I still listen to my vinyl...I have a pile of cassette tapes, and a tape deck to play them...I have a nice VCR...but I only use it to transfer from videotape to digital...
I have this memory from the mid 80's when I was at a record/video store and they had a laserdisc player up front, connected to a large TV and playing U2's Under a Blood Red Sky concert from Red Rocks...note that I said Laserdisc, not VHS, not DVD (didn't exist yet) (BTW that concert wasn't released on DVD until a couple of years ago).
I always wanted a LD player after that point, but of course they were very expensive, and the LD themselves were expensive and hard to find, depending on where you lived.
For the last year or so I have been researching LD players etc...Finally settled down on a few models, and finally picked on up...it wasn't on my list of players to get, but it had a large collection of LDs with it that I wanted.
Well...the shipper did a piss poor job of packing and it arrived smashed/squished in the front.
Well you can imagine that I was as crushed as the player...the seller gave me a partial refund, and I kept the disks.
So I have this busted LD player for free...now what?...I guess I will try to fix it...
Let me say that I got very lucky...yes the front panel is smashed, and the circuit board corner near the jog/shuttle is broken...but luckily it is not necessary for operation.
I won't waste time describing the mess...I didn't take any pictures because I didn't think I would have any luck.
Let me just say that I had to bend a lot of the steel frame back to somewhat shape...I had a straightedge I checked with...I took the entire top assembly apart, I took the optical system out and straighened some sheetmetal there...I had to spend a lot of time adjusting how the optical system flips from side A to side B...and finally about 2 hours trying to get the tray back in with the entire loading system back in sync.
Well all that worked, it correctly played disks and flipped to the B side. I watched about an hour of Star Wars IV with all the glorious film artifacts, and where Han shoots first...no CGI in sight.
...then near the end of the second side it died...
It shut completely down and I quickly pulled the plug...I was afraid that more magic smoke would escape.
I will admit that when I ran it, there was an eletronic smell...so I figured something would give out eventually...
And you know with the older electronics that you can expect the the capacitors will have been of minimal quality and will eventually dry out and fail.
Well yup it happened...
That cap I am holding in my hand is just the aluminum cap...the fuzzy mess at the middle of the upper picture is what is left of the cap...just above it is it's matching cap.
So I just ordered some caps from Digikey, and will replace all on this board...15 caps total, about $15...Hopefully nothing else was damaged in the process...BTW the cap lid was near the center spindle...about 6" away from where it blew up.
...stay tuned...
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1 comment:
you have an appalling amount of time on your hands. pretty neat solution.
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