On Thursday, December 3, 2015 at 7:34:56 AM UTC-5, Mark Zacharias wrote:
OK, so it appears there is very little to discuss on this group in areas
like repairing audio components, amps, receivers, power supplies, etc these
days.

I "tune in" here almost daily and rarely find anything of interest to me.

Maybe we could share some "war stories" of cool repairs we have done in the
past.

Re-live some past glories?

The first time you traced down a bad reset line for a microprocessor?

That integrated amp that blew a channel about once a year until you caught
that bias diode occasionally opening up?

Sansui 5000A's? (yuck)

Crappy Euro caps in Tandberg tape decks?

Those times you sweated whether you could even get this thing put back
together?

Any more recent successs stories to brag about?

C'mon, don't we all enjoy patting ourselves on the back, really?


Mark Z.

The one pops to mind took couple of years off my life. It was an old Hitachi built RCA projection TV (circa 1981) that had blown fuses in the power supply, but nothing showed a short resistance wise. I replaced the fuses and it powered up, only the geometry didn't look right. When I went to connect the cable back on to it to see exactly what the picture was like a blinding flash and arc appeared at the RF connector and it blew the fuses again. Working pretty much on my stomach in a cramped house, I traced a hot side/cold side short all the way back to the end of the line, which was a leaky deflection yoke (vert winding to horiz winding). It seems the horiz winding was on the hot side of the chassis and the vert winding was on the cold side. How it didn't blow the vert IC or horiz deflection output is a mystery.