 Hey, everybody, welcome back today to Retro Tech. I am Steve. And specifically, I want to go over a neckboard and how to service a neckboard with you. Now, today, we're going to be working on a PVM that's an M-Series, Sony PVM. And the reason I want to go over the neckboard is you could run into specific issues where you might be missing a color on your CRT or maybe you have some intermittent power issues or something anyway that might be interrupting your screen, whether it's with the colors. And there could be a problem coming from your neckboard. So the most common issues are cold solder joints, which just happen from heat and then cooling cycles over time, so as a CRT ages that can happen, as well as failing eye season resistors. Those are going to be the more common components that are going to give you trouble on your neckboard. There are a few capacitors on there and capacitor failure can be an issue. And then damage and transit. So you might have a very common, and neckboard gets damaged in transit or moving a CRT around, whether it's through shipment or whether it's just to move something personally, you can know a lot of times that gets damaged. So today, we're going to look at a good neckboard on a good working PVM and we're going to do some testing and then we're going to do the servicing. So we will need tools quickly. Then we'll need a screwdriver, utility knife. We'll need the replacement capacitors as well as a good desoldering tool. I'll be using the HACCO FR-301 quality soldering iron and then solder and flux alcohol for cleaning and RTV silicone adhesive at the end for reattaching our neckboard to our tube. So as I showed you on the test screens behind me, this one does not have any issues with color, but I've already been working on servicing it prior to this with the power supply. So we're going to go in now and just while we have it apart, service the neckboard while we're at it in our process of servicing the entire CRT. So first we need to take our shell off if you're just doing this by itself. That just means taking off the three screws on each side and then the four screws on the back and then slipping the rest of that cube off the PVM, slipping it back. Make sure that none of those cables get hung up. And here is the back of our wonderful Sony PVM CRT. However, if you're doing this on a different type of monitor that you can open up easily, it will look similar to this. And here is our neckboard. It's attached to the back of our CRT tube right there. And you can see that there are some spots that look they've been a lot of heat has built up over the years or heat will get in and out. This is a board that gets a lot of current run through it. And most of them are similarly designed. You may have a BVM that has, or even an Ikigami monitor that has a neckboard that has more of these components broken out onto other printed circuit boards. But this one is all on a one board and 95% of your monitors are gonna have a neckboard like this. Now to remove the neckboard, we're gonna first need to disconnect some of these connectors. And then after we get those disconnected, the first two are pretty easy. At the bottom, there is a ground connection. Now this could vary depending on what kind of monitor you're working on. And even sometimes the Sony PVM series neckboards can vary a little bit. I'm taking my utility knife now and I'm cutting the prior epoxy, which was applied around the connector between that little green spacer right here. So there's a little green spacer and then there's the glass from the tube and the pins and they go into this plastic connector right here into the back of the neckboard. And I'm taking my knife and gently going in there and cutting through that silicone that's already there. And then just wiggle and pull it out and you'll be fine. You'll wanna clean off the remainder of the silicone buildup on the back of the tube. And that way you just won't have a huge clop of that stuff when you go back and reapply your new silicone RTV because you'll need a good place to put it. And you could put it right back in the same spot it was as it was there, but just make sure you get it out of the way so you can get in here in service. And as well as not just services, we're gonna make sure we do a nice job of cleaning it. So now I've gotten it off the actual board itself. We'll take a closer look at the board. You can always reference the parts for your specific model with your service manual. This C board only has two capacitors in it. So we'll change those capacitors. And I'm also gonna reflow the solder on the larger resistors and the ICs that are on this board today. And that will be again, to make sure that we don't have any cold solder joints develop over time. So again, we're gonna use the HECO FR-301. This is my favorite desoldering tool. I'll be set it today to just over two. You could probably get away with setting it on to exactly because again, these older printed circuit boards, the older they are in age, then the more susceptible they are to heat generally. This Sony board is gonna be a nice board so it should be able to withstand some heat. But you don't wanna set your iron too hot and then burn your traces and your little spots, your vias to go in and install your new capacitors. So again, just two capacitors in this one and just reference your service manual for the ones that are needed in yours. There's a closer look at this circuit board again with the capacitors gone. And you'll notice those ICs. Now those ICs, each controls an individual color and they are labeled with a part number and they'll go into the socket here in this C board or this neck board. And so if you have a color that has gone out, one of these components, these major components on this board could have failed or there could be a cold solder joint sometimes because these generate a lot of heat around all these components. You have four major resistors on this board which you can see are very high, elevated off the board. And so those will be getting really hot and then you've got the heat sinks, the follow up again with one with each color. And so again, if those fail, which you can pull them out of series and test them if you're missing a color, it might not be that your tube's bad, it might be that you have bad components on your neck board or even just a simple cold solder joint. Here's a look at the capacitor. Well, excuse me, B replacing. These are Nishikon Nu. They are 105 degrees Celsius rated. You wanna make sure that if you can, find 105 degrees Celsius rated and then you can even get in there and try to find extremely high life capacitor, sometimes up to 10,000 hours or more at 105 degrees Celsius, which is a very long time and should pretty much outlast the life of the tube in most conditions and