 Hey everybody, welcome back today to Retro Tech. We're doing another CRT repair. We're working inside one of the best Sony BVMs that was ever made for a CRT. Now, this is a D-Series and a D-Series are great. They're actually a step up from the PVM20L5. It could do everything from analog video, 240p, 480i and then it can go all the way up to multi-format or semi-high-def up into 1080i. It can do 720p and some other different resolutions in between there. However, it is an extremely finicky monitor and I don't know if that's simply because the hardware used to get it to support both low analog video and then higher definition video is just so tricky that the engineers might have had trouble with it. But there are multiple boards inside of it that can fail out and there's also a lot of service work that should have been done to these. So if you get one from a broadcast studio and they don't have a service history on it, you're really getting into something that you don't know how long it could last other than what you could see from the obvious checks on the screen you do yourself like checking the geometry, checking the hours in the internal service menus and things like that. The one I'm working on today has a problem that I was able to isolate down to the deflection board. And the way I did that was I swapped boards between the broken D20 and my good working D20 and I just swapped boards out one at a time from the good D20 and the bad D20. So I'd take a board out of the bad D20, put it in the good D20 and see if it would fail out the way it did in the first one, an original failure. So that was a way to confirm and nail down which board was the problem. And as I said earlier today, we'll be working on a deflection board for this D20. I will go through and walk you through the process and then we'll see if you guys can maybe help me out at the end. And now let's just take a first look at the board and then the individual cap kit that I made for it. Hey guys, welcome back today. We're gonna be working on a Sony BVM D-Series board and this one belongs to Daniel, he is a Patreon member and a local customer and this is the capacitor list. This list has a possibility to have 41 capacitors in it. The reason I say possibility is there is a possibility that a revision of the board was made and sometimes that will not be the same as what the manual says. So you always really want to verify every cap list that you check out with the physical board. But anyway, this board has some issues. It will run. When you turn on the monitor, it will work for a little bit. It did come out of a D20 BVM. And after a couple of minutes, it starts to get wavy on the sides and then all of a sudden you get horizontal collapse, the monitor goes into overload and shuts off. And then you have to let it cool down for a long time and it will start back up and work for a little bit and then cut off. And what that tells me is there's a possibility the capacitors in it have gone bad. So I went and I tested a lot of the capacitors with a tool and my tool told me that a vast majority of them, nearly 80%, were pretty much on the edge of going bad. So rather than just try to eliminate a couple caps, we figured we'd just do the whole board and hopefully that will take care of the issues and we could hook this board back up into my BVM D20 that I have in the shop. And that's a good thing about the BVMs. A lot of them have cards like this that are easy to remove and then reinstall and very easy to ship compared to a lot of other things that we have to deal with. So we're going to go ahead and start now by removing all the capacitors here and then we can put in the new cap kit, which I'll have right here and I will post a link to that in the description of the video so you could check it out. Anybody can go check out that cap kit if you want to look at it and see what we'll work it with. So let's go ahead now and get started. Two capacitors on this main board. So we removed all of them and they're all in this container right here. Now we'll tell you that one of the capacitors was different. That was C28 according to the manual. It's only supposed to be a 4.7 microfarad, 160 volt capacitor. Yet you can see right there. It's got 10. But I noted that so always make sure that you check with the actual board and refer it to the capitalist in case there is a change and instead of changing the 4.7 I will change it to this 10 microfarad capacitor. I've got the new cap kit here. You'll notice a lot of different colored caps and a lot of different manufacturers. Unfortunately due to supply shortages I've been using a lot of back stock caps. Now I will tell you that every one of these caps is a high quality brand and is approved for general use and they are all rated for 105 degrees Celsius. So I've matched up all the other characteristics according to what was in the board as far as the microfarads and the voltage. And then there were a couple instances on this kit where I had to make some changes and just increase the voltage a little bit for a few caps. And there was the one cap, which again, I'm holding my hand right here. That's the 10 microfarad 160 volts. According to the manual it's 4.7. So I changed it to the 10 since I have a bunch of 10s in my shop. And that is a prime example of why you cannot always trust your service manual or even any kind of write-up directly when it comes to your board. You have to double-check it with the physical board because there could have been some issue with just even a small run of production on the boards. And maybe Sony decided to make one small adjustment on here for this specific board production run. And it's not going to be noted in the service manual. Or it could have had a later bulletin added to the service manual. And then that might be an instance where the service manual needed to be updated but never was officially. Now we're going to go ahead and put the new kit in. And then we'll be able to pull the other D20 board and hopefully we could put this one in its place. And we'll see if it works. Here's the D20. It's set up to run some tests. I've got my board in it right now. And I'm about to take that board