 Hello everybody, welcome back to Retro Tech. And today I have a brand new video for you and we're gonna be going through and future-proofing the monitor you see on the screen behind me. That is a Sony PVM1353MD. This particular monitor was part of my larger haul that I had picked up a couple of weeks ago. It was the one that was attached to the endoscope or the scope cart. If some of you saw that when you came to my show live or if you saw any of the presentation that I did on CRTs, this was in that presentation as a setup, as a prop. So let's just take a quick look now at the monitor in its original condition. Now I have not gone through and done much adjustment to it at this point. This is right when I got it and what it looks like. There is a little bit of a convergence issue on the screen and you can tell that the geometry is not really perfect. And also there's a pretty good yoke tilt going on. But before I really get into going through and calibrating everything on this monitor, I wanna go through and check the capacitors and change out the geometry capacitors on the main geometry board or the main A board of the monitor. And I also wanna change the capacitors on that power supply unit because these capacitors are well over 20 years old. Here's a look at the model here. This is again a 1353 MD from September of 1997. So again, 22 years old here. Definitely time for it to get a nice capacitor refreshing. So this monitor, it does do RGB as well as component. And then you've got composite and S video inputs. So the one that, what really makes these medical monitors most desirable is the fact that they have two switchable input lines for that component and RGB, which are those top and bottom ones there. One on the top actually has an out so you can run your signal out to another monitor or something else. Now we're gonna go ahead and start disassembling this monitor and what we wanna do is first we wanna take off this outer shell and I've marked with some arrows here. There's three screws on this side of the monitor and then there's three screws on the other side of the monitor. And make sure you take all six of those screws out and put them in a nice safe place. And then you go around to the back and you wanna remove four screws back here and they are marked again with some arrows. There's one right here in case you can't see the arrow because of my picture. But there are some rivets back here. There's six of them but do not pull these rivets just to get into the back and service this. The rivets are quite difficult to get out and really should only be taken apart if you need to clean your shell thoroughly or paint it or something. So once you get those six screws out of the side and four out of the back just pull the shell back. Now you have to watch because on this particular unit and some of the medical units there is a ground cable that is attached up here to this other cluster of ground cables. So just make sure you release that before you just try to rip that shell off or it won't come off cleanly. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get out the power supply, okay? And the power supply has two screws that hold it in place here. Again I've marked with arrows. Remove those screws and just lift up that power supply. It comes right off that shielding. And I'm gonna show you pictures now of all the connection points that you need to remove. There's quite a few of them on here but just go through and remove all these connections, these Molex connectors. And there's one cable that you can't get to. So just go ahead and go to the back of the input board and disconnect it. If you follow it around it comes back over to the input board. It's easier to disconnect it from the back of there and just leave it attached to the PSU. So now that you have most of those cables out of the way you can just take the big cluster of cables and pull them off the black plastic and you can remove that entire power supply and get it out of the way so we can go ahead and start working on that now. First off there's a screw on the top that we need to remove. And then there's this little rivet holder and you just have to be a little bit forceful. This is not on all models of PVMs. They pretty much went straight to screws after this but sometimes you will notice these little rivets. So take those off and then you can peel back that shielding. So it's just a shielding plate that's stuck inside the plastic frame on this power supply. So once you get that out then you can flip it over and you can actually drop that board out of the black plastic. You see these little tabs here? They're just push tabs and if you have the board upside down you push up, I think there's four or five of them push all those tabs and release the board and then you just slide it right out and it comes out easy. This is a very thick and heavier duty board that we're gonna be working on but we are gonna be replacing pretty much every capacitor on here. Now I don't always replace the very big capacitor if there's not a problem with the power supply to begin with because that's kind of a more difficult cap to replace. It's a snap in cap but every other cap on it is pretty much a piece of cake with a nice desoldering station to get the caps out. So just like that I pretty much heat up the spot and activate my desoldering tool and quickly and easily get those caps out of there. Just wanna make sure that I can't reiterate enough just take your time if you're gonna end up doing this kind of a cap job. It's not particularly hard but you don't wanna make any mistakes and accidentally like burn a trace or cause any damage to the board. So really just being precise and concentrating on what you're doing is really the best advice I could give anybody because it's just, it's a little bit tedious but it's not particularly hard work. You just wanna make sure that you check everything away you don't burn any again traces or destroy any of those pads. So now we've got our new cap kit down here. We're gonna go ahead and start inserting these new caps and then re-soldering them into place but it's pretty easy to work on this first board which is again the power supply board because you'll notice there's no other components on the backside of this board. It's all just one sided for this board which is not the case for the next board we work on but there we have it the finished soldered spot and we'll just go through now and insert some more of these caps and then solder them into place. Now I do use flux on my solder points and I would recommend you do that