 Hey, welcome back to Retro Tech. Today, I'm excited to bring you a monitor that I've never been able to really cover before. This is a Commodore 1701 CRT video monitor. This belongs to my friend Try at My Life in Gaming, and it's in great condition other than a small bit of a problem, which you'll eventually see in this video. Now, this one is made in 1983, exactly five months before I was born in March of 1983, and it was specifically made to give a higher quality experience for anybody who owned an at-home version of a Commodore computer, most likely a Vic 20 or the more popular Commodore 64. And this monitor, it was advertised as being exactly compatible with all Commodore products. This featured one of the very first styles of higher quality video, which they called Commodore Video. And to make it short and simple, that is actually S video, split into Chroma and Luma, and it's available on the back of this monitor. It also features a mono audio speaker, as well as AV inputs on the front. It says that the resolution is 1,000 characters for the screen. It also has a lot of controls built into the front, so you can do things like control some of the geometry as well as color and brightness and other things on the front of the monitor. All right, so that should be enough of an introduction here. Let's go ahead now and jump into the repair. Hey everybody, so here is the Vic 20 computer in combination with the Video Monitor Model 1701 Commodore. What I've got playing on the screen is just some homebrew game called Cheese and Onion. It's kind of interesting. I showed you earlier you could use the Sega Genesis controllers. You can also use a regular controller like this from an Atari. I just wanted to show you this monitor kind of after our introduction to it, how it has a specific issue on here, and I was playing that. I was playing this music so you'd get an idea for what the sound was like on this system. Very basic. One of the earliest home computers available with gaming on it. All right, anyway, I want to show you what's wrong with this particular monitor. So let's take a look over here on the side of this, the right-hand side here, where the bezel is supposed to meet the CRT screen. We've actually got separation right in here, and then it's not separated on the opposite side and the corners on the other side. So that just tells me that the problem with this monitor is mostly cosmetic, where, and structural, where while it was in transit or it was shipped, the corner bolts that hold in the CRT to the actual frame and bezel have snapped on this right-hand side as we're looking at the front of the screen. So the rest of the monitor is in wonderful shape, and so we'll try to restore this by getting in there and repairing that in those corners. All right, so for this repair, we're going to shut everything off, and then we'll have to turn it around and get into the back by removing just the Phillips head screws and see what's going on in the back. We want to concentrate on taking this apart properly, so we're going to start by removing the Phillips head screws on the front side, which are next to the control buttons. There are three of them, so you want to remove those first, and then we'll flip around to the back side. The back of the monitor actually is a little bit different quality of plastic than the front, but it still uses the Phillips head screws, so just remove all the screws from behind the monitor, and then you can slide off the plastic on the back. And then once the plastic is removed, we'll be able to get in and inspect inside this CRT a little bit more. Here's our first look behind the monitor. Now let's get into some of the troublesome areas, because honestly it doesn't feel very stable without the shell on, so I want to get it on its side immediately, but the real problem is in right there where that bolt meets the plastic. It's snapped up here, and then come down here, and same thing down there. You'll see the bolt behind that piece of metal shielding over here on the power. For just a note, there is a Hitachi tube inside here. It's a shadow mask tube. There's a lot of dust built up in here, and it just needs a good cleaning inside. There's some potentiometers most likely for some other adjustments on our screen geometry, but first we're going to move the tube so that it's face down safely onto something soft. So I want to move this so that the tube is face down onto this pillow with some t-shirts on it just so I can take some stress off the actual bezel, and then we'll kind of work on it from this way to try to avoid damaging any of the plastic. Our next step for disassembly is going to be to remove a couple of more screws that are holding the chassis and all the circuit boards to the main frame here, and so just remove those four Phillips head screws from the bottom of the CRT, and that will release the chassis, and then we've also got to get in here and discharge this CRT tube and anode cap. Just be extra safe if you're ever going to discharge a tube. No, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on discharging here in this video, but if you want to see some other tips or techniques or tricks on discharging, I definitely have another video I'll link to in the upper corner here for you to check out. Next thing we're going to do is unplug our speaker, and then we'll unplug some of the other things from the main chassis, including the neck board, and we're going to unplug the connections from the main chassis to our deflection yoke also. See, we're not going to actually remove the deflection yoke. We will need to remove all the other circuit boards though to get in here and get this tube out, but the deflection yoke can actually stay in place, so we don't have to worry about any major adjustments to make to that. Here's our problem. It's back here where my finger is. The bolts are not attached anymore to the frame, so we're going to remove the four corner bolts and pull it out of here, and hopefully we can see what kind of plastic we have left. Since we've got some serious damage here on these corner posts, I'm going to take extra careful time to remove the bolts, even though it looks like I'm going really fast here. I've sped up obviously the footage, but just remember to take your time. If you do have a post or a corner that's cracked at all, you want to try to maintain as much of that plastic in the corner as possible, and once you get those four bolts out, you should be able to easily lift out your CRT tube. Just make sure that you've got your grounding cables cleared if there are any, and also make sure that your degausing cable stays in place there if it's stuck to the bezel like this one is. Now I'm going to remove the post spacers, and then we're going to flip over the bezel, and I'm trying to just salvage and save any bits of plastic that I can in the corners, and the possibility that I'm going to need them to rebuild this bezel. Now that I've collected my major pieces of plastic, I'm going to try to reattach to the bezel. I've got my repair product here. This is JB Weld two-part epoxy. You've got a red tube that has a white cream, and then you've got a black tube that has a black cream, and you mix the creams to make a gray color epoxy, and that is what activates this epoxy, is the mixing of the two chemicals together, and this hardener is one of the strongest epoxies you can buy at your hardware store, so it's going to be quite a bit stronger, and the way that this works is it takes a while to cure