 My grandfather used to say one man's trash is another man's treasure. I always felt that this meant some things are worth saving and that people would often consider perfectly good items as trash and thus throw them out into the garbage. That kind of sums up where we are today with CRTs and CRT technologies. So let's turn some trash into treasure. Today's monitor is a coast. I have not been able to find any useful information on this particular model or format of commercial presentation CRTs. The monitor is also a complete mess inside and I've been putting this repair off for months because of it. It doesn't power on and honestly it smells like a sardine can. So without further introduction I present to you the Mitsubishi SMR 2601R. Here's a look at this interesting Mitsubishi presentation monitor. So if I look at the front side here I mean obviously it's filthy. It's been sitting here in my shop for a while and I've been kind of leery to work on it because I imagine it's probably got a lot of bad components in it possibly but we'll see in a second. It does have this interesting push out tray with a lot of buttons on it and honestly if you saw it from the front here you may think it just looks like a normal Mitsubishi television. There are stereo speakers built into it and it's got an infrared reader right here so it most likely supports a remote. It's obviously a shadow mass tube. It's about a 26 inch screen and a 4x3 format but that's just a quick look at the front here. We got this nice Mitsubishi logo again this part's plastic. The more interesting thing is the rest of the monitor. If you look at the frame outside of the bezel if you look at the top part of the monitor here in the bottom and then I will roll it around on the side it's got this amazingly high quality wood that's made the frame for the frame on the monitor. This has some nice handles right here. Let's look around to the back. All right so presentation monitor uses 60 Hertz AC 120 volts commercial use only monitor and then something else the model number is the SMR 2601R. We do have a couple more labels up here from Mitsubishi and a serial number and then a manufacturing date of May of 1992. Here's a closer look at our inputs. We've obviously got in and out on just audio video for composite which are B and C and we've got an S video port here a VTR port which is most likely not going to be used. You do have a speaker on off switch a lot of audio inputs and outputs and we do have VGA listed here as a possibility on an input which I'm not sure where that is but you can use obviously B and C for RGB and then sync and then we do have a sync on green ability and then there's an analog RGB D sub inputs you know similar to what you see on the older Sony monitors. This one actually will accept VHF and UHF signals which is quite rare. I've removed the screws from the back we're going to try to take the back plate off now and just like that it comes out. This one has a fan there's a quick disconnect up here. Disconnect that fan then we can look in here real quick. Here's the inside of the monitor. It's a very interesting design. First it's completely lined inside it with a copper. Imagine to limit interference. You can see how that's tanned up around the top there and the sides and goes all through the inside and then there's the tube and our flyback and it would right there and it's a very interesting flyback that Mitsubishi has here. It's like a double flyback almost and there's our power in so over here is our power supply board and that must have some type of an issue because we're not getting clean power into it and when I turn it on it has this terrible odor that smells like fish oil that's cooking rotten fish which is a sign that most likely there's electrolytic fluid somewhere on the board and it's starting to heat up and starting to stink so really what we need to do is get in there and inspect that board if possible so I don't know how really to get in there we'll see if we can without ripping the whole monitor apart. It's time to finally get back in here and start doing some work. We're going to remove the video board first I think it's kind of interesting everything does have little connectors that thankfully are labeled so first I need to disconnect all these quick disconnects and make sure that I have my cables loose from my video board and the video board just lifts off of some hinges on here that are very much like door hinges from old furniture so we'll get this one out of the way and then we can look around maybe get some more boards out of the way and start inspecting them and see if see if there's anything noticeably wrong just from looking at it well so I had to actually disconnect all the cables from the board itself instead of these quick disconnects those are almost useless so take this I'll show you how this just lifts up comes right out like that looks like that should be all of it so this board we can take a look at but this doesn't this is probably not there's probably nothing wrong with this board the the rest of this big board down here will actually lift up and come right out of the wood base and that's what I'm thinking I'm having a problem with is either down here in this power supply but I can't get to the power supply it looks like without actually removing the main chassis and other board this whole setup right here let me see how that just lifts it's not bolted in there or anything but you need to get that out and that might involve just discharging and pulling everything out well unintentionally I actually wiggled the cap off of the back of the tube it didn't appear to be making very good contacts maybe it was but I didn't I didn't really have to do much at all it just came right off so now I'm just going to get my discharge tool hook that up and discharge this point all right we're going to zoom in here to the back of the tube and what I want you to look for is the exposed metal band on that spring down there towards the corner right to the spring right there a little alligator clip first we'll touch the tube nothing nothing okay and that's it all right so now we're just going to get in here and tear down the monitor I'm going to join you from the studio for the remainder of today's video and we're going to talk you through a little bit more on this unbelievable Mitsubishi repair so once I've gotten it open and apart now I'm going to start disassembling these boards because I can't get the power supply out without first getting rid of that main chassis and the neck board and of course that input board too so this is fast forward extremely a lot but what I was able to do is finally get to that power supply and I'll show you an inspection of it here quickly so you can see pretty much what our major issue is and that is the capacitors on here these capacitors in this high heat high frequency zone are unbelievably disgusting this is one of the grossest grossest jobs I've worked through these caps had completely vaporized for the most part spewed guts and gore and goo all over the board and then that stuff got onto the board on the backside and it got all over the traces and it got onto the solder pads of many of the capacitors and other through hole components and it was just a mess so whatever would happen is this current would run through that and it would heat up these areas and and immediately heat up that electrolytic fluid that was on those hot spots and just cause an insane amount of stink to come out of this monitor this was a repair that had been done by somebody in the past and I cannot believe that any of these points still had continuity so a lot of that's going to have to be fixed and we're going to clean up a lot of this you'll notice that dark kind of burnt looking area on the circuit board that's the high heat resistors and like I think there's some diodes probably in there on the other side of this botched repair and a lot of those had just lifted they were they're