 Welcome to Retro Tech. Today I want to take a special look at a Sony PVM. This specific Sony PVM is a 1954 Q. It was manufactured in 1996 and this was personally my very first Sony PVM. I bought this in 2015 right before the market pretty much took off and I think I got it for about $200 with shipping. This one came from a government auction and I'd like to go through just some of the details on the monitor. I'd like to show you why you might want to consider having a 1954 Q in your collection of Sony PVMs. Let's take a closer look at the monitor. This particular PVM was made in 1996 and only had the one owner which was the US government. I want to go through this one specifically. First off let's look at what makes this so special to me. Please look over here on the right hand side and you'll notice this property of US government. Now this is a metal inventory tag and as I said I got this as overstock or basically old stock of equipment from a government auction site and it was a piece that was used as a playback monitor for NASA which is pretty cool. It's got some tagging still on it from that. It's got that nameplate and it's also got this sticker on top. Let you see that from the John Glenn Image Technology Center, John Glenn Research Center for NASA. So basically I bought this PVM. I didn't know anything about PVMs. This is my first one. I got it and then I started picking up more after I learned about it and I pretty much put this one in the back and I haven't cleaned it. So today I really want to just go through the monitor a little bit. I want to show you how I'm going to clean it. Taking a quick look at the back of the monitor here you can see it's pretty standard. It's got two lines for composite in, one line for S-video in and then you'll notice down here. Unfortunately this model only has one line in for RGB or component. So you can switch it between them but it does only have one line so it's not like the medical units that have two which I highlighted previously. The operations menu on this monitor is identical to that of the last PVM that we focused on on our calibration menu settings. So please check that video out if you want to know how to calibrate one of these but let's just look a little bit here at this sticker and back and you can see it's still quite dirty so today we'll be taking it apart. I'll let you see how I do that and how I clean it all up. The first thing I like to do is open up the shell after I've tested it to see what the condition is like on the inside of the PVM. A lot of times dust will build up heavily inside your PVM over the years as well as since there's these nice holes there's a lot of room inside there and that can attract insects and basically they will come and inhabit your PVM on the warmer components as they're running and it can make a real mess inside if you don't take care of that so it's always a great idea after you make sure your monitor is working to get inside and see what's going on. Now I'm going to show you how to open that up. To open this monitor it's just going to be these three screws on each side and then our four screws in the back. Remember we're just taking these four screws up for this one. Slowly take the shell off. Now the screws are all gone let's go ahead and remove the shell. I like to grab it by the handles and just pull back a little bit and it slides right off. Now we've got the back of our monitor open. We've got nothing plugged in no signals running to it because we know it works we're just concentrating on cleaning it out. Let's take a close look and zoom in on some of these areas. I want you to notice how much dust is built up in this monitor. So if you look over here the area is like the flyback and especially on the electron gun there's dust built up there. We got dust on the tube this is pretty standard amount of dust and I even see some cobwebs. It looks like a spider might have tried to move in here once. A lot of just dust especially down there on the board you can kind of see just how dusty everything is. There you go. It's a good shot of the bottom board there. What I really want to emphasize is the reason we want to get rid of. The reason it's so important to get rid of dust is dust can act like an insulator and that is what can really damage a lot of our components inside of our CRT monitors. Buildup of heat will cause our capacitors to fail as well as other parts and again that dust should just come out and I want to show you how I get rid of the dust. I have found there are two great things to really get rid of dust in your monitor. The first is this a very high quality non-conductive paint brush. This one's very clean I know it looks like it has some paint on there but that was from a long time ago it's been very clean and I just like to brush over most of the PVM starting from the top down that way I can free up a lot of that dust and then I'll go back after that and hit it up with some good old-fashioned compressed air. So let's just go ahead and I'll let you watch me do this. I'll let you watch me clean this PVM and get a lot of this dust out. One quick thing to mention while I'm in here cleaning this is a great opportunity if the first time to open your monitor to check and see what kind of condition a lot of your components are in. If you can see here just this takes a good chance to look over some of these areas to make sure that nothing looks like it's failing everything looks like it's still in very good shape. You really want to inspect a monitor just visually before you even start working on it and this one again a lot of the components are in great shape it's just dirty. It's got to be very gentle again you're not trying to be aggressive with this you're just trying to knock that dust down and then we're going to blow it out later. Also remember to gently wipe down your cables. The cables build up a lot of dust and you can just get rid of that and you only want to really do this every once in a while so just go ahead and make sure that you just knock off as much of that nasty dust as possible up everything. Alright there you go maybe you can see that's already getting a little bit better. You got some dust flying around in the air you can see on the lens so I'm just going to blow a lot of this out now. Just in case you don't use this stuff very much just do slow sporadic bursts. Slow bursts most of the time you don't want to shoot out a lot of that cold onto your board and your other components but if you just give it some quick bursts it does great. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to come over here and I'm just going to rub I'm going to take this nice this is a lens cleaner and I'm going to very gently just rub the remaining thick dust off of this electron gun here and there you go. Now sometimes if you haven't turned a monitor on for a really long time and it comes on you can hear some crackle and hear some and smell something that smells like some burning. A lot of that times that can be this dust build up getting on some of your components and then your monitor turns on and gets hot and the stuff that's been sitting there for a long time starts to pop and burn and smells nasty so that doesn't necessarily if that happens it doesn't mean you have a problem with your PVM it just could be extremely dirty. I again always recommend cleaning these to try to prevent damage to a lot of the components on the inside. If you want to take a quick zoom in here look at some of the components this one's just pretty much got the main board there similar to an arcade monitor or any kind of CRT TV more of like a chasis board there that has the fly back and then we've got our CRT and our Yoke set up with our electron gun and our net board our power board is over here where all the powers comes from. This is a very easy PVM to maintain and work on compared to many other models as you can see there's a lot of space in there and it's very easy to take apart and put back together but we don't need to do much more with the inside of this one. Another tip if there's something that you really want to get gunk off of and you can't you can always use an old toothbrush those are really good ideas and rubbing alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is a safe solution this one pretty much just needed dusting and the wipe down electron gun and that's pretty much it for the internal cleaning that I'm going to do. Just a quick shot here of the net board attached to the electron gun you can see there's some silicone on there which has come undone that's not really a big deal you can reapply that but I just want you to see how clean that got it. It looks like a polished new piece of glass. Thanks again for taking a special look at this monitor today in the second part of the episode I will show you how to clean the shell effectively that we've taken off as well as give it those stickers and make it look really nice and clean and shiny and basically as new as possible but that's pretty much all you really need to do for the inside if you notice that you have a big problem or if you any kind of problem with a component this is a good time to research and try to figure out either how to fix it or maybe try to talk to somebody who does know how to fix it and try to get some help. Again look for the episode coming up very soon about cleaning the outside of the monitor. Thanks again for watching Retro Tech. Have a great day!