too. It just helps your solder flow a little bit more evenly and solder really reacts well with flux. So I definitely would recommend you use that even on just a small recap like this. Now again, we're gonna wanna change these caps in this power supply specifically because these are tend to be under a lot of stress and a lot of heat. This is one of the hottest areas on the PVM is gonna be around the transformers on this power supply. You said big yellow thing there is a transformer so it can get really hot but there we have the board. It's got all the new caps replaced in it and then the last thing I'm gonna do before I put it all back together is actually clean the board. Now the top side is pretty well clean but if you look on the bottom side you could see the little brown and yellowish areas. That's my flux leftover. So I will just take a solid cloth. It's cotton but it doesn't leave behind traces and or any little fibers is what I mean any little cotton fibers. So just put some alcohol on it and make sure you clean off those contacts really well. I go behind it too with the Q-tips sometimes to just make sure it's all cleaned up and that's pretty much it for the power supply. You can actually go back now and reinsert it into its plastic housing, reconnect that one little red cable. Do you see that red cable right there? That's the one that was in the back of the video board that we had to unplug earlier. So put all that back together and now we'll put the shielding plate back on top and reinsert the screw and the rivet to basically get the thing completely finished and then we'll set it aside and get to work on the rest of the monitor. Because as I said, this is not just a single board future proof we're doing. We want to make sure the power supply is good but we also want to check the geometry capacitors. And in this geometry kit coming up there's also some very important things about the caps that's actually been changed from Sony. So I'll mention that when we get to work here but the next step I'm gonna take a flathead screwdriver and there's a ground plate in the back of this video board and take all the screws out and remove those ground cables so that they'll won't be in your way. And then just go and disconnect the four cables that are connected to your neck board and then evenly pull pressure back towards yourself and get that neck board off there. Just watch the pins on the CRT tube itself because if you break one of those pins off you're gonna have a shot tube but they're pretty tough and they can bend a little bit so if it does bend a little bit, don't worry, just bend it back straight and you'll be okay. So the next thing I wanna do is get the video board out and that's got a couple of plastic tabs down towards the side, two of them, one on each side. Make sure you try to get those tabs out of the way because this plastic is so old that it will easily break and then you won't have those tabs holding the video board in, which is not a huge deal but still just if you take a little time you can make sure you're not gonna break that plastic. That plastic is right over here under my hand right now where I'm circling with my cursor. So the next thing to do is just unplug the cables that are connected to the video board and you're gonna wanna try to take as many cables off the main A board as possible and leave them attached to the other boards because we're really not gonna be doing any work on this video board. I never have any troubles with these. I've not recapped any of the caps in them. They're pretty solid but that video input board right there could just be taken out and removed out of the way because we're not really doing any work with that one specifically. So now let's get in and we're gonna go ahead and discharge the PVM. Now there are a couple ways to discharge a PVM. You could go by Sony's way of just taking the suction cup and an anode cap off and then not even using a tool like I have here to discharge but today we're gonna be safe and just get in there and discharge it with the homemade discharge tool and then we'll remove the anode cap and what I did right there is I took it and I tapped it against the metal frame just as kind of a double check on that grounding and then I'll take my grounding tool back and tap the back of the tube where the anode ring is and that's a place that you wanna kind of avoid even after discharging it because electricity can sometimes rarely build back up and that's where it's kept. If you come back and touch that area you might have a live spot and get a little bit of electrical shock. Okay so here's a close up look at the anode cap and you can just see the two prongs that are in there that you pinch together to get. It installed back in the hole here but that's just a really short cylinder. There's, it's not like a deep hole into the back of the tube. It's really shallow and that's where the anode cap goes in. So now the last thing to do is pull this board, this A board has another black piece of plastic at the bottom of it. Don't try to rip that plastic, slowly pull it out as I'm doing here and as you pull it out you're gonna need to disconnect more of these cables. There's a lot of cables towards the front, probably about eight or nine connections all in all that you need to disconnect so you can just safely slide as I did right there, slide that A-frame out or the A-board out and then you get to work on it. The first thing you wanna do when you get the A-board out is remove the screws that are holding it to that black piece of plastic. There are four screws here. The three are pretty obvious in the middle of the board but then there's one actually on the flyback right here that this arrow up top is pointing to. That's the only one that you should, you might not see the first time that you make sure you wanna get that out. And then once you've got those four screws out, turn the board back around and there is this little piece of shielding around the flyback that sometimes is inserted into the black plastic so pull it out and then just like the power supply there are two black tabs, one on each side that hold the A-board in and you gotta kinda wiggle it a little bit but you slightly pull it towards you and then lift it up and it'll come off that black plastic tray and now you're ready to get to work on the A-board. Now, firstly you'll see is a ton of capacitors and I'm not changing all of these because a vast majority of these do not control screen controls. They control all kinds of other functions in the monitor. So I'm gonna go through now and