Television Repair

First, TV repair should not be attempted by anyone who is not trained to work on high voltage electronics. There are lethal voltages inside all monitors/TVs?. That said:

In the beginning lots of people fixed their own TVs? by replacing the tube which had lost its beautiful orange glow. I still love that color. Even a 10 year old future network broadcast engineer could unplug the TV and take the little tubes to the drug store to test and replace.

When the TV quit working you could take the back off and look inside. Many backs had some sort of quick removal system rather than screws, indicating that the maker expected you to open them up. They actually did have “user serviceable parts inside.” The back was designed to pull the power cord out when it came off, in an attempt to keep you from electrocuting yourself. You then removed the vacuum tubes and took them to a store that had a checker. An amazing array of stores had this device, even 7-Elevens. You then identified the type of tube, and looked up the proper socket and test procedure for it. You put the tube in, let it warm up, and ran it through the test. It would test either good or bad. When one turned up bad you bought a replacement. You then had to take all your (hopefully still good) tubes home and get them back in the right place in the TV. There was a tube placement diagram to help you with this. Amazing the things that ordinary people could do back then.

In the 1970s TVs? went all solid state except the CRT of course. Some problems were still easy to fix. A noisy volume control could be cleaned. A flaky power switch could be bypassed and replaced with an inline AC cord switch. Serious repair usually required test equipment and service manuals.

In the 1980s TVs? were taken over by microprocessors, but one could still rescue a superbowl party by jumpering a good capacitor across a bad one to fix the vertical deflection. Of course that requires knowing which part out of dozens is likely bad. One brand TV of that era had problems with solder cracking which could easily be fixed with a hot soldering iron.

Wild colors sometimes resulted from the failure of the degaussing thermistor. These were easily scrounged from other deceased units.

Today most “repairs” I perform are actually knowing how to install and configure the components and knowing how to work around problems. I have a 26 inch LCD on my desk because someone didn't read the owner's manual and thought it was broken. There was a menu setting which just needed to be changed. I have replaced the LCD panel inside a 42 inch monitor and the inverter/CCFL in a laptop display, but I would not recommend trying that type of repair unless you have nothing to lose. In that case have fun and learn. The feeling of bringing a dead TV back to life is a great rush.