Which was the worst TV set / chassis you had to repair

[ben]

Originally Posted by greg_simons

That sony 2704 was a real brute, built like the proverbial outside convenience, needed two strong guys to lift them about.
Greg.

Years ago I hauled one of these Sony 27" monsters (KV27EXTDH) back home. Single handedly ( i was younger then ). Even though it was about a hundred yards away, it took me most of the next few days to recover!

Fortunately I got it working, usual drys and the separate speaker enclosures had rotted foam on the drivers. Quite a unique looking set, must dig it out one day and test it.

edit: more info page 53 of the 1988 sony catalogue

[Maarten]

@Wendy: I would be interested to know which Turkish company if you happen to remember that in the future. Also do you happen to know which German design house and if there was a connection to Romania?

@Red to black: It would surprise me if Vestel had anything to do with Slovenian production. I think the manufacturer of the E-series chassis would have been Gorenje or a smaller company that was swallowed by Gorenje.

[Red to black]

Hi Maarten,
As far as I recall Vestal themselves retrospectively re-named the Indiana 100/200 chassis as 11AK01/02 though there are huge discrepancies here due to 'inheritance' issues.
The CE25/28 series might have been made in Slovenia but there were at least two Vestal versions and one Spanish version, maybe they were only assembled in Slovenia as kits ?, who knows ? ask Wendy as they imported them into the UK at least.

[FERNSEH]

WendyMott wrote: "Sorry to differ but the Indiana series were never adopted by Vestel. To my horror I cannot remember the Turkish company that made them..the company was eventually swallowed by Vestel."

Telra Profilo perhaps?
Information about Turkish TV manufactures:

PROFILO TELRA A.S. profilo
Part of the Profilo Group of Companies, the Private Holding with interests in Electronics, Telecom, Trading, Construction, Real Estate, Distribution, Ship building and Tourism PROFILO TELRA A.S. was established in 1970 and started TVs manufacturing in 1980. It has been the first ever outsourcing partner of Sony, also partnered with Matsushita, and in 1990, the company signed a Production & Sales Agreement with Thomson. With 3 million TVs produced and sold in 2004 and 2100 skilled employees, Profilo-Telra is ranked on leading positions among the top European TVs producers. Its modern TV production facilities capacity was extended to 5 million units in 2005. Additional capacity for a few millions electronic sets is used for other Audio/Video products. Equipment consists of 65 insertion machines, 36 plastic injection machines, and 22 assembly lines (4.5 million LCD and CRT TVs, 500,000 Plasma and DLP TVs). Products currently manufactured range from 14 to 50" LCD Plasma DLP and CRT TVs, including DVD, DVD+RW, DMC, Wireless Combi’s, and Digital TVs. The company sells its products on the European market through own subsidiaries in Germany, France, Poland, and Turkey, and through a network of dedicated distributors in other countries. Most TVs are sold under distributors’ specific brands or retailers’ private labels, as well as renown CE Brands. According to the published company data, in Turkey Profilo-Telra enjoys 20% market share and sells its products under own and franchised brands through 5 000 stores. The financial data for 2005 points 550 million USD revenue and growth superior to 50% over 2003. Confident in its growth prospects, Profilo Telra expects its turnover to surpass the 1 billion USD mark in 2007

DFWB.

[FERNSEH]

South-East European Industrial Market.
The website:

https://www.see-industry.com/en/prod...-turkey/2/344/

DFWB.

[Nickthedentist]

Wasn't there something on a CD from Television magazine written by D.M. (Wendy) about some of these strange sets?

[Richard_FM]

I remember someone mentioning somewhere that one model of TV Philips made in the 1980s always seemed to have a certain fault caused by a particular component going out of tolerance after a few years.

They reckoned it must have been a dud batch of components, as otherwise they were reliable sets. I'm wondering if Philips were aware of the problem & issued any amendments to the service manuals.