out and put in this new other board. I'm using an 11RBKM remote to control it. We're going to get in the back here and remove the board I have in here right now for deflection and swap it. So let's get set up and do that. You'll notice that fan noise that's coming from this. The 41HD. Just a noisy card with that fan in it. Let's get it set up for the removal of this board. What I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this plate. And you'll notice there's screws in it. They're Phillips head screws. There's four in this one and two in our board. They don't actually come out of it. They're built into the panel. And so you don't have to worry about them coming out of your board when you remove them. But that's an easy way to give you a little bit more room in here. And then you're simply going to pull on this like it's a card for any type of video card example or something. And there's one connection we're worried about. And that's our yoke connection right here. You can go ahead and pull the full card out if you get to that. If it's easier like that. And then there's a point in the back here where it's connected also to just hold that cable in place. So this is my board that came with this monitor. Let's try the new board. And here is our new board. We'll plug in our yoke connection. You can secure the cable like that. And then you want to slide it on the track that's inside. There's a line actually lining up where the track is. And then just push completely till you feel it snap into place. And then we'll just tighten our screws on the board a little bit. Don't over tighten them. And then if that were it we would put this plate back. However we need to turn it around and test it before we put the plate back. So let's just test it. Initializing on our yoke pattern. Everything seems to be good. Let's turn the brightness down just a little bit. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to let this run for a little while. All right it's been about five minutes and starting to do this thing again. See that's getting all wacky and it's about to do the horizontal collapse. So no we're not fixed on this problem. All right I've got my original boards back in it that came with this monitor and I've taken out the boards I serviced. Let's just see if it'll turn back on hopefully and work fine. So the image is back. I'm going to let it run for another five ten minutes and see if it does anything but I think the problem still is persisting in that board. More than likely I need to go back and inspect and possibly there's a cold solder joint somewhere. Some other component has gone bad. Well it looks like my boards are holding good. So unfortunately that means the customer's boards still aren't working. But you get in there and try to troubleshoot those boards some more before you give up on them. This is an example of some of the things I'll be looking for. Pins on the ICs. Some of them look like they may you know get warmed up a little bit and there could be a short in there. There's also a couple of other ICs to check out. These over here there's a strong possibility there's a break in one of those. So I'm going to reflow solder on all these ICs that are in white and we'll test it again. Let's do another test after a solder reflow on the boards. Still now it's just collapsing and overloading immediately. So still no luck. Hey that's where our repair sits right now and I still have the board right here and I have not been able to figure out the issue completely with that horizontal line collapse on the screen. I did the full recap like you saw in the video. That was at the recommendation of Save On Pat and then I reflowed the solder on the ICs and other high voltage and high temperature components but that was to no avail. So my last thought is maybe one of these ICs is actually bad on here or transistors or something but the problem with that is there are 15 or 16 transistors and ICs on this board and a lot of those are very difficult to find. They were expensive at the time of production so now down the road 25 years or 20 years we're still having an issue getting good replacements and also ones that are cost effective. Ultimately it would have cost way too much to invest the time and parts today in trying to repair it just by replacing the other ICs and even pulling them to test would have taken hours because each IC has another IC stacked behind it so you'd have to desolder an entire block of parts to get to just say like this IC with my finger on it. You'd have to desolder a lot of parts just to be able to access it to test it and the parts again are so expensive and hard to find. What I ended up doing was referring the client to Save On Pat and he had a replacement board for $285. One that was serviced and fixed up so I compromised with my client I said hey let's just go ahead and get the board from Save On Pat and I'll only charge you for the parts on this one and that way we don't invest $200 plus $250 or more on this board and still find out at the end of the day there's some issue that maybe we can't fix. So I would really like to know your opinion though if you have any ideas on what maybe is causing the issue that we are experiencing maybe you have a D20 that had this exact same problem and you were able to figure it out please leave me a comment and I will try that fix. In the meantime I did get an update that the boards from Pat had arrived and the D20 was working so for now this one's going to end up being a parts board and sometimes that's just the way it goes you got to compromise a little bit and know when it's better to almost try and find a replacement part as opposed to buying and servicing a whole board. Sometimes you're not going to get that lucky with other CRTs and older electronics where there will actually be a replacement part available most of the time you will be stuck rebuilding what you've got in the original hardware. Hey that's going to do it for today's episode I appreciate you for joining me today and sticking around to this point please again if you have any comments about the repair leave them below and I will see everybody next time with some more retro content.