 Hey everybody, so I was recently asked by one of my patrons exactly how long he thought it took me to restore a CRT. Now we're talking actually taking something apart, cleaning it, recapping it, recalibrating it, putting it back together, and then sending it on its way. So the monitor that I seem to be unable to get away from the last couple of weeks has been the Commodore 1702. I have yet another one in my shop that someone brought locally and they wanted a cap kit done to it. Now this cap kit has 39 capacitors in it for this monitor, so it's a pretty good size little kit. It's not huge like a PVM or anything, but this is kind of a standard CRT that would be more on the easier side to recap and service as compared to something a lot more complicated like a PVM or BVM that would have probably this many caps on each circuit board and then it would have four or five circuit boards. So we're just going to see exactly how long we're going to start just by taking it apart here in a second, disassembling it, getting the boards out, and then I've got all the tools here. So we'll be ready to go. I'll set up a stopwatch and have a couple of cameras going and we'll zip through this thing. And the point here isn't to just go through this and do it as quickly as possible. I want to kind of time this to see how long it takes this job to be done in a quality fashion. So all right, what I'm going to do now is we're going to switch over, look at the other cameras, and we're going to just get started. The stopwatch will get set up. And again, so I'll record each segment and time each segment. And then at the end, we'll put each segment together and see how long it took the entire job. And then we're going to get started. I'm just going to go ahead and sit started here. And now let's get started. I'm just going to start by taking our screws out going from there 50 seconds. All right, so it took a total of seven minutes for that first section. Well, six minutes and 50 seconds to be exact. But we've got the chassis pulled, the main boards pulled. This is what we'll be servicing. There's only, since I've done this thing so many times, there's only one more piece we need to really be worried about to get in and service that. And that's this little slide bar down here on the side. And it's just held in with a couple of screws. And that way we don't actually have to take these boards out of this frame while we restore it. But the issue with this one is it's just, it's really dirty. It's got lots and lots of dust and dirt building in it. And it smells like it's got some cigarette smoke in it. So it's probably been in the house of a smoker. So that's another, it'll add another little bit of time that we normally probably wouldn't have spent time cleaning. And I'm going to show you some points on this board where you can really see just some excessive buildup of dust and soot. And that's really what happens when you smoke on these things. So especially like in this back area where our potentiometers are. Okay, so there's a whole bunch of stuff down in this area. See if the other camera will show it any better. Just lots of soot and that's just beyond what we'd call regular dust. That's definitely got some tar and cigarette buildup in it. So we need to really clean this thing off before we start servicing it. So that's going to take some time. Let's go ahead now and set up the timer and we'll dust off this chassis and clean it up. And then we can start removing the capacitors. Alright, so I've taken just my brush and brushed all that soot and stuff off everything. And since this is a pretty simple circuit board, it's safe to use, you know, just an old horsehair non-conductive brush that's not going to do any damage to any of the parts. And I don't have an environment out here that's conductive to a lot of static electricity. However, that's something that you should be aware of when you're using brushes to dust. There are some people that like to use anti-static or electrically neutral or safe brushes. Now, as I go through here, I just want you to see that we're going to add basically another seven minutes of time. We're up to 15 minutes. Give or take a little bit total on our rebuild so far. And that's just to get us to the point where we've got our chassis cleaned. I do have the cap kit ready, but first we're going to need to use our HACCO now. And let's see how long it takes us to get all the caps out of the board here, the power supply board, and our neck board. Right at about the six minute mark, my HACCO FR-301 decided to get a real nasty clog. Now, I actually was forced to take a timeout and go clean the tool. It took about 30 minutes, but I'm not adding that time to this procedure because it was obviously unforeseen. So anyway, I did take a break here at about the six minute mark to clean that. And then I restarted the timer and got back to work. After I fixed my HACCO FR-301, it took 12 minutes to remove the rest of the capacitors. So if I add all that together, we're looking right at 18 total minutes to remove all 39 capacitors. We're going to start on our first section of our recap now. That's going to be our neck board and our power supply. So just five caps and then we'll bust into the big board, which has 34 caps and see how long that takes. The rest of the main board, which is 34 capacitors all here in this kit. And I've left my clock. So we left off right at 12 and a half minutes. So let's just resume that and see how long this takes. We'll come back and see at the end what the finished job looks like and how long it takes me back. So I did just finish up those 35 caps and I'm at a total time of under one hour and five minutes. Now again, that's all the caps. We'll combine that to our total time on the job. Now I've got to get this back into the frame and shell with the CRT tube. But before I do that, I really need to clean that out too because