Did one ever beat you?

[Doodlebug]

Over all the time you have done repairs to wireless/TV etc has one ever beaten you
and you had to admit defeat, maybe when you were young and less experienced?

When I was 13 my Uncle asked me to see if I could cure
motor boating on an old Phillips  radio.

That was one that beat me at the time.

[Old Sparky]

In more than 44 years serving & repairing Radio & Audio gear a very small percebtage of all thethings I'veseen have beaten me. If I'm honest, most of those which I've been unable torepair satisfactorilly have been in in more recent years.

[tiv48]

In the early days (late 60's/to late 70's) i cant remember anything beating me or i should say us. the advent of colour tv bought challenges ,i remember a G6 stuck on the bench for 3 weeks with an ident fault. and a thorn 3k with a simple power supply fault that also took over two weeks.
In the 80's the failure to repair increased because we used to take in repairs of anything and some company's decided not to release service data to to none authorized dealers.
since leaving the trade i can pick and chose the things i repair so my success rate is back to 90% ish.
If i was repairing LCD tvs i think my fail rate would be nearer 60%!
I just remember there was one 30AX amstrad tv that would blow its chopper transistor about once every 3 months i never got to the bottom of that one and had to exchange the set as we had sold it .
Rob T

[Mark Hennessy]

In theory, anything can be fixed.

In practice:

• Can you get service information?
  
• Can you get replacement parts?
  
• Can you take it apart non-destructively?
  
• Is there any point?
  

The last of those being the important one.

I - like most of us, I'm sure - have been guilty of pressing on with a repair out of spite, when really, the sensible thing to do was to give up and return it to the customer as BER. I spent about 25 hours on a Roberts R300 with low gain, and in the end I swapped the chassis with one from my own collection to get the thing out of here. What could I realistically charge the customer? I think it might have been £30 or something. So, about £1/hour, just because I was stupid and stubborn.

I have countless more examples. Just one: Up in the attic I have a cheap and nasty Packard Bell PC. Some friends gave it to me as it had become unreliable. It's about 8 years old, and runs Vista. It's an AMD CPU of some sort - not even a basic Intel. So, I told myself - out loud - to remove the RAM and take it to the tip. Several times...

So what did I do? I opened up the PSU and saw a bunch of swelling capacitors. I then spent a couple of hours lookup up the correct replacements and ordered them from Farnell. A couple of days later, I spend an hour replacing them and cleaning out all the dust, etc. I then spent a couple more hours freshly rebuilding Vista from the recovery partition. Net result? It is now 100% reliable, but being Vista, it runs like a dog - much worse than I remembered it running on my old laptop when I got that. So another couple of hours were wasted removing the Packard Bell "crapware", which helped a bit. And what have I done with this machine since? Absolutely nothing! It's sat in the attic and will stay there doing nothing until I finally take it to the tip (minus the RAM).

Does anyone want a Packard Bell mini-tower running Vista? And if you were interested, what could I charge you? A tenner at most, which might just about cover the cost of the caps, but certainly not the time I've spent on it. I'm an idiot!

(Seriously, if anyone wants it, it's FOC if you can collect it from Evesham).

Aside from that, parts availability is a bit problem, especially for older stuff. Sure, substitutions might be possible, but what if it's a custom IC? Occasionally, there are solutions: http://www.markhennessy.co.uk/dm63/ - but that was an exception, I'd say. Back in ~1990, it was worth the effort for what I got in return. And I was "cash-poor, time-rich" in those days (today, I'm cash-poor, time-poor!).

Component level maintenance has obviously become less feasible these days, and stuff is designed to fail just after the customer has decided that they fancy something shinier. Like it or not, companies make their money from sales, not supporting the repair trade, and the majority of the public is sanguine about this, thanks to genius marketing.

Ultimately, don't see it as "beating you". See it as "choosing to walk away because that is the sensible thing to do"

Cheers,

Mark

[valves4amps]

In the mid sixties When I was 14 I was given a 4 track tape recorder to fix by a neighbour. It had multi pole switches to change modes. I have long forgotten what make it was. I thought the switches were faulty so I bought some new ones and fitted them. It blew up on switch on, most embarrassing, needles to say I had to give up. A few years later I had learnt about break before make and make before break switches. A little knowledge can be dangerous and all that.

Dave.

[Old Sparky]

Reading some of the subsequent posts, I can say that there are a few cases of 'been there, done that and got the tee shirt' amongst the posts by Rob T, Mark, and Dave. I, too have spent several hours, often over more than one day, trying to pin down and rectify elusive faults, sstill do sometimes. There's a part of me that says 'don't let it beat you', even though I know a hopeless case when i see one! In the past half-year I've had several such jobs, including an ONKYO CD Player which now loads the discs, but the spindle motor won't run, and a Yamaha HDD/CD Recorder that defies all attempts to fix it, and a couple of other 'dogs' of jobs!

