 Hey everybody welcome back. Today I've got something very special for you. I have the legendary Sony GDM FW900 in the shop here today and it's right behind me and that is this beautiful number right here. Check it out. Unfortunately as it sits right now this monitor does not power on. It doesn't work at all. We've got really no signal when I tried to power it on. So what we're going to do today is we're going to try to get inside this do some troubleshooting and some repairs and hopefully get the screen to come on and see what it looks like because I have been just waiting for years to get this amazing CRT in here and hopefully having a chance to see it in action because as everybody knows this one has jumped the shark and the internet knows that this is the most desirable CRT on planet earth. All right here it is everybody arguably one of the best CRTs ever made. This is the Sony FW900 and it is actually from Hewlett Packard. So who would ever think that Hewlett Packard would have made one of the most amazing CRTs but they did have their own variation on the front. We have a monitor here for A7217A and then over here the Trinitron marker and then it's a 24 inch widescreen tube display. All right here is the back of the monitor. We have taken it apart a little bit because as I said it does not work and there's a couple of issues going on. I have trouble shot this power supply and I replaced all the bad capacitors in here, inspected all the fuses, all the traces, all the other components and I found nothing that was visibly bad or tested bad so I think that the power supply is in good shape now but my suspicion is that most of the issues are over here in the deflection board which is on the right hand side and again I've pre-removed some screws and a lot of things to get to the point where I'm at now. The entire neck board is already gone along with our input board which sits down here and all that has to be removed because you have to be able to get this portion which goes into the flyback here. You have to be able to get all that out of the way to be able to get in here and get to the board and be able to remove the board and you have to be able to remove the shielding a little bit so you can pull this portion out and it's really a headache to get to so it's not the easiest thing to work on obviously but it's worth working on I think so we're going to try to get this thing back in working order and I've already removed all the cabling here on this except for one and that is the anode cap and this needs to be removed so that we can just pull this board and get it out of the way and the only thing left to do really is to discharge this tube so I'm going to do that now I do have my ground point here with my grounding tool my handy dandy discharge tool and so I'm going to get in here right now we're going to try to discharge this tube and we'll see if we get any kind of spark I doubt it this does have a bleeder resistor but if anything will happen it'll be right in there now see nothing so just get that tap the anode cap discharge that tube right there a little bit and now I can remove this tool and we're safe to remove the deflection board and now we can take this d board down to the shop because I suspect lots of capacitors on this board to be bad there's a quick look inside here look at the connections and other points that we've got this amazing piece of hardware sony has here this is our yoke look how amazing that yoke is wow all right let's get down the shop and see if we can't get this d board fixed up then we'll see what happens all right we've got our board isolated I've actually removed all the shielding and cleaned it up just a little bit but of course this is the anode cap and then down here is our main flyback transformer and then of course we've got all this stuff that's helping us control our deflection and our screen geometry and there's some pretty vital parts in here and also this board gets extremely hot that's why you'll notice this huge heat sink plate and then there's a couple other major heat sinks right here but there's going to be a high temperature generated from this board especially this side so I'm going to check the solder integrity of here and I'm going to go through and use this tool right here and actually start testing all the capacitors so if you want to know more about this tool definitely check out this video right here and that will tell you all about this tool because I've done a review of it it's a great handy tool for testing capacitors and it will tell you whether they are good or bad without having to remove them from the circuit and then I'll record the bad capacitors on my sheet and then I will basically pull those and replace them and that's what I did earlier with the actual PSU or the power supply board which was the G board I've already gone through that was all the bad caps in it and we'll see how many of these test out bad I'm betting it's even more than the ones that were on the G board so let's go through now we're going to get set up we'll turn the ESR meter on over here we'll get set up and we'll start testing these capacitors and see which ones read bad 0.08 which this is a 220 so that one's that one's reading bad so c710 is bad mark that one with a sharpie it's marked for replacement now all right these are all the capacitors that read bad on this board that I'm going to change out it came to a total of 23 and there's only 29 caps on this board thankfully the big ones are the ones that are the ones that are left over and those tend to read good they don't wear out quickly like the smaller ones do so I'm going to use my Hakko FR301 right here and we're going to just remove these bad capacitors and then we'll come in afterwards and replace them with some fresh upgrade capacitors okay that's our first one now we just have 22 more to go well that's all done we've got all the capacitors that were failed out of this board see how they're all just pulled from these sections mostly now the most difficult one to get was a bonus capacitor I found and it's under this heat sink tucked way in there I doubt you can even see it but maybe you can all the way against the heat sink in the back on the back side so that's going to be a fun one to try to re-thread and get back into the board but that's all of them there you go that was actually 24 capacitors that are bad so now I'm going to go ahead and make the custom cap kit and then I'm going to install those capacitors in this board using my re-soldering station and then once I've finished all that step up I will come back I'm going to show you this board how it looks when it's cleaned up and then we'll put it back down there in the shielding and go test it with the other boards all right so I've gone through and I've recapped that board and then I went a