 Hey, welcome back to the CRT Bunker and today I want to talk about a fun topic. That is poor repair work or poor service work that you may solicit for one of your CRTs, specifically one of the higher end PVMs. Today we're going to be featuring the Sony PVM20 L5, which is one of the most sought after CRTs left, especially due to its multi-format features and the fact that it's a high quality Trinitron. But before we get to that, I'd like to tell everybody how Brutus is doing. I get a lot of questions about him. He's doing fine. He's just acting like a lazy teenager and really hasn't been getting out of bed today. Hasn't made his bed by 2pm and just lounging and taking it easy. So I kind of am a sucker for him and let him do what he wants at this point since he's 13 years old and he's hanging out comfortable and he may come and join us and visit us during this talk. First off I want to talk about Sony PVM20 L5 number one. This one was brought to me from a client in New York and this one had a little bit of a track record. It came from a video studio of some sorts and they solicited somebody in the New York area to service the CRT and specifically go in and do the Save on Pat cap kit, which is available on eBay and documented to cover a large portion of the deflection board. Not the complete deflection board but anyway the monitor did work prior to it being serviced. Now what happened is the client got his monitor back after it was serviced and it didn't quite work right. It started acting funny making a lot of noises and wouldn't sink properly. You'd have some issues with startup and so he kindly asked me to take a look at his PVM for him and I did that and I got to tell you this was one of the craziest services and awful bad experiences I could have seen from somebody who was supposedly a CRT technician that worked on this 20 L5 and what this person had done was they had done the cap kit on the deflection board. However, they did not do it correctly. They did damage a lot of pads and didn't do a great job of cleaning the board. They didn't stick their capacitors all the way down against the board when they replaced them and that was the biggest problem with the whole monitor. What had happened was and I found this out by opening it up and inspecting inside. One of the capacitors that was in the kit had not been pushed all the way down against the circuit board and the capacitor actually touched legs with another capacitor which was a film solid capacitor. It's not normally this color. Inside the monitor they are blue but this was the replacement capacitor. Anyway those two capacitors touched. The monitor was powered on and there was a surge of electricity that caused the film capacitor to just explode and it was that that caused a lot of the issues. Now the tech also went in and did some strange things to the neck board and really things that didn't make sense like desoldered points and left them with no current going to them so I'm not really sure what this person was doing. It looked like they did have some competence in electronics but I'm really not sure what they were trying to accomplish. Now thankfully I was able to see that issue and it didn't really cause any major damages because that kind of a surge could have fried out a really important unique chip or something that would have maybe damaged the monitor forever and turned it into just a parts monitor but thankfully all I had to do was go in and replace that single film capacitor and then I went back and I undid all the work that that other tech had done and I guess it's not even fair for me to call them a tech but that other person had done. I undid all their work, cleaned up the board and removed all the old solder all the old caps and then installed the cap kit again with better caps and ran a lot of tests and it was working. We got it back to I'd say like 95% so that was the first instance where I had seen actually a film capacitor fail but also an instance where bad service work caused all the damage in that thing and that would have been terrible if that PVM would have been destroyed just because of that one instance. Now our second story involves this specific Sony PVM 20.05 and this one was sold to another client of mine and it was specifically sold as being serviced. So what I want to do now is I'm going to show you how we're going to check out if this is being actually serviced or not and what you can look for in signs that if you're sold or told that a CRT has been serviced you can check for some of these things and help you determine whether it's actually been serviced. So let's go ahead now and take a look inside the Sony PVM 20.05 multi-format CRT monitor. As we inspect inside our Sony PVM 20.05 just please note the shell has already been removed. The first thing over here on our left hand side of the monitor is our deflection board and it is secured by this plastic brace that does often crack over time. Thankfully this one is in good shape and it's quite dusty. There's a lot of dust built up on there and also there's like just a thin layer of it pretty much on everything especially that board there again. Check out the heat sink on the major major board down there. Got a lot of build up there but anyway back to the deflection board. This customer did say that the deflection board was serviced and recapped he thought from the person he got this monitor from. But if we look in here these parts are part of that cap kit over here and they all look like they've not been changed since they were installed by the factory. So we can verify that by getting this board out and looking at the backside and seeing if that solder has been changed from factory. It should be noticeable even a little bit if it has been changed. But a lot of these caps in side of here just from my experience do look like they were factory caps and they do resemble those same capacitors. Now maybe some of them have been changed but we'll find out. There's also this IC right here on this larger heat sink that it may have been changed for some reason and because it looks slightly different than the others you can tell there where the thermal paste just looks a little bit different and that's a sign that maybe some work has been done. If you look at the main boards down here this is our flyback on our monitor. There is just again just a lot of dust so I'm I'm thinking the odds of this actually been serviced or not that high. Now the good thing is is there's not any evidence