it's got a lot of smoke and nasty build up. So we'll start the timer on that and see how long that takes to add that of course to our job total. All right, we're really going to get in here now and start cleaning the inside of this. But again, it's got a layer of dust covered in cigarette smoke soot. So I'll let you take a look at that before we start the timer just so you can see. I want to show you some of this so I'm going to zoom in a little bit and then we're going to start cleaning it and we'll start our timer. Just a real thick layer on there though. I'm going to use a brush and just an old t-shirt here. Next I'm going to put the chassis back into the frame here and the bezel with the screen. And that way we can test it. And the other pieces of plastic are inside soaking in hot water so that they can be cleaned. That's just going to be about a 10-minute job and I'll time that and add it in at the total when we put it all together. But this right here should just slip into the bezel and then we can... The last thing I'll do is add just a small bit of dielectric grease up here around the anode and two and a little on the cap. And that's just going to give it a little bit of lubrication and extend the life of those parts just, you know, without doing too much more. We're just going to do that. It's also going to make sure that we don't have any small bits of hair or dust in here that could make it crackle when it turns on. Okay, ready? Pretty much ready to test it now. I'm going to flip this around. I've got the Super Nintendo plugged in. First off, let me make sure it's on the front input. Let's hope it's all good. Add green blues all there. All right, so it tests out great. You can see everything, all the colors, the tube looks good. And what I need to do is calibrate it. But before I do that, I'll go inside and clean the rest of the pieces. Again, that should be about 10 minutes and then we'll be able to reassemble the rest of the parts, start calibration and finish this whole thing up. Again, right now we're sitting at, after I get done cleaning, about two hours in total time for everything. As you can see, the S-video input or as we say, Commodore video is working as well as our mono audio. All right, so this didn't need a whole lot of adjustment, just a little bit of vertical centering and vertical size adjustment. And that's pretty much it. That's a good thing about this monitor. It seems to do really well after recapping and then a slight adjustment, generally speaking. And it always maintains a pretty solid picture. All right, so that's the completed restoration. And I think that at the end of the day we came in at less than two and a half hours. But I'm filming this before I edit it and actually count up the time. So I will add the exact time below and you can see if I beat that two and a half hours, I believe I did. Just some of the challenges I encountered. Of course, when you try to do something like this, you're always going to run into some kind of problem. And this job was no different, but the problem really didn't pertain to the monitor itself. My problem this time was in my FR-301 HACCO desoldering tool. It actually got extremely clogged up about five or six capacitors into the removal job. I removed five or six of the 39 capacitors and it just clogged up, seized up. I was not able to get anything through that till I was able to clear that nozzle. And that did cost me 30 minutes of time actually to clear that nozzle. I'm not adding that as part of the job because that's something that's not really part of the job. It is part of the job, but it's not part of the pricing for the customer. That's already got to be built in for tools and things. So there's just something to think about anytime you try to do something that seems like something will happen, but just stick with it. I was able again to clear that after about 30 minutes with the work. Other notes on this restoration. I did actually go and discharge the tube and the anode cap the way you're supposed to with the discharge tool. I get usually some crazy questions. You're not supposed to do that while the monitor is plugged in. It needs to be unplugged first off. And you need to make sure that you're not touching any metal. Just use one hand when you're discharging it. But that's the official way you should discharge it. And also doing it like that is not going to damage the tube in any way. Whereas if you use that tool and poke and prod around the back of the tube, you could scratch it up and hurt even the connector sometimes on the anode cap itself. You could damage that. One maybe final note is the adapter I use for S video to get it into this. I know some people have asked about that. This is just a simple circuit board that has a S video input. And it breaks it out to where it has ground and luma on this side and then chroma on this side and ground. And all that basically does is separate those lines. And it was on B and C for the other end of the connector. So you could make any kind of adapter you wanted to. All this is doing is breaking it out nice and clean like that. And then you could run B and C cables for this, which is what I normally do. Or in the instance here where we've got it on this monitor, we will use that adapter to get into the Commodore video. But hey, that's it again for this beautiful monitor. And hopefully maybe we could get on to something else besides the Commodore monitor because I have plenty of other things to do. And I'm not just typecasting myself all the time to do just Commodores. I like them and they need to be worked on. And each approach that I make as a video will be different. So I hope you guys enjoyed this one. If you did, please leave me a like and let me know what you think with a comment below or any questions you may have. I appreciate you joining me and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.