Anyone know any specifics of studio rgb monitor repair? Panasonic BTH1350Y woes...

Lios

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Anyone know any specifics of studio rgb monitor repair? Panasonic BTH1350Y woes...

I know this place is more tailored to arcade game repair and restorations, but I'm really not sure of an active online community for other kinds of rgb monitor types and their problems. I'm sure they exist, just not sure of the magic words to put into google to find them ;)

Long story short, I bought a 13" Panasonic studio rgb monitor from around 1993 on the cheap, pretty much expecting it would have problems needing attention.

The model is bth1350y and it's one listed/pictured here: http://www.broadcaststore.com/store/model_detail.cfm?id=15676

I definately need someone with the service manual willing to share, or someone with far more field experience that I with monitor repair.

If anyone can point me in the right direction it would be most appreciated.
 
I don't have a manual, but you don't always need one. What is the monitor doing/not doing? You don't mention what's wrong with it, so I can't give you things to check :D

A monitor is a monitor - they're all built differently but they all operate on the same principles.

-Ian
 
I would assume that throwing fresh caps in it, probably wouldn't hurt. I had an LCD monitor that had trouble powering on, and that cured my problem.
 
Well, pre opening it up it behaved as follows:

Powers on tube energizes/fills with static etc, then after the usual warm up there was no vertical drive, just a single squashed bright horizontal white line. The adjustment knobs only moved the line around and the size knobs (h size, v size etc) only succeded in barely making the line fatter. Sounded like a cap issue to me, especially since the wg k-7000 i think it is, in my double dragon squashed to a similar horizontal line after a period of "random earthquakes" and a cap kit and reflowing of some cold joints fixed it.

So I open it up and start taking it apart, this thing has no less than 6 daughterboards, it's definately not your typical "basic" old arcade rgb monitor. Much more complicated circutry, and really nicely laid out, every cable is labled with a letter and number (like E20) to correspond to the place it goes silkscreened on the boards.

Since I had no where near enough caps to cover even half of this beasts entire amount of caps, I reflowed the solder on the entire bottom side of the main mobo, parts of some of the smallest boards, and the HOT area of the one large board. Said section on large daughter board consists of only two large line filters, a fuse, and one of those large square white resistors.

Basically it uses a standard pc ac plug, the hot and neutral wires plug directly into said seperate HOT part of one daughter board, the live into the fuse, the neutral into the resistor then both go through two line filters, afterwards a cable connects the two lines to the push power button on the front control panel then a cable from there to the main pcb's HOT area.

I also replaced a few of the electrolytic caps that I had equivalents or better on hand, very few actually.
When I realized I had no where near enough to cap it all without making an order, I stopped after maybe 5 caps, all on the main board.

Pieced it back together, and no less than quadruple checked all connections. Turn it on and immediately I am greeted with a rather loud whine. The tube still enegizes, static and all, but the sound is REALLY worrisome, so I leave it on for about as long as it normally takes it to warm up and get that line, then when I have nothing I turn it off.

I've taken it apart and put it back together multiple times since, same result, no fuse is visibly blown, and all the ones i checked with my multimeter are good. I did take a quick look at the neck of the tube when it was on, and I didn't see any glow, but before when I only got the single line, I looked and don't recall being able to see the usual red green blue or any glow from the neck. Then again, I haven't really taken a close look at it since the new problem.

I checked the caps I replaced for the correct polarity and ratings, no problem that I saw. I think caps are definately part of the problem. The problem is now I have introduced a bigger problem on top. Possible I took out a diode from heat when i reflowed the main pcb? I definately suspect a power problem in the HOT section, or open/shorted transistor, diode, blown fuse on something. My expertise with monitor repair is pretty much limited to cap replacement, solder reflowing, and pinpointing a open/shorted transistor on a wg 4900 neck board (i think it was, I forget) for the green drive.

Currently in over my head on this one, til I can get a direction. Not making any parts order until I have some idea more than pretty much the shotgun approach of replacing parts one by one til it works again.

Also I've only worked on it off an on over a period of months, it's not a high priority, but it would be nice to figure out.
 
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