Hey, welcome back to Retro Tech today. I've got a new monitor in the shop. That's the Sony pbm 14m to you I got this monitor on the discount. It was originally owned locally by a video production person and he never Officially serviced the unit after buying it so it does have some screen issues. I was well aware of that and buying it It wasn't shipped to me. It was delivered here or straight to my shop now to get things started We're going to turn the power on and put some RGB in a video game on there just to see what our screen looks like to begin with So there are a few issues on this screen. The first is that it's stretched out I've tried to make some adjustments to this initially when I first got it and it's not making the adjustments So when you try to go into the sub menu and adjust things and you're not seeing any kind of adjustment on your geometry That's generally meaning that your capacitors are failing on your geometry part of your main board So the picture is extremely over scanned. Let's try to under scan it with the under scan button and see that's Under scan in us vertically, but not horizontally So our horizontal controls are failing But to turn down the contrast and the brightness just touch and let's see if we can have see what Red green blue White so our colors are extremely off. This is too much red and our white So we'll need to turn down the red once we get it recapped to does show each color Which is good. That means that the color gun is firing properly These type of screen issues are generally related to capacitors that have gone bad on the geometry lines So I'm going to change out those capacitors and see if that helps my screen look any better First thing I need to do is remove my shell for this pvm So I'm going to go ahead and take the screws out and remove the shell first Now after I've removed all 10 screws, I simply pull back on the pvm shell towards me and it slides right out of place Everything looks normal inside here for a Sony pvm Just a lot of dust and really needs to be cleaned up I don't notice anything extremely off about it to begin with So now it's time to discharge this pvm I'm going to link to a video that I made a long time ago explaining Just how to discharge a CRT and why it's so important This is pretty much how you do it after you've removed the cap and get it out of the way Always go back with your screwdriver and tap that little anode ring It's the metal part on the back of the tube And you'll also want to tap the back of the suction cup where the two metal prongs are Make sure there's no electricity still built up on those prongs And once you've discharged it you can go and safely take all your boards out starting with your video input board Remove that first and unplug it. Now remember when it comes to these plugs and pvms They are all different shapes and a lot of times they're also different colors So it's not as difficult to remember where they plug back into My main chassis or a board will slip right on out and now we can give it a closer inspection First thing I'm looking for is any kind of bulging capacitors or maybe any that have leaked or split open or anything I don't see anything like that But these are the capacitors we're going to be changing right around this heat sink and these other heat sinks And then there are a couple more caps that will change right around this chip down here And that's all part of our geometry controls Well, I have my board here. I was just about to remove the capacitors I flipped it over and I noticed a number of custom Modifications, I guess you could call it to this particular PBM. Let me show you the three that I noticed right away I have no idea why these are in here and it's concerning to me that they may be affecting my color But it's hard to tell sometimes you get in these old machines and some Yo-Yo tech has come in here before and done a halfway repair And now we're stuck 20 years later trying to figure out what he did. Here's our first one It's a different type of capacitor, but here's a capacitor that's been installed here This is another strange capacitor being added over here and Then here's the third and final Customization, I'm not sure what's going on here, but this one really looks bad I'm just gonna take a lot of extra time to carefully remove these capacitors Remember, this is a double-sided printed circuit board and there are components on both sides And you could easily heat up the wrong component and damage something else Which I don't want to do when I'm trying to get in here and actually fix the monitor And so here we have all of the old capacitors that I just removed None of them appear to be leaking or failed in any way I'm gonna go back now and clean off the old pads with isopropyl alcohol right in this area I want to make sure there's no residue left behind or anything that could cause any trouble for my solder bond Now here's a new cap kit. These are the cap kits that I've designed personally if you take a closer look here You'll see they're all niche a cone or however you say that You know those high-end high-quality capacitors that you want to use when you're repairing these old electronics Now I'm gonna start soldering in my new capacitors and I'm gonna be using some new flux that I bought And this is some paste style flux And you take some kind of applicator and just wipe it on the end of the bond where you want to put your fresh solder So I've done that here and I'm gonna come in with some Fresh solder and just hit it right on the hot spot there when I heat up that pad and that