[Wendymott]

Hi Maarten. The TV Factory was Gorenje... but named Elektronica. And yes we had a big connection with Electronica in Bucharest Romania...I spent many a unhappy hour there.. After the revolution they built their version of the Indiana 100/200 ARGhhhhhhh

Fernseh... THANKS.. Profilo it was.. the Turkish company....The German design house I will not name publicly... PM if you wish. BAZ... the Indiana 100/200 was never built by Vestel....see below....
NEI supplied kits to Profilo...... sourced from Philips.
NEI also supplied ALL components for the CE25/28 and the E5.... that was part of the deal..we supplied the components then bought back the completed sets.
Re the Indiana 100/200 ..I spent 10 working days in Rotterdam in a warehouse, exchanging the main text processors, fitted in error...... they fitted Spanish text chips instead of UK..
Nick. Yes I put together ALL my faults recorded of ALL the NEI/Nikkai TV's into articles for TV magazine...my bosses went mad . They suggested it was an admission that our sets went faulty..haa haa.. I was there to help engineers navigate problems.
Nick..Television mag published all my data under the name Alan Dent...not my idea..
BAZ.. The designer of the Indiana sets had a big association with Profilo and Vestel were big competitors.... thus they would never share designs. We did buy from Vestel the 11AK08 and 11AK10, See february 2000 television mag for details page 226.

[Welsh Anorak]

Digressing slightly, who made the Bush 2020? That's the one with the plug-in decoder which used a TDA 3562 decoder IC made by Telefunken. If you replaced it (a common occurrence) with a Philips IC there was no picture unless you changed a couple of components. I ask becuse there was a Goldstar chassis that was almost identical. So who stole what from who?

[FERNSEH]

"Digressing slightly, who made the Bush 2020?".

Wasn't Thorn-EMI designers involved with the development of the Bush 2020 chassis? In some respects it does resemble the TX100.

DFWB.

[Wendymott]

The thing is DFWB.... Badging became a nightmare for engineers...and suppliers alike. It obviously started in the hey days of TV production, when smaller companies were swallowed up by bigger ones..Even companies like TopRank who were not in the trade..just to make money,,, if you read the book "Setmakers" by Geddes and Bussey you will see what I mean. Badge buying was very lucrative. NEI even sold Indiana 100/200 to the owners of Bush/Alba. and were badged. Cannon Street investments bought NEI, Nikkai, Maplins and others....anyways we are OFF Topic..

[Wendymott]

One range of sets that became a nightmare were the Grundig GSC100/200 chassis. This had no less that 5 Thyristors "SCR" on board....NEI Bought a shipment that had been destined to Argentina... but were embargoed due to the Falklands conflict. We were supplied with all the kit and caboodle to convert these sets to PAL "I" from PAL "M". However the three SCR's in the Line output stage were "fragile" to say the least..... Usually you could get away with changing one... see Television mag Sep 1984 pages 608.
One may say the saving grace was this chassis had plug in modules.. which made conversion easier... but reliability suffered.

[Wendymott]

Maarten...... Going back to Slovenia. Elektronica was in part of the Gorenje complex, and it was sooooo old fashioned...the soak rail was an overhead railway that took 12 hrs to complete. However about 9 years ago Elektronica was bought by an Indian company that invested heavily..... all new equipment on a new site.... this was for the now LCD Product.
I have lost track since I left NEI so I dont know the status.

[Philips210]

Originally Posted by Wendymott

One range of sets that became a nightmare were the Grundig GSC100/200 chassis.

Hi.

I remember having a long drawn out tussle with a 22" 90 Degree R/C Grundig TV fitted with the GSC200 chassis. The set had been dropped and the CRT was broken as well as a break in the main chassis and the cabinet had a break on one of the corner joints. The set was obviously a write off but I acquired it free of charge from a customer.

