Been a right PITA day. One of those where everything you pick up is either
not worth repairing, or seems to get worse if you as much as bring a
screwdriver anywhere near it. And so it was with sinking heart that I put
the Technics SL-PG480 CD player on the bench. "Not playing discs" said the
ticket, and when I reached for a screwdriver, I needn't have bothered - the
owner had already kindly removed all the case screws, to save me the trouble
.... I probably should have just sighed at this point, and sent it back
where it came from, but I've always liked these, so I thought I would just
give it 5 minutes. Everything basically did what it should, except focus
search didn't take place. That's an unusual problem on one of these, so I
thought I would just whip the deck out first and have a look at the
connectors, as someone had clearly been in there before me. There was
nothing obviously wrong, so I thought I would just check the continuity to
the laser focus coils whilst I could easily get at the connections. With an
analogue meter on a low ohms range, I checked the coils. The tracking ones
were fine, and the lens deflected left or right, but the focus ones read
open, with no lens movement.

The deck fitted to these is a Philips CDM12.1 and the lens carrier and coils
are clearly visible and accessible on the top of the laser, so I had a close
look with my powerful headband magnifier. You could clearly see that one of
the superflexible tails that connect from the fixed pins that come up from
the laser flexiprint to the focus and tracking coils on the lens carrier,
was laying detached by the side of its pin. It didn't look broken - just
never soldered or soldered properly in the first place. Pointy tweezers, a
fine tipped iron, and some fine gauge solder, soon put that right, and the
lens then deflected normally when the meter was applied again. All worked
nicely, as these always do, when it was reassembled.

Makes a change to get a decent result like that, and just goes to show that
you shouldn't just get jaded with all the crap passing across your bench,
and just not bother even attempting a repair on the basis that spares ain't
gonna be available anyway ... d;~}

Arfa