Mica check... 1, 2...

Scucci

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A couple of hours ago I was playing a little BattleZone (nightly ritual)... Monitor goes out. Still head neck glow, spot killer was off, game was still playing blind. Turns out F100 and F101 had blown (19V2000)... I slapped a couple more fuses in, they popped as soon as power was applied.

I pulled the chassis, checked the bridge, checked every power transistor on the chassis that I could think of... checked every diode. Then I checked the transistors on the frame... one of them was shorted. So I take it off, double check it out of the frame and it was good. Put it back in, shorted... back out, good. back in... yeah, checked several times. I finally put it on and didn't screw it down... it checked good. I screwed it down, checked bad.

When one of the screws was fully tightened the can was shorting to ground. Just a 1/4 of a turn out, and it was good. Granted, I thought about leaving it like that because I had already spent 2 hours on this crap. But I found some spare mica insulators and replaced the old one... fixed it right up. The old one still looked good, just the screw holes in it were just a liiiiitle worn out. I guess just enough to cause it to short when it was fully tightened.

So... not really a question... just always double check everything like that... had I not checked the transistor when I took it off, I would've just been wasting money ordering a new one (cap kit was just done a few weeks ago), only to have the same problem in the end.

Anywho, gonna finally finish my pre-bedtime BattleZone and get some sleep.
 
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