 Yeah, so it can be hard to tell when to officially give up on a project, especially something like maybe a CRT or something you had an idea to restore or fix. So today I wanted to talk a little bit more about a question I was posed from one of my Patreon members, Benjamin, and I'm going to go through his questionnaire in a minute. I'm going to talk a little bit about some specifics for him, but I also want to talk about this topic of when is it smart to finally say no and maybe move on to a different repair. So first with Benjamin's situation, he has a Toshiba 14 AF-46 that was made in September of 2006. He bought it new and gave it a couple years of heavy use, and most of the time it's been in storage till now. The picture isn't quite as nice as I remember, but I don't know if my memories are through rose-colored glasses, which they generally are. I've always used components since I've had it. Is there any chance it could be needing recapping? I've tried my best to play with the settings and the service manual, and there's internal potentiometers and yoke rings, and he says everything looks the best into factory positions, but it's not very good. So he asked, again, also saying there's extreme blooming and distortion in areas of bright white. Do you think there's any hope of improving or it's just best the TV is designed to look or is it time to give up on the TV? So that's what I want to talk about more. Sure, there is a little bit of a design difference between this shadow mask and any kind of flat-screen TV that you might use, or even a Trinitron, because it has that completely different curvature on the surface of the glass. So that does lead to some convergence issues in the corners, but I just want to jump in here and talk about the other problem where you say you've got a CRT that is older and it's a consumer CRT and it has a problem with it. Do you actually take the time to try and fix some of these problems or is it better to just maybe push ahead and try to get a different CRT and do maybe a future proof or protective, you know, preventative maintenance, and I want to talk a little bit about my approach to how I keep and store old CRTs, specifically both consumer and monitors. So first thing, I've got stacks of just PVMs that are especially small ones like this that have mostly the same problems within them, and a couple of them work fine, but most of them need some type of small repair. And since they're PVM and really high-end, even these just composite ones, I'm not going to throw them away. I'll probably keep them and try to eventually fix all that I can or use them for parts. And so those are something that if it's a higher-end monitor, like a rarer broadcast or pro-video monitor or medical grade monitor or even, you know, a rarer computer PC monitor, you could still consider saving it, even if it doesn't work right as maybe for parts and you might come across one of these. See, I've even got large 20 inches, 20 inch PVMs in my shop that have very bad issues and have basically wrecked boards, and I need to get brand new boards for them where they've been damaged pretty severely in some way. So even those are in long-term storage for me, and this is a nightmare here looking at it, but these are boxes of just parts that I save, broken boards, unrepaired items, and also a lot of housing and other parts for the PVMs. I try to save as much as possible, and and here we have a, you know, power supply just sitting in a frame of just a 14 inch monitor, but I tend to keep all that, including tubes that are still good and do my best to save it. Now this is another one that was damaged in the monitor does work, but the bezel was destroyed, so it has no bezel, and this is the only way to keep it safe and in one piece without completely tearing it apart, so it'll sit here until I can come up with a solution for a bezel on this one. So again, these high-end monitors I'm always keeping, but there's something that everybody should be aware of when they look at a high-end monitor and when you're considering parts. First off, you need to look at the tube itself, because if the tube is in certain conditions, you'll probably not really want to mess with it too much. Now I often get asked what I do about my monitors. Well again, I told Shoji I keep most of them for parts, but for example, this Ikigami monitor right here has a worn-out tube. You see this, this is considered screen burn. There is absolutely no way to get rid of that effect down there where it's literally burned into the front of the phosphors on the CRT itself. It has those images burnt in there, so I tend to keep the rest of the monitors for parts, but if I do get tubes that are burned, I do not keep them, I just try to get rid of them. But I want to move to ones that I don't consider repairing sometimes. I've gone back and forth on this one. This is a sharp Linnitron, and it's from the 80s, has some cool knobs and a cool look to it. It's very small though, and it really has no great function outside of just the fact that it looks cool, and with it, it has intermittent power problems. So it sometimes will turn on, and other times it won't turn on at all, and there seems to be a short in it somewhere, so it could be as simple as needing a resolder flow, reflow of the solder, or it could be parts going bad like capacitors that don't want to turn on. But since this TV only does analog RF and doesn't even have AV inputs, it's not really worth the whole job of tearing it apart and fixing it, at least at this point when there's other jobs to be done, but I do still keep it because this one might particular maybe one day it will be worth fixing, but if it has like a burn in screen, or if there's real serious issues with a consumer CRT, unless you're extremely experienced in this kind of repair, I generally say it's better not to try to start by just repairing something that has an issue. I actually recommend kind of what I'm doing here on the current videos that I'm working on, on this JVC D-Series CRT, and that's going in and getting a CRT that's already working and try to use it instead of one that needs repair. You can take the working CRT and actually take it apart and do what I'm doing where you're going to replace all the capacitors and do a clean out and then do a calibration check and a yoke adjustment if it's needed, and actually doing that you'll be better off than if you're trying to fix something and you just want to take a CRT apart and if you want to do that, that's not an issue at all. I guess I'm not trying to say that discourage you from trying to repair something. I'm just saying if you're trying to go into the steps of doing something with a CRT, I always recommend starting with something that currently works. Again, doing this to a consumer CRT is a very good idea. One of the good Trinitrons would be a good example of one to do this to like I have in the past. Really any decent working CRT that you may have that you can use for analog video. This is a perfect example again, this JVC D-Series. I'm still working on this thing as we speak and I've got most of the boards recapped. We'll have full details on that in the next coming video, but I just wanted to talk about that a little bit more about when it's kind of time to give up on those projects. I think that if you're again trying to learn, it's always a great experience to work on the machines even if you just want to keep something around. But when you start getting the larger scale amount of CRTs and what I look forward to work on, when I go for a CRT that's a consumer grade CRT, I'm going to go out there and try to find one that is very desirable more like this JVC or even a Sony Trinitron that consumer grade CRT and then rebuild it but make sure it starts from a pretty decent starting point whereas you've got a nice bright screen, all the colors work and it doesn't have too terrible linearity or anything like that. You want to make sure the tube is solid and the flyback works. So that could actually be done with a power test and just watching it turn on and power up for a couple of minutes. But I think that starting with something that works and then maybe graduating after that to the full-on CRT repair if there's something that's really important. But if it's not that important and you're wondering if you should actually invest a lot of money and time into repairing it and restoring it even before you get it completely fixed it's generally not the best idea. It's always better to go out and just get a fresh CRT that you can get and then restore that one and that way you could go through and do all that calibration and you know that monitor or CRT will be good for the next 20 years if you do your restoration correctly. But thanks again for the question. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.