Still Alive!
OK, so, I fixed it as well as its going to be fixed for now. Bottom line is, it *was* a shifted deflection yoke! For those dealing with this same issue, here's how it all went down:
So I turned off the machine, loosened the flyback screw 3 rotations, and grabbed the large white plastic part of the yoke and "unseated" it from the glue/gunk holding it in place. Then I proceeded to power the thing back on and do this thing "hot".
On the Popeye, the flyback is sitting high and right in your face, so adjusting this thing "on the fly" is exactly that. I dunno how many of you have tried adjusting an EZ20 yoke WHILE the thing is on, but let me tell you this, you can *feel* the energy coming through the flyback (all the hair on my arm went straight up). So I did that with my wife "helping" me with the adjustment and she was basically no help, I torqued that friggin yoke all around the place and finally everything looked great convergence wise, but the colors on the left and right were off. At this point I'm thinking "DONE except for degauss, woo!", so I cleaned up and busted out my brand new super awesome 50 dollar degaussing coil to degauss it. Did it work?
NO. Do you know why? (If you do just hold on, I'm getting there).
Popeye doesn't have a test pattern generator or anything like this, so I'm basing my adjustments on a few 000s in the player scores and the bottom water line, so overall when I say things matched up, that's what I'm talking about.
But now my left side is all showing YELLOW instead of RED and my right side is all showing GREEN instead of BLUE. Ok, so at this point I'm thinking "Purity RING ADJUSTMENT TIME!"
Yeah, No. Thank god I didn't start adjusting those.
So here's the status at *this* point in time.
1) the yoke was SOOO far out of position (specifically, away from the tube) thanks to my amateur CRT repair skills that purity was WAAAAY off, even though it *seemed* to be converging correctly.
2) the little rubber wedges had to be shoved all the way down to even contact the yoke (VERY BAD)
3) I was seriously afraid of electrocuting myself
4) Degaussing WOULD NEVER work in this situation and Purity RING adjustment would have F***ED me even more than I was.
Ok
So finally I got up enough guts to go back in there and fiddle with it some more, this time without the threat of impending death from flyback, as I powered it down everytime I adjusted it. My plan was simple. Loosen the yoke again, Remove all the wedges, and fix my purity FIRST. Then start minor adjustments to understand everything else.
Skipping to the end, here's what worked:
1) Loosen the yoke clamp very modestly, it doesnt take much and you want some friction to keep it in place
2) Only move the thing in one direction at a time. Here's the directions and what they did:
Forward, backward on the tube neck - Helps/hurts purity and that's about it from what I can tell
Pitch Up, Pitch Down - Jacks with the linear width convergence, in my case, I did not have to adjust this.
Yaw Left, Yaw Right - If your Red is above the blue on the left side, and is below blue on right side, this is what you should adjust.
Rotate Left, Rotate Right.- Levels the playing field, I needed to do this one a little too.
So, in the end I fixed the convergence as much as I could (without a test pattern generator), learned how NOT to adjust a yoke, how TO adjust a yoke, and how to sack up and rub your arm up against a live flyback. After doing that monitors aren't so scary anymore...
Anyway, Dokert, thanks for the help!