CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

deronmoped · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 1154 Location: San Diego

I was wondering if there is anyone into recapping CRT boards. It would be nice to have someone that specialized in some sort of refurbishing of boards for those who can not do it themselves. I have repaired a few of my own boards and found out real quick that it takes some soldering skills and patience. My 10PG is like 14 years old and the caps are giving me problems. Why wait till there is a problem, these PJ's are like anything else, they need some preventive maintenance every now and then.

Deron.

kypha · Joined: 26 Dec 2006 Posts: 57 Location: 89103

I think Curt does that. He always advises people to send in boards for repair.

jask · Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 10187 Location: kamloops BC

yes there may even be a few others but here at CURT PALME , (where CURT makes his living fixing and selling this stuff) I personally would recommend CURT PALME - he has done work for me (very well and Quick too!) and I recommend him over all others on this-his forum or to put it another way...

CURT can cap ya Smile

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

Considering you can d/l software to fabricate your on PC board, submit it for manufacture, and be quotes one-off and multi-unit pricing without ever picking up the telephone, I wonder why someone hasn't just reinvented some of these boards using updated electronics. In fact, I would think the chief driving force behind that kind of initiative would be to increase bandwidth in the unit.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 2:51 pm Post subject:

Guys! (I'm sounding like Tim here.. Wink

)

I take a slightly different approach to repairs. It takes a LOT of time to fully recap a board. I think Mike P would agree, there's certain caps on each board that can/will drastically affect the image, but other caps can be off by as much as 80% of their rated value without changing the pix at all.

'Shotgunning' a board to replace all caps 'just because' isn't a good idea IMHO. Even a qualified tech can accidentally damage a board or put one of 50 caps in backwards, then you have a mess on your hands.

I use a systematic approach in troubleshooting boards for a SPECIFIC problem, and then replace whatever has failed with higher quality parts whereever possible. In the case of a neck board, I'll change the same parts on all three boards to prevent failure down the road.

So while you CAN recap a board or three in any set in hopes that you'll get better performance, I'll bet that 99% of the caps you change won't have much if any effect on the image, and other parts that you missed will fail before the caps that you just took out of the set will.

(flame suit on, I know this can be a very subjective area of thought)

mp20748 · Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 3:04 pm Post subject:

deronmoped · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 1154 Location: San Diego

What I'm really trying to get at is the older PJ's need tune ups from time to time. No one has jumped in to offer such a service. There are plenty of people offering upgrades. Curt is know for fixing problems. I think there is a place for someone to put a advertisement out there offering a preventive maintenance solution. Curt might be the ideal person as he could target the know problems that come across his work bench. There could be a list of PJ's and the problems that are common to them, plus general problems that effect all PJ's.

Why wait for a know problem to happen, cut it off at the pass.

Deron.

deronmoped · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 1154 Location: San Diego

I agree that caps should not be replaced just because they are old, but going over the board with a ESR meter and checking all the caps is a good idea. On these older PJ's, I bet one or two real bad ones could be found on some of the boards, they may or may not be causing problems, but it would make sense to replace them.

Deron.

JustGreg · Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 3098 Location: Kenosha, WI

I bought some brushes from here a couple weeks ago:
http://www.tanisinc.com/tb_mini.php the 08130 and another...I forget which one right now..
and armed with way too much time, a couple cans of Caigs, a can of air, and six cans of suds I pulled every socketed EVERYTHING and gave it a good cleaning inside and out.
Supposedly the Molex (??) connectors the CLM, VIM, Decoder, etc, plug into on the backplane are self cleaning when the boards are repeatedly reinserted. That wasn't good enough for Rainman here so I sat there with the backplane and cleaned every.....single....pinhole with the Caigs and brush. I also cleaned all the other connectors I could find paying special attention to the female parts. (opened myself up for this one.)

It may just be me trying to justify the 4 hours all this took, but the judder is gone I saw while converging, there's less noise, and the pj goes from 0-60 in 3 seconds. (I made that part up Rolling Eyes

).

I've thought of getting an ESR tester but I know I'd hose something so I went the janitor route and am happy and surprised with the results.

Greg

Tinman · Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 8:09 pm Post subject:

My take is that it's not worth re-capping a whole projector "just because". The best approach is to use an ESR meter, go through the thing, and replace ONLY what's actually bad. The fact is, that many caps will outlive the set while certain others will need replacing once, or even twice in the projectors lifetime due to the stresses those caps endure.
I do re-cap boards, but don't even ask. I only do broadcast monitors, and my OWN PG10 Very Happy

Marc

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

I was thinking of not so much trying to re-invent the wheel, but rather replace that old steel wheel with a brushed billet aluminum wheel. Anyway, anyone interested might check this out. http://www.pad2pad.com/