I wish you were closer, since I could use a few. Heck, I have been saving TV tubes, so I need the frames and chassis just as as much (got it with really bad burn-in)?
Scott C.
Repair it instead of replacing it.
- Thread starter ArcRevival
- Start date
Scott C.
DWJ
Member
And whether you succeed or fail, you can still count yourself as a member of the Cult of Done. I think I hit 11/13 items of the manifesto on one project, which is probably a record for me.
This weekend, I was supposed to be fixing a power supply on another project involving a board with a bunch of switching power supplies that all talk to each other, but the moment any of 'em get confused, they all shut down. I fixed it a month ago with a couple of capacitors, but it managed to find a new failure mode - probably some marginal caps I'd missed the first time around. ("#8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.") Good safety engineering, but tough to debug.
On the way back from the last remaining old-school parts store, I got sidetracked. Someone had tossed out a 19" TV, and further investigation revealed a sticker and a manufacturing date of 1990.
("#1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.")
Not Knowing:
I'd never worked on a raster monitor much beyond a basic recapping job. A tube swap? Well, I've never had the opportunity to try it, and I've seen a couple of good writeups here... ("#12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done").
...so with all that info out there, I should be able to figure it out... ("#4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.") Besides, all the parts I'll need are right there... Go fot it
Action:
So I tossed it in the trunk with the intention of trying the tube swap thing. Hey, if the yoke's impedance is way off, or if it's close but the swap still doesn't work, I'll just toss it. ("#10 Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.")
Disassemble TV ("#9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right", and believe after I got the dust off the TV, my hands looked right...), remove monitor from game, discharge both tubes, measure resistance on TV's yoke as a proxy for impedance, and discover they measure within 10% of each other. OK, too viable a swap candidate not to proceed. ("#5. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.")
Completion:
A few hours later, my Robotron has a burn-free screen. A few tweaks of some pots brings it into calibration and even with some minor keystoning, it looks better than I ever remember it looking.
After salvaging the yoke from the heavily-burned tube, I hooked up the old tube to the CRT rejuvenator I found at a local flea market this summer. Main project completed, why not take an hour to learn both how to use the rejuvenator, but how not to use it? Yay for me, I learned both. ("#11. Destruction is a variant of done.")
Tonight, I play some Robotron. Tomorrow, the local e-waste recycler gets a funny-looking TV and a couple of laughs. ("#7. Once you're done, you can throw it away.")
Robotron monitor rebuilt, I can finally get back to the power supply ("#6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done") that started this adventure, but I can get back to it a little smarter than I was 72 hours ago. ("#13. Done is the engine of more.")
(Disclaimer: Yeah, what the other folks have said about safety precautions and monitors. But for game PCBs, especially the 80s/early-90s stuff? It's pretty hard to damage much of the game board's hardware while debugging it, and almost impossible to hurt yourself. Give it a shot, you might find you enjoy it more than you think.)
Long live the Cult of Done.
Last edited:
