Repro Monitor Chassis???

time4akshun

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So I've been spending a crapload of time doing cap kits and diagnosing monitor chassis problems lately. Mostly across G07's but having some fun with Atari Disco also.

As interesting and glorious it is to figure out monitor chassis problems and fix them, it is taking an enormous amount of my time to do so.

When I encountered board troubles in the pinball world I weas super excited to see that vendors like Rottendog and pinballpcb had come up with a way to repro pin boards that are plug and play into 1970's and 80's machines. This was HUGE for the pin industry.

Has anyone attempted this across monitor chassis?? I would imagine there is a market as some chassis aren't easily repaired with cap kits.

Any technical limitations to trying this?

Time
 
We have looked at it as we have access to the 'hard to get' bits at the right price BUT the problem is we can buy brand new chassis - built and ready to go for around $14 complete!

Not worth our time and trouble to bother developing a chassis - people would bitch and complain about it anyway no matter how we built it and making it 'universal' wouldn't work.

Just the same as they bitch about 'Chinese crap' - the chassis is $14, what do you expect?

If we built one it would have to sell for $150 - that's a lot of 'Chinese crap' chassis and (in our experience) people just won't pay it.
 
Also remember that a monitor chassis is actually a lot *more* complicated to fabricate than something like a CPU board. It has custom metal brackets, frame and heat sinks that are integral to the design that would have to be reproed in order to build identical drop-ins. Otherwise, the layout would have to be redesigned to support off the shelf heat sinks, and you'd have to come up with some other mounting scheme.

Not to mention that just about every monitor chassis has at least one difficult to source IC.

Also, if you were to repro something like the G07, you'd need to make the width coils and the focus dividers too.

I am, actually, kind of curious where you can get a chinese clone chassis for $14 though, and what kind of corners they cut to make that happen. I've never seen a chassis that cheap.

-Ian
 
Um..yeah. $14? You sure you don't have dyslexia or something? That can't be right.

I have an office in China and employ Chinese staff. I have bought them recently for a small manufacturer in New Zealand and I paid AU$14 each for 100pcs (that's actually LESS than US$14 each). After nearly a year the buyer reports only 2 failures.

Naturally there are still shipping and import costs but even if you double the $14 to cover these that's only $28 landed......

This was the type I bought:

chassis.jpg
 
Similarly, anyone interested in importing a batch of these to the US? At those prices, I wouldn't mind playing with a couple.

-Ian
 
I respectfully suggest that a chassis for $14 is probably going to end up burning your house down... The flyback alone should be worth more than that.

As for the $150 option, the Jomac chassis sell for around that and they've been pretty popular amongst Australian circles. I think the main factor would be finding a way to ship them overseas relatively cheaply.
 
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I respectfully suggest that a chassis for $14 is probably going to end up burning your house down... The flyback alone should be worth more than that.

As for the $150 option, the Jomac chassis sell for around that and they've been pretty popular amongst Australian circles. I think the main factor would be finding a way to ship them overseas relatively cheaply.

Nope - this is where 'westeners' simply are not aware of the price things leave the factory for. A FBT is UNDER $1. I have a fat Chinese catalogue here from a company that ONLY makes FBTs with hundreds of different ones in it and all are less than US$1 (naturally you can't buy a single piece from them for that price - qty buying only).

We are being ripped off something shocking right across the board.….well, maybe 'ripped off' is a bit harsh BUT that's how places employ people and pay for fancy showrooms - - because there is 2000% margin in a lot of things.

These chassis are world class. I have been involved in the amusement industry since 1979 and I was a trade qualified electronics tech before that - these are every bit as good as any other chassis I have seen in any amusement equipment.

Let's look at the Jomac chassis - assuming that he sells them for a profit (nothing wrong with that) then he wouldn't bother unless he made $50. Take off $15 GST (Tax) the $50 margin and you are left with $85 cost. Then take off freight and other margins for resellers or wholsalers etc and you are probably down to around $40. Not that far away from my 'factory door' price.

I would argue that a Jomac chassis is very similar to these universal chassis just that he has taken the time to work out exactly how to connect them to various tubes and I say good on him for that. He is earning his $50 margin by providing a service.

As I said previously - I have my own China office and I employ my own Chinese staff, I KNOW EXACTLY what prices things leave the factory for. Some of the things I sell I make excellent margins on simply because I can operate on 200% margin where others need 2000%

Here is the label on the chassis I sold and (again as I said earlier) the buyer reports that he has had only 2 failures in a year out of 100 chassis and I will add here NO FIRES (I checked with them yesterday - no fires and in fact they repaired both of the chassis that stopped).

infos.jpg
 
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....as if the old US built chassis never "caught fire".....very few vector PCBs I see have no burn marks....