[Terry]

We didn't have TV at home when I was at school - mum said she didn't want one but this really mean't that she couldn't afford one on a widowed mother's pension and, therefore, she didn't need one. It was a different story after I introduced the first TV into the house when I started work!

This attitude obviously rubbed off on me so, as a result, although I knew a lot about radio by the time I left school, I knew nothing about TV. So, when the Pye VT4 lost line sync while we were watching it one evening, I was thrown in at the deep end.

I tried everything I could over the succeeding days and weeks to no avail.

I even replaced the original flywheel sync by a new line oscillator/direct sync affair built on a 2oz tobacco tin as the chassis which I mounted on the side of the cabinet! Still nothing.

My desperation ended when someone gave me a Bush TV24 and the Pye was quietly forgotten ...

Several months later, my colleague, Ray, 2 years older than me, was struggling with a VT4 on the bench which was driving him mad, although I've no idea what the fault was. "Have you still got your old PYE?", he asked. When I said I had he asked me if I would bring in the chassis, which I duly did.

After Ray had disentangled my ad hoc modifications and put things back as they should have been he was left with the familiar lack of line sync.

A while later he announced that he'd found the fault and there he was with a perfectly locked picture!

So, what was this fault that had beaten me? The main smoothing capacitor!

Of course, there was no sign of hum with the faulty one and this was a couple of decades before Cyril Bateman started banging on about ESR in his excellent series of articles in Wireless World, but it taught me a lesson I will never forget ...

[Mark Hennessy]

There's a part of me that says 'don't let it beat you', even though I know a hopeless case when i see one! In the past half-year I've had several such jobs, including an ONKYO CD Player which now loads the discs, but the spindle motor won't run, and a Yamaha HDD/CD Recorder that defies all attempts to fix it, and a couple of other 'dogs' of jobs!

Life is short, time is valuable.

Whereas the likes of Yamaha and Onkyo make cheap commodity fodder with a short design life. Bin it and move on!

Incidentally, suppose you did get that Yamaha working. How long will it remain compatible with the Freeview signals? Assuming it currently is...

Today, things move on so much faster than before. The days of buying something to keep for 20 or 30 years are long gone, sadly. Right now we can easily make AM or FM signals for our radios, or 405 line signals for our old TV sets, but you won't be buying DAB modulator kits on eBay any day soon! And let's face it - how many of today's DAB radios will still be working in 20 years time? Bearing in mind that the firmware for modern products is held in Flash memory - usually the cheapest type available - I wouldn't make any assumptions about long-term survival.

Back in 1991, I built a NICAM tuner. Obviously, it's no use any more, but it's nice to have built something that was 100% reliable and managed to outlive a broadcast standard!

But when you think that NICAM 728 only had a broadcast life of roughly 20 years, that's quite sobering. PAL obviously did rather better. But it was only 5 minutes ago when HD was the next big thing, and now everyone is excited about UHD. In that time frame, 3D has been and gone (again!). It's obviously in the interests of electronics companies to push out new standards because that equates to sales and profits for shareholders. And that's just TV; don't mention phones, computers, cars, clothes, furniture, etc. We live in a consumerist society where no-one apart from the likes of us cares about fixing things. Sad but true. Where will it end?

The vintage radio community is a bit of a haven from modern life, which is great, but we still need to be realistic. 50 year old Hacker Mayflower? Yes, that's very fixable, and it will continue to be useful for many decades - even if you're making the FM signal yourself. 15 year old Yamaha PVR? What's the point? Even though it might only be a simple PSU fault (IIRC?), it won't be compatible with modern broadcasts for much longer, and how long before the HDD fails? And until you've accepted that, it'll sit around playing on your mind, bringing you down, zapping your energy...

(However it might read, the above is written mostly for my own benefit. Because much as it's easy to say, it's not easy to do. I'm trying my best to sort out the junk I have here at home, and also a lot of junk that we have at work. I'm trying to reverse decades of being a hoarder - something that started when I grew up; there was no money for components so everything - literally every last resistor - was recycled from old gear. Today, about half of my electronics and radio collection is a millstone!)

[Old Sparky]

The Yamaha doesn't receive broadcasts, Mark. It's simply a combination HDD & CD recorder/player, which accepts signals from external sources, and, yes it appeared to be a PSU fault. Ireplaced most of the electrolytics, including all the large ones in the PSU to no avail, so maybe it should be scrapped. The Onkyo will go back to it's owner as BER. I've spent too much time on it as it is. Like you, albeit for possibly different reasons I need to declutter, both here at home, and in thc cellar where my I have my workshop. At my age (over 73) I really should knoew better!

[Mark Hennessy]

Ah, so it's even less useful than I realised

I've thrown away a few things today. Think my therapy is going well