"I was charged with fixing his re-do's and generally cleaning up the chaos he
had left behind. "

Steve's TV, I doubt they are still around. Quit, went back a couple of times. One time they needed bo TV techs but needed an audio tech. Figured, hell I'll give audio a whirl. Not that I hadn't done any, just not exclusively.

Well there is this whole big stack of recalls (or redos) from the last guy. The Delco 2000 series car stereos. The guy's bench setup had a common ground for the speakers and he blew the audio output chip out of EVEY ONE OF THEM.

These are true four channels radios but not quad. these are not some elcheapo LAXXXX six buck chip. They were DM-165 mostly and they were over twenty bucks each, and he blew BOTH of them in each radio.

That was one of my last commission jobs. I made money. And after that SNAFU was cleared up the boss(es) standing around said "We're finally making money on audio". That part was a bit hellish. Back then we didn't even have a Hakko and those Delcos were among the first things that (regularly) came in that two sided boards with plated through holes.

Every last one of them. With the type B tape decks in them the belt would break and it would not eject, so no radio either. So many customers decided to pry the tape out, breaking the cassette guides. The belt is a buck, a set of these plastic pieces it twenty. Even though they were assholes who cost themselves some money there, they did happen to notice when the front speakers didn't work anymore after they got it back.

And then they bring it back and because of the common ground the bench speakers would play the L-R like the back channels of a quasi quad unit and when you turn the balance to one side it would sound almost normal. "Nothing wrong with it". Yeah right.

You can't really work techs on commission anymore. Back then, so many repairs involved simple parts that it could work with a guy who is good. There were shops though that I would not. If I do not see a good parts department **** that. I ain't coming in and diagnosing all this only to wait weeks to complete the job to get paid. What's more, forget the free estimate, I ain't doing it.

When the shop[ makes money, the tech makes money on commission. One place I did work commission worked out pretty well. I was running though some of my old **** and part time, one week I made $480 in 12 hours. One week I worked about 30 hours and took home $775. And that was in the 1980s. Later, that job converted to hourly, at a quite good rate. It was slightly less money but it was steady. I liked the money steady and they liked the fact that I could no longer refuse jobs.

And that paid off for them.

Actually, now this is a LONG time ago and at $23 an hour, they threw me a set I had already been stumped on before. they said it is a do or die. It may have been a contract job, and when you cannot fix a contract job that is very bad. You can't just refund the money, you have to buy them another TV.

This was an RCA CTC 169. (I should have put thios in my other post but did not recall it then) Intermittently it would start up with the OSD shifted and no sound. Now this was a normal symptom for this chassis and I do not recall what the fix was, but in this case where the OSD is usually shifted to the right, this one was shifted to the left. (or vice versa but you get the idea, the other way)

it would never do it with the chassis flipped up. About ten people resoldered almost every joint on the board to no avail.

RINALLY I got it. It was a weak 503 KHz crystal at the jungle IC. the hell you say ? Well when the micro tells the set to come on it expects a source to come up right away which is scan derived. this feeds the EPROM which then reads its contents into RAM with the specific setup info and settings.

I started noticing that when this happened, the HV did not come up immediately. What it was is the crystal was weak or whatever and the oscillator took too much time to start. The micro is only sensitive to that data for a limited time and the window was closed by the time the EPROM spoke up. That chassis had a system that is operable without an EPROM. When it is in that mode it uses a set of parameters that do not match the hardware installed. Actually I do not recall ever seeing a CTC169 without an EPROM, but other models did. Some of them would autoprogram first time they were turned on after being unplugged. Those were the elcheapo models, but of other chassis'. I guess they used the same micros or at least similar code in them though.

So we got :

No sound - 503 KHZ crystal for horizontal osc.
No sound - vertical shaping IC.
Loses blue and green after CRT replacement - adjust vertical height.

I'd like to see some weirder ones than that.