I believe your prices. At one point in time I was talking to a Chinese factory rep to have monitors made (they sold CRT's and chassis) and your prices were not far off.

However, the shipping costs and import duties and taxes alone hugely increase the price.

Homepin, since you have an office there, are you aware of any b/w crt's still being available from Chunghwa ?

http://www.cptt.com.tw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemid=114

They have some listed on their website still but I haven't contacted them yet.

Would be cool to find a cheaper source for good B/W 19" CRT's. And Chunghwa actually delivers good quality stuff (at least they used to about 15 years ago).
 
....as if the old US built chassis never "caught fire".....very few vector PCBs I see have no burn marks....

I believe your prices. At one point in time I was talking to a Chinese factory rep to have monitors made (they sold CRT's and chassis) and your prices were not far off.

However, the shipping costs and import duties and taxes alone hugely increase the price.

Homepin, since you have an office there, are you aware of any b/w crt's still being available from Chunghwa ?

http://www.cptt.com.tw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemid=114

They have some listed on their website still but I haven't contacted them yet.

Would be cool to find a cheaper source for good B/W 19" CRT's. And Chunghwa actually delivers good quality stuff (at least they used to about 15 years ago).


There are still several factories making B/W tubes - I am not specifically aware of the Chunghwa factory (I certainly have heard of them, I just haven't had any dealings with them). Most of the 'name brand' companies expect that you will buy at the very least a container load where I normally deal with smaller companies that will sell a hundred.

You are spot on with costs and taxes increasing the price. As an example a 20' container in the off peak season from Shenzhen to Brisbane (Australia) is $1600 plus agent/govt fees of about $500. So you have fixed costs of around $2100 before you load the container. Put 100 chassis in it and straight away the freight cost is $21 each - more than the purchase price of the chassis - then add 2% import duty and then 10% GST ON THE TOTAL INCLUDING FREIGHT and you are getting up around $40 each if you buy 100pcs

If you bought 1000pcs the approx cost would be about $19 each - I spend half my day explaining these simple sums to half of my customers......
 
Yep that price for a container sounds familiar too. I once asked my nephew who works for a forwarding company what a 20' from NY to Rotterdam would cost and it would be around €1700 and that was the bare costs.

And indeed, these Size Chinese companies talk in container loads....

A LOOOONG time ago I worked a year for the European office of a Taiwanese computer (only CRTs then) monitor company with the illusive name Cheer.
That was the same stuff, dealing in container loads...
I did the technical work though. They used Chunghwa tubes which looked great and I never had a bad one, all the troubles that appeared were on the chassis.

Even 100 is a very large number in this hobby, If I could buy 10 19" BW CRTs that might be interesting.
 
Yep that price for a container sounds familiar too. I once asked my nephew who works for a forwarding company what a 20' from NY to Rotterdam would cost and it would be around €1700 and that was the bare costs.

And indeed, these Size Chinese companies talk in container loads....

A LOOOONG time ago I worked a year for the European office of a Taiwanese computer (only CRTs then) monitor company with the illusive name Cheer.
That was the same stuff, dealing in container loads...
I did the technical work though. They used Chunghwa tubes which looked great and I never had a bad one, all the troubles that appeared were on the chassis.

Even 100 is a very large number in this hobby, If I could buy 10 19" BW CRTs that might be interesting.

You would think we could scrounge up an order for 100+ b/w vector tubes from the peeps on this board.
 
You would think we could scrounge up an order for 100+ b/w vector tubes from the peeps on this board.

I'm sure you could BUT there are many things that would need to be considered.

First is packing - generally these factories supply tubes 'bulk packed' on a pallet of 20 tubes or so, depending on tube size so packing would have to be manufactured (I have already investigated this previously) so that they could be safely shipped out to the end users - this is more expensive than you might think.

Second is the logistics of transporting them to the end users - messy and expensive.

They would probably end up costing in the vicinity of $200 each delivered and someone would have to organise the money, the manufacture of the packing (plus the re-packing of the tubes in China into the individual cartons), the purchase, shipping, customs clearance, delivery, etc etc etc - WAY too hard!
 
Plus, I was talking about Europe since I am located there. You US guys can still get new BW tubes locally for a fair price. Shipping one (or a couple) one of those to Europe and again I port duties and taxes spoil the fun...
 
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