 Woo! Oh yeah, I'm excited. How about you, Brutus? Oh, of course. Oh, he's just a ball of energy, isn't he? All right, everybody, welcome back. Today we are doing the year-end spectacular. You know, 2020 has been a crazy year full of twists and turds. But one thing that has been great has been the continued support of you guys for this channel at Retro Tech. I sincerely appreciate you watching the videos, hitting the like button, sharing it, and all that good stuff. Today is going to be part one of a special episode series dedicated to this last year's best repairs. So sincerely, thank you again for me to you. It's been a fantastic year. Now, to spice things up a little bit, I did go ahead and add some new commentary to a lot of these repairs and told you some behind the scenes as far as who owns a lot of these monitors and some other information that I have not talked about before. Sit back, relax, and we'll get into these amazing CRT repairs. Let's get started today with the Sony PVM 2950Q. This is a professional CRT monitor that is one of my personal favorites, and I've done many videos in the past highlighting how great it is and all the different features. But today's repair is for my friend, Sean. And Sean has a pretty interesting story on how he picked up this particular 2950Q. He bought this from a government deals auction and the auction just went wild. And he wound up having to pay over $1,300 for this monitor untested. And he had to actually fly from his hometown in Florida over to Alabama where the monitor was located. This is all after he won the auction. And then he had to rent a car from the airport, go pick up the monitor, and he actually took it to my shop here outside of Nashville, Tennessee. So he drove it from Alabama to me, and then he returned his rental car and flew home from Nashville to Florida. So he was really dedicated and wanted this monitor checked up and done right. I've mentioned before that I sometimes travel to Florida, so I was able to bring this back to Sean where he could meet me and pick it up from me a couple months after I was able to service it for him. But just a crazy dedication to try to get one of these ultra rare, ultra amazing 2950Qs. Next we have the JVC AV 36D01, also known as the JVC D-Series consumer CRT set. This is one of the most desirable consumer grade CRTs due to its size and high TV line count for resolution. This one needed a full restoration and a thorough cleaning. So I'd like to give you the backstory on this CRT because it's quite interesting. I actually saved this one from a bait shop in southern Florida. My family is lucky enough to have a property down in Florida, and I generally go fishing there and one time I walked into the bait shop and I noticed the largest CRT that I'd ever seen in public. It was a 36 inch D-Series. I saw it from behind, I read the label, and then I noticed that it had component input as well as S-Video and regular composite. I went back to my family's condo and I did some more research and found out a little bit more about the JVC D-Series and the specific CRT and how hard it is to get such a great CRT that isn't a Trinitron that is 36 inches. So I went back to the bait shop and I haggled with the guy who owns a bait shop and ultimately owned this TV and he sold it to me for 50 bucks and then I didn't even have a big enough vehicle to get it back to my house. I had to sucker my in-laws in the driving it back for me in the back of their minivan and they had to drive it all the way from Florida up to Tennessee for me and I was super thankful because somehow it survived that long trip but it's kind of an interesting story and the guy, the bait shop owner, he had it in the back of his bait shop and he must have used to smoke cigarettes because this was just absolutely loaded with cigarette soot on top of the dust in the back of the CRT and it's generally what caused a lot of the build up and it just smelled like an old smoky pool hall or bar or something. The Commodore 1702 CRT monitor was one of the repairs I did for my friends at My Life in Gaming. Now this particular repair did not involve any kind of circuit board work, it was pretty much all cosmetic and structural but it was still an important repair because a lot of times this old plastic on these CRTs will often break and thankfully we can use things like epoxies and other adhesives to repair them. Alright so this damage definitely originated from shipping and that brings up a big problem with CRTs and trying to get them places. We have to rely on shipping carriers such as FedEx and UPS and other ground services and unfortunately they can beat the crap out of these old CRTs and often you get things like broken bezels and other broken pieces of plastic inside your monitor. However we can use our ingenuity and creativity and a couple of modern tools and most of the time repair these types of damages. I really did enjoy this repair. It gave me the opportunity to experience all the emotions and frustrations of video games from the early 80s. Wow I can only imagine what my father had to put up with when I was a young baby and he was trying to escape to the world of the mighty Commodore. The Sony BVM-D24 E1WU is arguably one of the best CRTs ever made. This display has a resolution of 1000 TV lines. It also supports 240p up to 1080i. In 2020 I was fortunate enough to pick up two different BVM-D24s. I was able to service both of them. They were in different conditions. The first one had about 15,000 original hours on it and it needed a couple of capacitors to be replaced and some boards to be serviced and then it needed a good cleaning and calibration. It ultimately went to a great friend of the community, Epos Vox and then the second BVM-D24 had about 28,000 hours on it if I remember correctly and it had a new tube installed within the last few thousand hours and that was done at the prior owner's facility. Both of those monitors ultimately came from Skyway Studios here in Nashville, Tennessee. I bought them from their post-production department. They were in vans for years and ultimately they upgraded to newer technology. So again the first monitor went to Epos Vox and I'm excited to see what kind of content he can create centered around this BVM-D24 and then the other with the newer tube that D24 actually went to my friend Matt at Insurrection Industries and they will be able to use this monitor to test out any of their new products that are in development and ultimately released onto the retro gaming scene. We're going to finish up part one with the Sony PVM-14L5. Now this is a multi-format Pro CRT monitor and it is my favorite 14 inch formatted monitor available. This one belongs to my friend Corey at My Life in Gaming and it had a bad tube in it. Basically the tube had screen burn in the top portion of the screen where characters and numbers could be seen on bright colored screens and it was quite annoying and eventually you're going to have to replace that tube. Now the tube from the Series A line BVMs can be used as a replacement in this PVM and that's what we did in this repair. I can give you a little backstory on this particular PVM. This has been used by retro access the cable makers for the last couple years as one of their test monitors to use a lot of their retro cables after they create them. They can QC them on a monitor like this. Eventually I'm guessing that they upgraded and Corey brought this monitor to my shop so we could test out this tube swap method. This repair turned out wonderfully. The screen was bright and brilliant and there's no burn on the new tube because it had less than 10,000 hours on it. Corey was very satisfied and I completely understand because once you get a 14.05 with a crisp bright image it's hard to go to another monitor. This one can control geometry spectacularly well and another great selling point on this one was the smaller format. It is noticeably smaller than the BVMs that are also 800 TV lines and something like a D Series PVM that can do 240p up to 1080i like the L5 series monitors. Alright guys that's it for part one. Definitely keep an eye out because I have part two of five more of my favorite repairs from 2020 that I will be releasing in the next couple weeks. Other than that thank you again so much for the channel support. Hopefully we can keep these CRTs roaring for the next 10, 20 years. Who knows the sky's the limit. Thanks again everybody. I'll see you next time with some retro content. Well Burtis it's been a pretty darn good year for retro tech and repairs. I hear you buddy I probably could have never done this without your constant help and encouragement. That's right buddy you rest now because we're going to need you in 2021.