of any damage or anything but it's due for at least a cleaning and possibly cap work. So that's just down the side from that angle. Here's the neck board same kind of deal. It doesn't look like really anything's been done to the neck board which is a good thing. Then we have our input board and over here is our card slot. Right now there is a SDI card reader digital in there along with a spacer plate or cover plate over the second portion of that slot cover just a lot of normal dust that you'd see inside of here. It's not like an obscene amount of dust but a good enough layer where again if someone would have serviced this some of this dust would have at least been cleaned off in the process of them removing the boards and normally if somebody services something they should clean it out at least somewhat. So that's kind of the inspection back here but now I'm going to have to get in here clean it up and we'll remove this deflection board and inspect it a little closer. Our deflection board is removed right here. Let's take a look and see if anything looks like it's actually been changed out. Again on the top side of the board it's difficult to tell because if somebody did a good job servicing it then looking from the top you shouldn't easily be able to tell whether it's been done. However if you flip the board over and we look closer at some of the joints and pads and solder points on here we should be able to notice pretty pretty simply if some real work has actually been done here. But first off if we look around the other side of the heat sink this is and these are those ICs and transistors and these look like they were factory installed. The solder does not look changed but over here this is the one that possibly was installed at a different time that we had talked about based on the evidence looking at from that side let's see if we can determine anything like maybe it still looks like it's something that was done in a factory almost so maybe it was maybe it wasn't so let's look over here now at some of the capacitors that are in this kit for example I know that this capacitor right here would be in the kit 2515 2514 I believe those are in this kit and even 2535 and every one of these solder points looks just the same as like those look the same as every other point on here which is again showing me that these are factory installed and probably not changed out at any point it's just some dirt and so the odds of them actually being changed out are pretty low it doesn't really look like anything has been ever serviced on this one. The customer decided they wanted to have the cap kit and the servicing done to the main deflection board here so that has been completed now this is the board after the capacitors have been replaced and then it was cleaned and it is almost ready to stick back into the frame with the rest of the monitor and we'll give it a test look over here here's the old capacitors from the capacitor kit and the new ones and upgrade parts are all in there this main deflection board and the daughter board they've been reinstalled over here and I've double and triple checked all the cabling and make sure it's right and then I've got s-video ready to go in line a ac power ready to go in line a and all I need to do is turn on this search protector let's try it okay we want to go to line a I might have an issue where this maybe this doesn't output s-video there we go I don't know what's going on my some of my test consoles are taking a minute there to turn on but the n64 is working now I want you to see what a monitor should look like if it's been serviced notice up here we don't really see much of any dirt or soot it's really easy to clean some of these areas and it makes a big difference another area we'll take a look at is our yoke assembly here and you can tell it's a lot cleaner so is our neck and then our neck board and we've got all that dust cleaned out and all that soot that's been built up on these cables has been cleaned out there is the back of the neck board and all the loose plastic if there was any has been removed and then everything is very shiny down here it's not spotless but it's pretty close to that now that's just what I would consider if I had opened this monitor and seen it look like this and that would have been a completely different answer for the client I would have told him yes absolutely it looks like it's been serviced and it's good to go but now it has been serviced and it is ready for a long-term use all right so Brutus I think he's ready let's get the shell on this thing and take one last look at it finished up all right so it looks like this one may have been serviced and I'll tell you what I found out I did remove the bezel and I saw that the anti-glare screen layer was removed on this tube and that is technically servicing it if there was a scratch on that screen or some kind of reason to remove that that's really all I could find that was actually serviced you saw inside I noticed a lot of dust and debris buildup that is very much specific to a crt sitting there for a long time and just having dust kind of slowly build up on to all the components in almost a gradual and consistent manner but yeah this one definitely was not serviced internally we went ahead and recapped it with that deflection board cap kit and it's been fully serviced for things like convergence and geometry and checks for every input everything else has been checked out great on this crt and this one is a bit of a better situation where you thought maybe somebody had serviced it and it turns out they hadn't and the monitor turns out to be in really really good condition to begin with so it's actually kind of a blessing that it wasn't serviced as opposed to the first story where it was it serviced improperly and nearly damaged permanently so that'll be it for today's wonderful videos on these amazing crts please tell me what you thought with a comment below and if you have any questions please remember to go out and check out my podcast with Lewis from Zez Retro we do a podcast every week and that's really the opportunity that I offer for the public and viewers like you to offer questions that I can go into detail with Lewis just go check out our podcast on the Zez Retro channel and drop a comment on the most recent podcast we have there and Lewis will ask me that question in an upcoming episode but thanks again for watching today everybody I'll see you next time with some more retro content