The necessary repairs were carried out to the chassis and cabinet and a regunned CRT was obtained from Chromavac. After fitting it and checking everything, power was applied but the set stubbornly kept tripping. I wasted a huge amount of time checking the thyristor line output stage to no avail. Then I thought about the scan coil on the regunned tube. I did some resistance checks and there were differences compared to the original scan coil on the broken tube. I carefully removed the coil from the replacement tube and fitted the old coil. Bingo, everything was OK thankfully. It took some time to position the rubber wedges in order to obtain the best convergence but the effort was worthwhile.
I can only assume the scan coil supplied with the regunned tube was intended for a transistor line output stage rather than a thyristor one so different line scan coil inductance and resistance values.

Also a big thanks from me too Dennis for that great article in Sept 1984 Television magazine, it was very helpful for other sets that I encountered.
I did generally like the Grundig thyristor sets which were good for access with all those plug in modules. I seem to remember there was a problematic decoder IC that only seemed to be used by Grundig.

Regards,
Symon.

[Wendymott]

Glad to be of service Symon :d
As part of the technical team (2 of us).. I often had to evaluate CRT variants..... The main things to check was the Scan coils, obviously, and the Heater series resistor. The tuning capacitor and "S" correction cap, once the values had been selected for EHT, Width and scan linearity, the heater resistor was selected. As we couldnt afford a "doosy" meter, I designed a CRT Heater meter which was published in June 2001 page, 480 as a necessity for the debacle mentioned earlier.

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

Digressing slightly, who made the Bush 2020? That's the one with the plug-in decoder which used a TDA 3562 decoder IC made by Telefunken. If you replaced it (a common occurrence) with a Philips IC there was no picture unless you changed a couple of components. I ask becuse there was a Goldstar chassis that was almost identical. So who stole what from who?

The Bush 2020 should have a Vestel 11AK01 chassis according to my records, . I'm pondering whether there's a German connection as well as I think the similar Goldstar models were "Made in Germany". It wasn't uncommon for the Turkish industry at the time to license foreign designs, see various cars.

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by Red to black

Hi Maarten,
As far as I recall Vestal themselves retrospectively re-named the Indiana 100/200 chassis as 11AK01/02 though there are huge discrepancies here due to 'inheritance' issues.

I remember looking up the schematics after a similar discussion. I've found that neither chassis matches the Indiana chassis, and the 11AK01 (and possibly the 11AK03? I don't remember) while vaguely similar is more old fashioned than the Indiana design and indeed more similar to a Goldstar chassis that I once encountered. The 11AK02 looks like a very ambitious ITT Digivision chipset based design.

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by Wendymott

Maarten...... Going back to Slovenia. Elektronica was in part of the Gorenje complex, and it was sooooo old fashioned...the soak rail was an overhead railway that took 12 hrs to complete. However about 9 years ago Elektronica was bought by an Indian company that invested heavily..... all new equipment on a new site.... this was for the now LCD Product.
I have lost track since I left NEI so I dont know the status.

Thank you very much for tidbits of information like this. I have always been fascinated by 'obscure', or rather relatively unknown brands and anonymous OEM manufacturers.

I'll send you a PM about the German design house, and forgot to ask you about the Spanish manufacturer. If you can't disclose that one either, I'll also ask in the PM.

[Maarten]

Getting back on topic, I think one of the harder to repair chassis I encountered was an obscure Italian OEM designed I2C bus controlled set (Philips reference design) on top of a Thomson reference design with the TEA2026 controlling both the boost converter power supply (with mains separation transformer) and the horizontal stage.

Their earlier sets were much simpler, but the version with the TDA4601 power supply tended to blow up when the power supply went high and the PCBs weren't silkscreened or marked in any way.

[ben]

Originally Posted by Maarten

nd forgot to ask you about the Spanish manufacturer. If you can't disclose that one either, I'll also ask in the PM.

Although in the 60s there were companies making sets like Ingra and Inter, By the 80s there was one major Spanish set manufacturer: Electronica Beltrán, whose products were sold as ELBE. They also used some Sharp designs and the VCRs were NEC. A popular set was a 14" model C1401 which in the Uk was badged Rediffusion.

After Philips withdrew from CRT set production, some of the staff took over the Spanish plant and operated under the name Tecnimagen. But that was circa 2003 IIRC.