feedback from my first newsletter

After sending my first newsletter out this morning here is a feedback from a member from Philippines Mr. Ernesto.

and here is what Mr.Romeo has to say....

My first newsletter- members only

Beginning this month of January 2014, i will be publishing monthly newsletter.

 This will be members only and therefore if you are interested on getting those updates, you are most welcome to join my mailing lists.

click here to join NOW

If you have already subscribed please don't do it again

See you on the other side

Humphrey Kimathi

DVD player picture freezing and how to set the spindle motor height

 Hi Humphrey,

One Samsung DVD player after 25min of playing picture is freezing (stuck), sometimes picture is played intermittently with broken sound. I saw optical block dancing backward and forward when this trouble starts. Replaced spindle motor problem was same.

Email support between me and a customer from Barbados

This is Winston from Barbados, haven't spoken since March last year. Since then I have acquired an analogue ESR meter, very easy to use, and it immediately showed up faulty capacitors that I would not have found before.

 I am still focusing on CRT TV's though quite a few people are coming to me requesting flat-screen TV repairs. I still have a very large CRT market available here, and I want to repair ALL, except those where Tube is at fault.

LG Television hit by high voltage

This television belong to a colleague, he informed me about his Television which he suspect was hit by power surge because there was power blackout in his area and when power was restored he switched on the television and was not working. 

Usually equipment hit by power surge is easy to fix and therefore I passed by his place in the evening after work and upon opening the set I went straight to the safety components and I started by testing the condition of the main fuse.

Testing across the fuse I got a beep, I was not expecting that but in electronics we deal with facts and therefore this is the truth.

Next I checked the health of the surge limiter and again to my surprise it was also okay, with this I concluded one thing....there is no shorted component on the supply.

So what is blocking the power then? I started scanning the primary side components for any sigh of stressed components.

Usually when component fail due to power surge you can see marks on components body which have failed. So I started scanning the primary side components and I noticed the main capacitor rated 220uF/450V was swollen slightly at the top as you can on the picture below...

Please note that there is no point of re-testing a capacitor which is swollen because they usually short and therefore if you test with an ESR meter it will read very low ohm, as you know low ohm on capacitors using ESR meter means the capacitor is in excellent condition but this is not the case because the low ohm here means the capacitor is shorted...if you test using the capacitance meter you will also find the capacitance is within range but this again is wrong result.

I continued scanning for more culprits and now my attention was drawn by burnt marks on the inductor which is part of the E.M.I circuit.

This component rarely fails and I did a test for open using my meter and i found one line was open circuit.

This explain why the fuse and the surge limiter was not open is because the component opened first and therefore cut off the supply before doing more damage to the supply.

Getting this component (inductor) for replacement was not easy and checking around my junk board I found any old board of IBM CRT monitor which has a clean one and installed it on this TV.

The board after installing the two components, please note that the new capacitor seems smaller than the original one, this is because the new capacitor is rated 400Volts and the previous one was rated 450 volts but the capacitance were the same 220uF.

I also installed the main capacitor and after doing few test on other components and realised they were okay went back to the owner and re-installed the board to the tube and after applying power the TV was back to normal.