I'm pretty much a greenhorn too, and I have to say the capacitor issue gets a little confusing to me as well.

Squirrel boy, one thing I would disagree (in a friendly way) with you is that guys on here are teachers in that people are learning from information you post. There's plenty of folks reading stuff who you'll never meet, see, or ever know about.

Think about a favorite teacher when you were in school. Of course you weren't their only student. They probably taught the same thing, to several classes a day, for years on end. That requires a lot of patience to repeat the same thing over and over again.

I know its frustrating and annoying to you guys that are experienced to answer questions from us newbies all the time. There's probably tens of thousands of posts here and opinions vary even among experts. I haven't seen every post and I don't always know who's right.

Maybe there could be a forum on here just for beginners. There newbies could feel more comfortable asking questions. If the experienced guys want to help out, you could go there and do so and it would be appreciated. If you don't like helping newbies, stay out!

Also, if there were stickies with the basics, you can refer people to them when the same questions get asked instead of having to type it over again. As has been said, there are several guys here that are really good at making videos and some of them already have ones on basics. Maybe they could be listed here too since youtube doesn't have a way to categorized their channels.

Techicolor: have you thought about practicing on radios first? I know your not into them, but there's a lot of similarities. Every Audels book or old TV repairmans course I've seen always started out explaining radios first. If you mess up, there isn't a lot lost. I've had a few ruined radios in my wake. When your done and you don't want to keep them, give them away to friends and family and tell them how great you are at fixin' stuff. The bad ones throw in your worst enemy's yard!

This is a really good point. Starting with the basics means starting with radios. That's how many of us here (especially myself) started out in this hobby... learned with radios first. As pointed out... if you screw it up, not a lot lost. And actually, there's not a whole lot you can screw up in an old radio. And, because of the fewer parts involved, it means the lessons learned cost less.

You two guys make a good point. When I took tv repair in boces part of high school, the first year was radios..... By the end of the first year we all could draw a 5 tube radio schematic from scratch put in the voltages and knew what each part did.... the second year was b&w tv, we only spent a few weeks on color tv.

New-bees often jump right into stuff that is quite complicated, not to mention often jumping into capacitor replacement while the tv still has some problem possibly not related to a bad capacitor.

People here, and me included, are not teachers. Teachers teach why something is happening, the student figures out what part may be wrong with the knowledge he/she has gained. Here often a person is directed how to fix the problem, often without an underlying understanding of what he/she is doing, or why.... I know because I did it just the other day with a person with a sound problem that most likely is an adjustment.... New-bee's also need to be good students and do some learning before jumping into stuff..... youtube has some very good beginning electronics stuff, and even a few people like the post I made earlier about the power supply, where the guy actually does a good job at trying to teach a little about troubleshooting.....

The first time I started replacing capacitors on an old set, I would replace a couple, then turn it on for a minute to see what was up.

Of course, this set had been running fairly regularly.

As I went through the replacement, starting with electrolytics, I could see a difference with each can that was replaced, and I was happy. I was thrilled when sound suddenly came on after replacing one multi-section can.

I've never replaced everything on a chassis.

Now that is some excellent common sense advice

I'll do that on the sylvania roundie.

dave would always replace something and make notes on any difference.he had thousands of pages.interesting and his notes fixed many,many sets.he was very good at documenting everything.

I usually approach each set differently.... It also depends on the condition of the chassis before I start. If there's a lot of paper caps, I just change all of them first.

If I feel I can run the set without burning down the house, I will change a little then run in to see the differences.

If you feel you need to replace all the caps because the set is from 1953 or something, then it is very smart to replace just a few, power supply first, then run the set with the chassis in the set and the back on. Run it for a week regularly, if everything seems stable, do more. Be sure new parts are at least rated proper tolerance, temperature, and voltage ratings... Same as original or better.

If a problem pops up, you need to fix it before you do more.....