out, so we'll need to apply it to our plastic pieces. You can do it by applying it with just, I'm using a chopstick here, and then I'm going to clean it up with a paper clip, and just move it around and make sure I've got all the areas that I'm trying to reattach covered in the epoxy, and then I simply go and try to refit that piece where it broke off. Now this one's a little bit trickier because there are sections of this corner post that have broken off that are not going to be reused, but it still should be enough for us to get a good bond here, and then once I've got it in place, I'm going to go back and take a little bit extra epoxy on that paper clip, and I'm going to rub that epoxy over my joints so that they will do, you know, give it a little bit better chance of hardening and not moving or anything, because this is going to just have to sit here for at least 12 hours so that it can really be hard enough to hold in a CRT tube. The second corner post had a much more clean break, and there really wasn't any other pieces of plastic besides the main corner post, so that should fit in here quite nicely and give us a chance to make this repair almost perfect, especially on this corner where, again, we don't have extra pieces of plastic that have cracked and fallen off. And now it's had about 14-15 hours to dry, so it's probably three-quarters of the way cured out. And so it's cured out enough for me to go ahead and probably reseat the tube, so that's the next step here, but this is the, one of the repairs, you can see the gray epoxy that has been placed on there, and it's very hard and sturdy. Actually, the epoxy is quite a bit stronger than even the original plastic, and this repair was much better because there was a lot more of the corner piece in one piece, one solid piece still, and so it came together really nicely. Now our epoxy has completely cured out, and we need to reinstall our tube. First we're going to insert our four spacers in each corner, because those are going to separate our tube from our chassis and give us that right height balance, so it will actually sit right against the outside bezel from the front view, which I'll show you after it's reinstalled. Once you get that lined up and the tube in place, you're going to need to use your bolts again and make sure that you've got your rubber spacer and washer in place, because you will need those. I recommend slowly putting the screws in one at a time. Don't crank them all the way down yet. Kind of get them nice and started, and that way you can crank them in or tighten the screws in equally after you have all four screws in. But everything appears to be in place as far as the CRT is concerned. I did a quick check, and it was flush against our bezel. Now we're going to reinstall our main chassis and circuit boards first, which we'll just slide down, and we'll want to go back and install the four Phillips head screws on the bottom and back, and then we can start to reattach our cabling and double check everything to make sure you're attaching it in the correct spot, especially that deflection yoke cable. Then we're going to of course have to get in here and reattach our flyback. This flyback was a little bit difficult to get into place, to be honest with you, and I didn't discover till after I had tried for a while to work it in from the top that the plate above it actually could be removed, which I'll show you here in a second, to get to it easier. You can remove that plate up top, and now I'm able to check and make sure that everything in the top half of the monitor is correct, and that means the anode cap, the deflection yoke, and we'll see we'll slide this board back into place so we can connect our last few connections like our speaker and all our ground connections need to be checked prior to doing any kind of testing on here. All right, so thankfully finally we have an opportunity to test out this monitor after it's been repaired, and I'm going to show off the S-Video slash Commodore video feature on here. I've got my Super Nintendo, which has been modified for S-Video output, but I have a breakout here that converts my S-Video into Chroma and Luma, and then I go straight from that adapter into the back of the Commodore monitor, and now let's fire it up and see how this baby looks. And it appears we have a successful test run here. The monitor looks nice and sharp. The picture is great. I told Tri that this was just a beautiful example of a Commodore monitor, maybe one of the best that I've ever seen. He did get this as part of a deal from a museum where they were offloading some extra retro tech and gear, and this was a great buy. It's just unfortunate that it had that small crack happen during shipment, but thankfully we were able to get in there and repair that. The last thing I want to do is I'm going to go and replace all my Phillips head screws and especially put this tray back in place, which just snaps in, that'll cover up those adjustment buttons, so they're nice and protected. This little tray thing is especially hard to keep in good shape. It's often broken on these monitors. All right, so there you have it. The repair is pretty much finished. Now before I do close this video out, I will let you know that I did run through and try some calibrations behind the monitor, which I'll show you a little bit of. I'm going to try to do some geometry adjustments here. I'll show you what I can use on the back as far as potentiometers. There's not a whole lot. There are like three or four potentiometers in the back that will adjust certain geometry settings. I just wanted you to see the picture that we're starting with, and then we're going to walk around back and look at the adjustments, but the biggest thing is just our vertical centerness. We're a little bit too low, and that is one of the four things we can adjust here. Go around to the back. The only thing I've really got, again, are those four potentiometers, and the big black one adjusts vertical centerness. Then we've got horizontal frequency right next to it, which we do not need to adjust, and most likely you won't need to adjust that. You can use your horizontal centerness potentiometer or adjuster on the front of the monitor to do that. Then we've got these other two over here. One is for our vertical height, and then the last one is for vertical linearity. I will go and spin some of those now with my little screwdriver, and I'll put the camera around front so you can see how it looks as I make those adjustments. There were very few adjustments that you could actually make. I mean there was a pan adjustment, and then a vertical center, and a vertical size adjustment, but outside of that there really wasn't much else. It's very limited on what you can adjust on here. Anything else would have to be done manually through the deflection yoke. So just so you know, there's not a whole lot of sway you can do as far as the geometry is concerned. Again, I want to say a special thank you to Tri for trusting me with his lovely Commodore Vintage Monitor. We got it all fixed up, and hopefully sometime I can get it to you in the future. But if you guys have any questions about this repair or any other repairs, please leave a comment below. I also want to say a very special thank you to anybody else who supports the channel on Patreon. If you want information on that, or maybe how to get something that you have fixed, please check out the links in the description, and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.