not even you know that electrolytic fluid had just eaten through the traces so they weren't even making contact on a lot of points over there but that's that's going to have to be rebuilt and then we're going to have to get in here and clean up some of the other areas on the board where some other capacitors possibly were removed and replaced I'm going to use of course my HECO FR301 solder desoldering tool it's a great tool and if you're thinking of getting one it's a really good time to get one right now being that it's towards the end of the year they generally go on sale for 20 to 25 off directly from HECO and so I highly recommend this tool it's been a workhorse for me but just what would happen is you'd heat up these spots and if you were lucky the caps would come out and if you weren't lucky there was a lot you know some of these spots had again that electrolytic fluid built up and that would burn away and then the trace would vaporize almost so there's going to be a lot of rebuilds going on here's what the top of the board looked like after I removed the capacitors just look at the amount of buildup we've got under these capacitors this one right here was by far the worst it had blown its stuff all over the place all over these resistors those are usually generate some heat also so that's where a lot of the bad smell was we've got some heat sinks more resistor right in between these so again high heat it's funny too it happens around these ICs generally and these connection points where high with frequency voltage generally is traveling through and that causes these capacitors to generally wear out quicker than some of the other capacitors that aren't in a high frequency current so here's a look at the capacitors themselves afterwards I just wanted to show you these specific ones and how they were just terribly eaten up this is what they look like when they start to fail to the one of the most extreme fails that I've seen a long time and these were actually Rubicon so I hadn't seen many Rubicon's fail before so just even even the best can fail if the environment is right with heat and just time because again this is an early 90s model of monitor and that just means there's a lot more time for these components to go out you did have to clean it rather heavily with some isopropyl alcohol it would have been nice to have some kind of device like perhaps to actually clean it further you know like an ultrasonic cleaner but for something abort this size that would cost an extreme amount of money so the best bet is generally to get isopropyl alcohol and clean that off as best as possible let me give it some time for to evaporate and this is what we looked like afterwards the top side came became relatively clean and looked pretty good but the bottom side still had some trouble areas we're gonna have to go in and rebuild some of these traces like I had mentioned before especially in this area you'll notice some of these just had vaporized the entire through hole portion on here so we're gonna take and use a jumper wire or even some legs of the capacitors and other other components to repair some of those and bridge some of those points and as first it's just gonna go in here and replace the capacitors as best as possible I was again concerned about being able to get a good bond on my circuit board considering that a lot of the areas were covered in the electrolytic fluid but after the cleaning it did help but there were it was definitely a challenge it wasn't as easy as say a new or cleaner power circuit board there so just take that into consideration if you're working on something this old that the circuit board could have somewhere and tear on it and need to have a you know a little bit better handling than maybe if it was a little bit more durable and newer and here we have the after after we've replaced all the capacitors here's what it looks like inside it looks wonderful we've got it cleaned up and I want to show you how I repaired a lot of the sections on the back I was able to clean off some of the other areas and didn't really have to do too much but this particular area you'll see let me go through some of the repairs right quick I had to make a jumper right here and this is done with most likely yes a capacitor leg came through the hole and I put a heat shrink tube on there and then we've got a couple of jumper wires where I had to rebuild the entire trace under them that had been disintegrated by the past a couple years of that electrolytic fluid building up on here and just eating it away there's another jumper right there I left this jumper in place that was originally installed before I got there and I just kind of worked my way around it as opposed to redoing it also because I did go through here and of course check for continuity after I did all these repairs but I was you know I was kind of skeptical I never knew if this thing was actually going to work again because of this kind of damage when you get in here and there's this much damage to a pcb it's really difficult to tell if it's actually going to work again so I wanted to limit the amount of you know work time I put into it without knowing that it's going to be working again because it's quite a lengthy you know we want to take and do the right thing on that board to begin with because if you look inside here we're going to have to put it back together and we're going to have to put all those cables right there in that stack back connect those all back to the main boards and everything of course I went through and I did check my continuity on all my solder or all my joints on the power supply so it took me probably an hour to get it back together and before I fire it back up and see if we get it to work I did want to show you briefly we'll go back a second take a look at the inside of this monitor it's actually completely lined in high quality copper and that is just stapled onto the frame that wood frame and that does seem to help out with limiting the exposure to purity or outsize outside magnetic fields it really does decrease the amount of magnetism that's affecting the inside of that backside of the tube and thus it doesn't affect the picture quality I imagine now once we try and test it out here and see if we can actually get some power back into this thing maybe we'll get to see that in effect or you know definitely get to see to affect because here it is it did work okay once I got everything back together it fired up right away and really blew me away this monitor is super sharp and very exciting to get it back to life and to see the you know beautiful picture on it once again because this is again something that you're not going to see every day this is a look at some of the calibrations so it did look very nice there were actually calibration controls for RGB on the front of the monitor which is super handy considering this didn't actually have the service menu it did produce wonderfully bright and crisp scan lines again this is a shadow mask tube so it does have slightly different look than the Sony but just a magnificent magnificent thing to behold is this monitor so if you see something like this just note that you're going to want to get inside and inspect before you just try to usually run and start using these things I mean a lot of times you'll get lucky maybe and there won't really be a problem with it but most of the time at this point 2020 this monitor is almost 30 years old and has you know it obviously had been used quite a bit so the main problem here was the power supply again it was a dirty job but I'm super glad to get it fixed up and back into Dave's Mr. Blade Gun his hands so he can enjoy it and you know use it for a long time to go all right guys well thanks again for joining me today if you would please make sure you click the like button on the video and make sure that you're subscribed if you haven't already and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content