 Today I'm starting in the offloading area of my shop and the reason is we're working on really big monitors today. So let me turn around and show you what we've got. And it's kind of a mess in here. I've got some boards and they're all from the same model monitor. That's the big cube, the Sony PVM 2530. We've got two down here on the floor, one here on this bench. I'm trying to stumble my way around and get to the one we're actually working on, which is this 2530 right here. And let me tell you a little bit about the issues on it. First off I did take the shell, the outside shell off, and that is done by removing a bunch of Phillips screws. The thing to remember here is there's a lot of them. There's two in each corner so you have a total of eight there and then two more, one at this plate and then one down here at the input board. So you need to remove all those screws and pull back on the case and it'll come right off. But the issue on this one is we have random power loss. You turn this on, let it run for a while and it'll just shut off. And then you can kind of wiggle the power button, get it to turn back on, maybe tap the side of it and it'll come back on. But let me show you more on the problem with a demo and hopefully we can figure out what is exactly causing the issue on this big beautiful 2530. I've been letting it run for about an hour and it keeps doing it and then I'll kind of think I've got it figured out, but I really think I've got it figured out now. So what I started doing was wiggling the red cable down here in this little junction box and you hear it? It just went out. If I wiggle that, see how it's gone out? Nothing on the screen. But then if I wiggle it, say if I wiggle it like that, power comes back onto the screen. So what I did was, again, I just kept doing that and I tried to wiggle every one of these cables and the red one seemed to be the only one that was doing it. And what the red one connects to is it connects up here to this place where you see all these voltage voltage points coming in. I hope you can see like right down there on the 40 volt AC. So look, we've got a clear point where the solder is just ready to almost break free. You see how it's got a ring around that point there and even some of the other ones like that top one too also looks pretty dodgy. So my anticipation is that's what's going on. That's the other side and the connection to that cable right here that, again, if I wiggle it most definitely will wiggle that point. So when I'm holding it down, for instance, I'm holding it down with my fingers, kind of pulling it towards me. And I think it's causing those points to ground out or touch down and make continuity and then you've got screen control. So what we're going to do is I'm going to go in and get my soldering iron and a reflow solder on that and then we'll let it run for a while and see if it has any more issues because, again, that's definitely a point where we've got some major voltage going through the monitor right there. We've got a soldering iron heated up right out here next to the monitor. We're going to go ahead and just reflow solder on all six of these points starting from the top going down and I'm sorry I wish I could get it closer for you but that's probably the best I'll be able to do today. We'll just go through and make sure we get good solder on all of these points. What happens is just over time, especially since this one's from 1987, these some of these points will break down especially some that are in high heat areas and one with a cable like this. I mean it could just the solder itself can just break down. It's another part of all this lovely maintenance you got to do on these old pieces of technology and hardware and there's a good chance that there's more of these points on here where the solder is broken down possibly. I mean the hope for it to be it was should be just this one point but there's so many different solder points that you could be finding one and then there's one right next to it or down the road a little bit that also has a break. So that's our reflow solder right in there and those points. Let's just replug the monitor up see if it works and see if we can wiggle that point. Our other option might be that the connector down here behind this needs to be re-soldered. Let's start by just trying to turn this power back on and see what happens. Powering on sounds normal make sure we got our picture controls yes yes all our controls are coming up. Let's get a video signal going in. We have the Super Nintendo screen so that's all good and that's normally what I would expect. Let's take it up a notch and wiggle this cable and see if once again we lose power. That's the same cable I was wiggling just to make sure I'm going to wiggle them all that are around there and there are no more interruptions. Remember how was just if I did that it would just click click click click click click click and I would lose my power and the monitor would just shut off. Let's not do anything like that now and I really do think that was the problem here. Now what I'm going to have to do is just let this run for a while and just try to come back and I'll wiggle these again after it gets hot but I think I'm pretty confident we've repaired that part of it. Well it's been a couple hours and the monitor's been out here running. The power has remained constant and on and steady and the game has stayed. There's no hiccups in the picture really it could use some adjustment. Again this is the spot right in there with the cold solder joints and thankfully we were able to diagnose that and get that done because there are so many points inside this monitor and you never know what it takes. Sometimes just a little wiggle just a little wiggle of the old wire and that'll tell you whether you're having some issues or not. I know it sounds a little archaic and old school and it probably is but that's what worked on this one and thankfully we have a nice pretty 2530 that can go back to its owner. Well that was an easy fix and thankfully after testing it seems to be working well again. Even though the repair is easy to do more time is spent trying to figure out what actually is wrong with the monitor than just repairing it. That's a simple fix it just takes a couple minutes but what I didn't show you was the couple of hours of me looking through all the boards, inspecting stuff, running my meter along points to try to find where voltage was stopping because when you have random power loss like that you kind of have to leave the monitor running and watch it turn itself off and then try to figure out what happened and it's kind of a mess and troubleshooting can take a lot longer sometimes than repairs especially on something like this but that's going to do it for today's episode. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.