leg of that capacitor It flows wonderfully with that new solder. And here's another way to do it You can not trim the legs of your Capacitors till after you solder them into place I just find that to be a little bit more difficult to get the solder joint to bond right away So for me, I like to come in and trim these legs and then try to solder it into place I trim them after I put them through the holes But I'll show you what I mean on this second point here if I go ahead and trim it and then come back in and solder it it It seems to bond a little bit easier because there's less surface area to heat up You don't have to heat up the whole leg of the capacitor to get the solder to flow over and bond with the pad Other one of these ways is fine. Just make sure that you've got a full bond there and there's no breaks in the solder I Replace all the capacitors that were in the geometry cap kit for this board But I just want to let you know that this is the first time I've been using this alpha Rasen paste flux and this stuff works wonderfully So I'm gonna put a link to this below because I think it would really help you if you're trying to Solder and you've not used flux yet. Try this it sticks in place as you saw in my little demo there The flux does leave behind a little bit of residue So I'm gonna go now and clean it off with some alcohol And then I'll reassemble the monitor and we'll fire it up and see if our screen looks any better than it did before After I clean the board I need to refit it back in its plastic frame And I'm gonna do this extra carefully because this old 25 plus year plastic is kind of brittle and it can break easily if you try to be too forceful with it It's just a matter of screwing in three or four screws here on the main board to attach it to this little Slide plate and slide plate is helpful because again It just helps you slide and guide this whole tray set up right back into the bottom of the monitor Once I have that tray in place. I don't slide it forward completely I leave it a little bit out so I can slip all the connectors back into place And then one of the last connectors I'm gonna connect is my anode cap I'm just gonna slip it back in there make sure it's nice and in place And then I will twist it around and make sure the cables hooked back into this safety cable holder All right, I was getting ready to install the backboard again, and I noticed this one was slightly different than Two it also has a jumper wire soldered in here. So who knows what the heck is going on here So many weird modifications. Let's just hope that's not hurting our picture quality But I just noticed that putting this together now. I just need to reassemble this monitor and test it out But I'm very Disheartened to see so many different weird modifications Again, I've worked on pvms a lot and I'm not seeing any little jumpers like this ever on a 14m or 14l Or any of the newer 14 inch models I have seen these kind of jumpers before on older pvms like 20 30s for example But those are generally ones that have come from the 80s and really early 90s Not these mid to late 90s models. All right. Now. Here's the big moment time to put some power on this screen and let's see what happens And unfortunately, I'm still seeing the same issues. I don't see an improvement and after I play with the submenu I'm not getting any kind of horizontal screen controls So this problem is way deeper than just the capacitors in the geometry area Again, I'm not seeing really any difference on this performance in this submenu It's still way over scanned and pretty much unusable. This problem is way deeper than just the geometry capacitors I thought we might get some screen reaction on our horizontal controls, but I still get nothing It's kind of frustrating because again, you've got a whole lot of really just terrible job done by whoever tried to service this before put a bunch of really bad jumpers and Things that just aren't safe and it's really not the right way to repair things So whoever did that? I mean they've pretty much made it to where I it might be impossible for me to fix these boards The only thing I can see doing is I'm going to start removing some of those things that they put in place And then maybe I'll put it back together and see if that has any difference on the screen And here's the first little silly Whatever modification that I'm just going to get rid of again, whatever happens happens, but I'm not Again sure why in the world anybody would have These diodes or whatever they are resistors put in here I just don't see What they could even be doing so let's pull it out. It looks like they're just tied in unison And soldered maybe to a couple junction points here But we're ripping them out see Okay So their point right here And then a solder point This right there.  There's definitely a reason it was there, but Unfortunately That's going to be probably too difficult to diagnose with all the problems that are supposedly in this monitor Basically, the a board is garbage All right. Well, there you have it I will be using this for parts and just let that be a little bit of a cautionary tale to you you that Sometimes it's way more than capacitors These old monitors may have been rigged up at some point in their life to just function and Then never have serious repairs done to them like this one appears to be and it also just has a lot of problems Hey, thanks again for watching today Please leave a like or if you have a comment or question Leave that below and I'll see you next time with some more retro content