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My first job as a 16 year old was working in a TV repair shop. I learned how to test PCBs for dry joints, how to make an electrolytic capacitor explode and most
by mattkevan 3y ago
My first job as a 16 year old was working in a TV repair shop. I learned how to test PCBs for dry joints, how to make an electrolytic capacitor explode and most importantly of all, how to discharge the anode before starting work.
It was amazing how many bits there were inside an old-fashioned TV, but even in the mid-90s the business was on its last legs as modern TVs couldn’t be repaired.
- philipkglass 3y agoHow often did they need repair after most of the circuitry went solid-state? I have a small CRT TV that was manufactured in 1998 and it still works perfectly. So does my slightly larger LCD TV manufactured in 2006. My parents' CRT TV from 1989 was replaced in 2010 by an LCD TV but it still worked too. I have never personally encountered a TV that stopped working.
- shiroiuma 3y agoA lot of TVs and other electronics in the 2000s failed because of the capacitor plague.
- saidinesh5 3y agoA lot of the time it is just 1-2 capacitors that pop and damage the power supply or something similar and once they are replaced, they work again for years. There's some "tv repair shop" channels on youtube that's interesting/nostalgic to watch.
- mattkevan 3y agoOn the older ones it was mostly checking the soldering - years of being warmed up and cooled down would cause cracking. A quick touch-up with some fresh solder would generally sort things out.
- throwup238 3y agoFlyback transformers and electrolytic capacitors loved to die in that era. They were big components and easy to resolder so they were repaired relatively frequently. It's survivorship bias; most people only had one or two TVs every decade.
- mattkevan 3y agoYeah they were the main things that went - most of the things we did were replacing the capacitors or transformers.
- amne 3y agomaybe because you got to experience only "original high quality" TV sets? I remember owning a color CRT in late 80's which was almost unheard of in Romania and it was a russian made TV called "Alpha" (written in cyrillic of course). By the late 90's it needed work on color phases because sometimes green would cut out or blue or red. They all went one at a time and a good smack on the side would fix it for a while until it didn't and things had to be replaced inside. My neighbour accross the street was an electrician (hydro-plant engineer or something) and had his house stacked full with TVs waiting to get repaired by him. In a more entrepreneurial environment he would've made it by definition but in Romania he was just the guy accross the street who fixes TVs for a pack of contraband cigarettes or whisky.
- Luc 3y agoThe CRTs you mention weren't that old. Once you get to '70s or '80s CRTs a lot more of them have problems (specifically for me arcade games, which have a hard life).
- mattkevan 3y agoThe guy who ran the shop used to go into long rants about how modern TVs were just a tube, a transformer and a PCB. If the problem wasn’t with the tube or transformer then it was virtually impossible to fix as the boards were more expensive than a new TV. They closed not long after I stopped working there.
- marshray 3y agoI worked on analog monitors (and a few TVs). The problem wasn't (usually) that they couldn't be repaired. The problem was that new electronics were so cheap that it wasn't economical to repair them.