener on a motherboard (Vestel T816 PVR) to protect the mobo against the +5V PSU output going fuzzy as the elyt caps dry out. One brand did have the zener, the other just had an empty position... On the first box, I did exactly that "find a short on a PCB" analysis, as explained by Mr. Dranfield in this video :-) and then I replaced all elyt caps in the other box preventatively.
Unfortunately, genuine repair techies, able to diagnose and repair small-signal electronics, are a dying profession. In rich countries, kids don't get to play with a soldering iron anymore. I know several old bards, say born in the fifties or older, who have experienced a great part of the history of modern electronics on their jobs, and keep their "ethos". I myself was born in 1976 and I was possibly lucky that I spent my childhood on the eastern side of the iron curtain, so I got my hands dirty and I was able to pick up some DIY skills from the old bards... Nowadays, the trouble is: consumer electronics is hardly worth repairing anymore. Industrial electronics still is, considering the cost of replacement (including various "strings attached", such as software licenses). As for consumer electronics, the problem is in the flip side of the "economies of scale" - in mass manufacturing and global mass distribution. It just got so efficient and cheap, per unit, at that scale, to produce and distribute new pieces, that a repair of individual random pieces just cannot compete. Repair takes too much human attention, and it takes a *skilled* techie who can diagnose microelectronics, at least at the level of power supply rails and proper general troubleshooting. Consider how much such a professional needs to earn, net pay per an hour of work, in a modern-day western country. Multiply by three to allow for taxes and similar costs and some profit for the employer company. A repair of a cheap TV set easily just does not pay off in a rich country, considering the amount of skilled work required. Even in my post-commie home country, where wages are still relatively low, I can venture to repair my own cheap stuff in my free time as a hobby, but noone would pay my employer for me to do that same on a commercial basis - because buying a new one is just cheaper.
In private, I delight in removing the more trivial "planned obsolescence sabotages" and giving my devices a new lease of life (often immortality, in the sense that moral obsolescence comes earlier). Sometimes I even go so far as void the warranty on a new gadget (after a quick initial test), "pop the hood" and look for the obvious culprits inside - cheap elyt capacitors and the like. And I remove those sabotages on a new device, before it had a chance to fail. E.g., I've had a cheap SoHo WiFi AP run for about 10 years in my parents' house, before some third party scrapped it for his commercial reasons (and out of technical ignorance). I do this in cheap Ethernet switches that I'm using in-house, and do not want to remember where they're located for the next 10+ years. Solving an emergency (device outage) that occurs at random is just much less convenient than preventing a failure (planned obsolescence) as part of initial deployment.
Speaking of capacitors, for the record, for innocent and excited tinkerers to come: when replacing leaked or suspicious elyts, note that you should *not* take capacity (microFarad) as the only or even a crucially important guide. In power supplies, the capacitors typically have to sustain a high AC current (and pulsed at that). There are a special variety of wet elyt capacitors for those positions, called "low impedance". And don't just rely on those words in a catalogue, do actually take a look at the Esr value and the permitted ripple current (two sides of the same coin). And, compare. You will notice how vastly better the Solid Polymer capacitors are in those respects, compared to "wet" Al elyts. When refurbing elyts, I strongly prefer solid polymer to a wet elyt. Unfortunately, solid poly doesn't work at high voltages. So the primary side of a mains PSU has to be fitted with a wet elyt. Speaking of quality wet elyt, remember Panasonic FR and Nichicon CS or CY. And Nippon Chemicon in general, but I won't suggest a particular model/family. With wet elyts, brand does matter (not so much with solid poly, especially when replacing wet elyts).
Also, be aware that while most elyts nowadays are in power blocking positions, some may still be used for analog timing or signal filtering - in these positions, you'd better stick to a legacy wet aluminum elyt (choose a quality brand and model) or MLCC if the size and voltage allow. (And, keep the original capacity.) Solid polymer tends to have a higher leakage current that might hamper timing or filtering applications.
In some rare cases, you may notice that after replacing a wet elyt with solid poly on the secondary side of a PSU, the PSU's regulation loop becomes slightly unstable - maybe just within a certain range of loads. The PSU starts to whistle. That's bad luck - it happens due to the significantly lower Esr of the solid poly or MLCC that you used for replacement. The lower Esr has improved the Q of the regulation loop, thus promoting some resonant pole... Hardly ever a problem though.
Your comment about Vestel supplying circuit diagrams is the reason I have always liked vestel sets but recently I have noticed they have stopped publishing schematics for the latest models and this is very worrying especially as vestel make a lof of the TV s in use today.