"God, I hope not. I have not gotten a bad semi from DigiKey or B&D (http://www.bdent.com/) "

Me too. I found B%D parts to be good. More expensive, but if your time is valuable it is worth it to only have to change it once.

While I am good enough to change a convergence IC a bunch of times without damaging the board, sometimes it take time to get to it. Plus, some boards are fragile and the pads seem like they just want to come off. After the second time sometimes you are on thin ice no matter how good you are.

I have seen some really awful soldering. Some of these people should not be techs. I learned because I don't want to repair lifted pads and broken traces on the board. One boss told me that I use more solder wick than anyone else and I retorted "Yeah, and I've seen their work". A few minutes to change the IC and then an hour to clean up the mess they made out of the copper on the board. And that is one of the reasons I made twice as much as them. That and being the goto guy. ****, we had one guy who was in electronic engineering school who didn't know the difference between a diac and Zener diode.

And none of them understood the concept of a convergence amp. It is sorta a transconductance amp, it converts voltage to current. It was justy about the only way they could do it.

Know what impressed me ? Zeniths. We had one for a while, no convergence outputs, strictly a passive circuit with caps and coils. Converged just fine. Actually had a pretty good picture. In fact one thing notable about that one was the sound, the sound was excellent. Found out one time while cleaning it that the screen acted as a passive radiator for the bass. I don't remember the board set but those were the ones where the high value resistors went bad and the G2 went sky high and burned the CRT phosphors as they went into shutdown. We had to put two CRTs into it, which is why we got it cheap..