Designs we love to hate!

[old_coot88]

Hands down, the WORST had to be those original b&w vertical chassis RCA with pc boards. There was simply no way to access the underside of the boards without cutting and peeling away the chassis sheet metal.

A close runner-up had to be those coil forms in Zenith color sets that crystalize with heat and fall apart (i.e., the 'efficiency' coil and the blue adjustment coils on the convergence board.

[zeno]

I could piss & moan ( P&M) all day abt serviceability.

Wires to short to flip out the chassis to troubleshoot. Many.

No bottom plate, especially on audio stuff. Almost all.

No markings on PCB. Zenith

Special tools to pull HV wire out of the FBT. Sony

Moon shot power supply designs. Blame Energy Star.

Service lit only on fiche or disk.

Unremoveable safety screens. Old sets, many.

One thing I learned was most the time the engineers built a
high quality & serviceable set. Then they send it to sales.
Those guys are so cheap they wouldnt pay a dime to watch
the Statue of Liberty take a leak. So you wind up with a 20"
AC cord ( Sylvania ) to save 3 cents on every ten. Blame the bean counters.

nuf sed

73 Zeno

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by old_coot88

Hands down, the WORST had to be those original b&w vertical chassis RCA with pc boards. There was simply no way to access the underside of the boards without cutting and peeling away the chassis sheet metal.
.

Like this one:
I didn't even try to get underneath the boards when I did a recap. I just clipped the leads at the body of the old wax cap, and then did a J hook connection to the replacement cap leads and the now pigtails to the circuit board. Not the prettiest method, but it worked fine and it's hidden, facing the back of the CRT.

My father hated Emerson radio sets, they used to bury some parts under other parts, and you'd have to remove the top layer to replace something underneath.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by wa2ise

Like this one:
I didn't even try to get underneath the boards when I did a recap. I just clipped the leads at the body of the old wax cap, and then did a J hook connection to the replacement cap leads and the now pigtails to the circuit board. Not the prettiest method, but it worked fine and it's hidden, facing the back of the CRT.

My father hated Emerson radio sets, they used to bury some parts under other parts, and you'd have to remove the top layer to replace something underneath.

I used to recap the vertical circuit in those RCA's, even when they were newer. There wasn't that many leads that had to be disconnected to gain access to the foil side. There was several caps, that had to be replaced.
The cap across the horizontal sine wave coil, .01 mfd @ 600v could be replaced, by reaching through the chassis holes.
The set pictured, is it a KCS108???. Don't let the chassis slip off the bottom rail, there goes the neck.

[Zenith26kc20]

Mitsubishi and the fish oil caps! Once you smell the tell tale smell, get ready to buy a new tip for the soldering station! Surface mount microscopic resistors! The GE "swiss cheese" chassis! As bad as the RCA! Panasonic's "Prism" that blasted the neck of of it's CRT like Zenith with bad safety cap and on the same set, the inability to get the board out to repair vertical IC connections! Funai VCR that requires you to unsolder those wonderful wiring harness' to get the transport off the board! Transistors and IC's that have the part number removed at the time of manufacture! And don't forget the Sony TV with the double foiled mother board and daughter boards that were SOLDERED in! Removing the daughter boards always resulted in broken traces that took forever to repair!

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by dieseljeep

The set pictured, is it a KCS108???. Don't let the chassis slip off the bottom rail, there goes the neck.

It's this set
I don't remember what the chassis number is, too lazy to walk across the room and pull the back off...

[old_coot88]

Doggone. I dint mean to sound unkind toward that RCA. It was sed from the servicing perspective back in the day. If a shop didn't have a test tube or extension cables, there was no way to effectively troubleshoot (we did have those items BTW).
We got a few of those RCAs as trade-ins and somebody had literally cut and peeled back the sheet metal to get at the foil side of the boards.
From the design perspective, it was a "What were they thinking?" kind of deal.

[Kevin Kuehn]

I was actually able to recap my vertical chassis RCA by soldering through those holes on the back chassis side. Slow and painful, but doable. You need a pencil iron, not a gun, and a very good movable light source.