[Findm-Keepm]

We never turned away a Sony, and actually got the mother lode from other shops that were afraid to touch them.

Sony had a nice set of bulletins you received when you ordered an SG613 from them. The bulletins went through all the pitfalls in replacing the SG613, from testing them, to changing the SID30-15 diode(s) to the upgraded diode. Actually, Andy summed this up in an earlier post.....

What most shops did was instead of ordering a SG613, they popped over to the supply house, bought an ECG276, popped it in, and prayed. No run-through of the suspect stuff that Sony suggested and no upgrade of the damper as suggested. The result was either success or failure - but most often failure.

We junked more Sonys due to bad CRTs (H-K short), mostly the 490BEB22 and the little 370? tubes as well. We had a 12" Sony with no back as a VCR monitor for years - it had no back because it was in a house fire and the back melted. Once removed, it wouldn't go back on, so we kept the set as a shop monitor. As I said in an earlier post, most SG608s and SG613s failed when a power surge occurred during a lightning strike. Most problems were with the 4.7uF caps - Rubycon and Marcons that would fail, and all 160V or 250V types. We replaced all of them with 250V caps - United Chemicons we got from one of the distributors for under a buck each.

I've seen lots of Sony's and the most problematic part ever has to be the MX0841's in the later CRT sets, followed by the caps in the early KVs, and then the STK regulator/audio in the late-80s sets. SG613s were like power supply diodes - understood to be the weak, shorting part in a Sony taking a power hit. 2SC867s and 2SC1034s went too, but the problem was really bad caps in just about all instances I've seen.