scenarios. So just going in quickly here and using my soldering iron, a HACCO again, and I'm gonna have that set at 740 degrees on there. And as I go, I do like to use these alcohol pads and an old toothbrush and just clean off the majority of the flux because I do use a lot of flux. Now, you'll can see the way I solder is I generally tack those legs into place. I come back, I trim the legs and then I reflow the solder and then I ultimately clean off any flux residue with alcohol pads. So you can do this the way I'm doing it or really any way that you personally feel comfortable with soldering as long as you're getting a good, you know, flow of solder and everything's going all right and you have your own methods. You can definitely do this your own way. Now, as I said earlier, we're gonna go and before we test this board out, even though we've just replaced the two capacitors, I'll go in now and reflow the solder on the ICs as well as those resistors. And I'm just gonna use some flux and I've got my flux over here in my toolbox. I thought I'd just show you what I personally use. This is Alpha brand rosin paste flux and you can really use anything similar to this. It is like a plant-based rosin, so I use that. And then this isn't the exact size I normally use. This is actually larger diameter but I like to use the Alpha Fry rosin core solder. Just has always worked really well for me and I've never had any troubles with that solder. I have bought cheap solder before from just like an electrical hardware store and it was just terrible and wouldn't melt. So I immediately threw it away and never really used it. So if you're gonna spend some money on your stuff, get a decent iron, but definitely make sure you invest a little bit in flux and good rosin cord solder. So just going in right now and flowing the solder and flux on to those components we discussed. This is the third set and so just go through there and do that. And this will help extend the life of your monitor in the way that even without any trouble, this is just extending or re-solidifying those individual solder joints there so that you do have a solid connection. And if anything fails in the future, you can know that you've done this service already so you're pretty well set to say that your issue might not be coming from this board. If you have an issue in the future with color or something that you may feel like in the past have been dealt with on a board like this, you can easily eliminate that by doing this kind of maintenance when you're doing your maintenance on the whole monitor itself. Now, I'm gonna tell you, always go back and check your work. I did have some pieces of plastic, kind of brittle plastic on some of the little knobs on there that were for the potentiometers that controlled the screen. Now you can get to the back of it on this one with a screwdriver still. So I wasn't concerned that it broke off on the inside. It's harder to adjust from that potentiometer that way anyway. But just so you know that can happen, it won't affect the performance of the monitor at all. And what I'm actually doing here is in fast motion, I'm putting my multimeter to continuity and I'm checking the continuity with different points on the board that I would have soldered and making sure that there's continuity flowing throughout every solder joint that I touched on the board to make sure that I don't have any issues when I put it back together. So we'll go through now and I'll show you how to just set this right back on here. Before you connect it, you're gonna wanna make sure that you connect your cable starting from the bottom end first so that ground cable is easy to connect at the bottom. And then at the top you've got the multicolored cable. There is usually a little piece over here that is bendable that can hold the cable in place. And then you can slide your board up there and gently press it against the CRT. We'll show you that again from the other side. Just apply a gentle amount of pressure in the center as to not bend any of the, or damage any of the pins on the CRT itself because that can ruin the whole project if you push too hard or you bend and break one of those pins that will cause a lot of trouble. So right in here above where you'll see I didn't actually have the RTV here ready yet silicone. So that right there is where you'd reapply that silicone on top of that glass and in between there like it was when we originally took it apart. And again, that is called RTV, just the letter R, letter T, letter V, silicone adhesive and it will show you the high temperature RTV. There's plenty of brands of it. And so that servicing worked well. Again, you'll just wanna consider doing this if you have color issues or if you're already servicing your CRT. It's a good idea to change the capacitors. It could be very from two to sometimes I've seen up to 10 or so on that little PCB. But it's a good idea to change those capacitors as well as reflow the solder on those pivotal and vital components on that neckboard. Check your work. And you know, you've gone back and serviced it. So again, just like when you're doing the service or if you have a problem where you're missing a color and you think it might not be the tube. So as they do is just buckle it back up, put it back together. Now I did this in fast motion but I think this took me about three minutes to get this to slide on here perfectly. It can be a little bit frustrating. Just make sure that you take your time when sliding it back together like that because you could get hung up on some of the cables on the side from the inside of the PVM on the shell and pull something loose or you could be bending some metal in there. And you know, you wanna make sure that all the screws line up perfectly. And it's just putting back the six screws on the sides and then the four screws on the back. And that's all there is to it for reassembling the CRT and then it's ready to be used. And so this one again was a 14M2U. If you wanna see more, there's already a video about the power supply unit. Now I have serviced many of these before and I really love this monitor because I feel like it's a great entry level monitor but there are also still a large amount of them available. So even if you're not looking for a monitor, sometimes you can find one of these and they will have problems with them because sometimes they were used a lot. So I just wanted to document a way to go through and service each one of the boards. So the next board we'll be going to will be the main chassis. There will be also a follow up right up to this available on Patreon for any Patreons who are supporting the channel that way. Thank you very much. And again, thank you guys for watching today and I'll see you next time with some more monitors and some more retro content.