mark off specifically the capacitors for this capacitor kit that are in the highest heat area and definitely affects screen controls and geometry controls and that's all these 10 in this cluster and what you'll notice here is a lot of these are next to these hot heat sinks and these caps in this area, there's two or three of them in the cap kit that had to be upgraded and those were upgrade recommendations specifically for Sony and that's what will cause that red, green and blue line to show up in your screen is these caps get too hot and they fail really quickly. So it's really good idea to get in here and get those upgraded caps into this monitor. So there's 10 in this section and then if we zoom out, there's a couple more over in this section up here by this chip but I've gone now and I've made, I've put red marks on all the caps for this cap kit. Now this cap kit does vary depending on which model monitor you have. So, and also the values are different than the original values on the capacitors here but that's pretty much the caps that we're gonna be changing just today for the geometry cap kit and that way we're not gonna change a bunch of caps so we don't really need to change and even if they are, you know, we'll go through, I did go through and inspect the rest of these caps just to make sure none of them were leaking or appeared to be failing already. So there we have all the caps removed. I went ahead and did it without showing everybody and I'll go ahead now and clean that, those contacts and then here's the caps reinserted. So we've gone ahead now and inserted all the caps, they're new and they're in their new spots here. I'm just gonna go now and after I do that, I always double check my work and make sure that all the caps are pointing the right direction and that every cap that was supposed to be in its right spot is in its right spot. And then lastly, I can go behind it again and start to clean up where again, flux builds up. You can see all this goopy, snotty looking yellow stuff. That's my flux. So again, I need to clean it off with some alcohol like I did before. And I just want you to see the back of that board. You see how many more parts there are in that board? You really have to take your time and be extra careful when you're working on this board because again, there's components on both sides, very small components. So it's gotta be extra precise and again, just take as much time as you can because you only get one shot at doing this the right way and you don't want to damage or it get a hot tip of your iron or your desoldering tool on one of these other components. So next thing I'm gonna do is after I've cleaned off that bottom, I've put it back in the black tray and now I'm just reinserting the screws and you'll notice the rest of this board is still a little dirty. So now I'm gonna go in with a brush that's a non-conductive bristle brush and just thoroughly brush off all the dust on these components. I mean, I gotta get in there and get the dust out of everything that I can off the chips, off the capacitors because that stuff dust sits in there and acts as an insulator and then it will cause heat to build up even more in something that's already getting well hot enough and it can actually make those older components fail quicker if I have more heat than it needs and it can't actually dissipate any of that heat or get rid of it in any way. So cleaning is gonna do, is going to help prevent more damage from occurring on the monitor as I use it. So the last thing I need to do now is just reassemble this entire monitor and that means sliding this A board back into place, reconnecting all the cables and then of course reconnecting our anode cap here and I'm just gonna slip that. You know, there's two prongs we showed you earlier. You just pinch those together and then when you pinch them, you slip it in that hole and then just push it down, make sure it's nice and air tight. Now sometimes you need to add some extra dielectric grease in there if it's really dry or if you hear any crackles but otherwise most of the time there's still enough if you think it's just a little bit in there. If the anode cap is good like it is on these Sony PVMs, then you'll probably be fine with just a little bit of that grease. The next thing is to install the video board again or the video input board and we're just gonna go through and reconnect all these connections, re-screw in a lot of the ground cables and things like that. Now there are a lot of these connectors, these plastic connectors on this monitor and just so you know, they're pretty much individual custom meaning that each one of them only fits in a specific spot. They have, each one will have one or one more or one less pin on the line than the others or it'll be built differently so you can't, it's really hard to put them in the wrong space. The best thing to do is just, or you just gotta make sure that you have everything connected. So the last thing to do is go back and put the power supply back on and then with the power supply in place, we'll screw it in and connect all the cables back on it so that we can try and power test our monitor and I gotta be honest with you, this is still even after doing, you know, I don't know, over a hundred of these PVMs every time you're still just, you're always nervous when you fire up a PVM for the first time after doing a big capacitor job because you just don't know what can happen but thankfully today there were no issues and I'm just gonna get a nice test screen pulled up here for a second and you can see there that the capacitor kit was a success. Both capacitor kits were installed correctly and the PVM actually runs great. So now on to the next task which is the calibration which is not gonna be covered in today's video. I'm actually gonna be covering calibration in the next video, that'll be quite detailed. We're gonna go through not only geometry calibration, we're gonna work through the convergence calibrations and then we're also gonna go through an entire yoke reset and because this monitor did need some yoke adjustments as well as a whole yoke reset with convergent strips and everything like that. But that's it for the first part. All the capacitors and the future proofing is done. Now it's just on to the final adjustment of the monitor but thanks again for watching today everybody. Please leave me a comment below and I will show or I'll be back with that follow-up episode in a very short time but other than that, have a great week and I'll see you next time with some more retro content.