little bit crazy and I decided that instead of just periodically replacing the caps in one board and then going on to the next board I went ahead and serviced all the boards so you saw the power supply and then the deflection board but here's what else I've done in the meantime here is that deflection board again it's been recapped at least all the bad caps but I also did this board which was inside the monitor and it's hard to get to it's in the bottom I'll show you where it goes here because we're going to have to put it back but I figured rather than waiting for this to show me more problems I'd go ahead and recap it and I recapped this board which is the A board which was behind the neck board so both of these two boards are very difficult to get to in case you got to service them so I went ahead and serviced both of them and then I also serviced this neck board which also acts as the input board for our video inputs here so all of these boards now have been rebuilt and should be good to go and if I look here at my cap kit list this is all that I've done it looks like a total of 92 capacitors and that's what 92 capacitors looks like right there all those red bad now none of them were leaking or visibly bad but they all read really bad to starting to go bad on the ESR meteor all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to go up and take a quick look at the chassis upstairs and the tube and then I'm going to have to put all these boards back here inside there and we'll run a test and goodness gracious let's just hope we can get some kind of picture to show up on that screen so here's the backside of our monitor as you can tell half of it's been removed the only thing left is our power supply over here and then this is the deflection yoke which we will not be servicing that one board that was telling you that's hard to get to it sits right in here and then the other board sits right next to it right here where my hand is and then you got to put this shielding right here into place in front of all that and then you can attach the neck board as well as the deflection board so what I'm going to have to do now is come in here and reassemble this monitor and hopefully after it's been reassembled it will work but that's the big test and big question will it work after all this now give me one second and I'll get this back together and then we'll run that test I of course have not tried this so I have no idea whether this is going to work I've got my power cable connected over here but I do not have my power strip on so now it's time to just again take one last look in here at everything assembled and cleaned up and let's hope for the best because I just spent an entire day and a half of my own time on this lovely monitor and I can only really hope that it comes out and works because again 92 capacitors being changed boards being cleaned and all the other things that I've done so far with taking it apart and reassembling it and even just testing and whatnot it's all come down to this moment so let's just go right into it and let's see what happens when we power this on all right we're just going to try to power this on the first thing we're going to do is turn the power on down here and then our power button right here oh goodness I sure am nervous all right so green power light here I don't really see anything on the tube oh I see something so wow yeah hmm oh man see this is what I was concerned about something's going on here still we're getting this screen in all green let me see I mean it is powering on all right folks we're at the point here where you can see it's got a green tent over it I can't adjust like screen g2 voltage like you could in normal manual way on this monitor I don't believe it's able to do it like that so technically I gotta wait for this thing to try to warm up now it keeps shutting itself off I believe there's a short in the tube on the green line and that's why we're seeing this green constantly and then the lines where it's just over voltage on the green because too much voltage is on that line due to a short that's what I think is happening now I do have the dreamcast in the background but as you can see it just totally disappeared and now I'm afraid this is going to just shut itself off because it kind of would do that out there we go see I'll just shut itself off it's kind of the normal thing it's been doing it will maybe stay on a minute and shut itself off and then we do get some blinking lights down here so I'll count the number of these blinking lights and see if the service manual says anything otherwise I'm afraid that the darn tube is just dead on this bad boy well unfortunately that's where I'm at with this fw 900 so after about a day's worth of work you can see that I might be stuck with something that's just basically a boat anchor at this point or just something to look at because I believe the tube is shorted out did tell me in the manual that there is a code that is flashed on the front of the monitor down here by the buttons and it's actually going right now and that's supposed to mean something as to what the problem is the only issue is I'm not able to find anything in the manual that at least I could find right away that said what you were supposed to determine that by it said count how long the gap is between the orange lights but it didn't say like what to do once you counted that and how to determine maybe what was wrong with the monitor so if anybody has any ideas or sees that can you please refer me to that also if you have any ideas as to what may be wrong with this please let me know in the comments I'd be really interested to hear what other people think because again I've spent an enormous amount of time on this monitor and it's it's in a dead state I would love to hear any ideas that you guys may have if there's something you think I should try just to verify the tube is dead eventually I'm going to get a tube tester working and this will be a great chance to test this tube and just verify that the green is out but again I believe the green is out and then I believe the monitor is tripping itself out and going into some kind of safe mode and cut itself off but I don't know what's going on with these amazing rare monitors but we're not really able to get a working one in here yet so that's a bit disappointing and I'll just have to you know get back to looking at what I can do with this one and if there's any other tests that I can do to see if anything is really salvageable so thanks again for watching everybody I will see you all next time with some more retro content look at this video wall here looks like what's you guys working on oh so Flynn is the trainer of this we're getting some good shots for a good background for like a promo video oh that's awesome I see 300 89 really sweet