Hi Steve, I absolutely love all your vast and extended knowledge of most things electronic. You don't edit out the parts where you need to nut out the problem to make yourself look like a genius, you take us on that journey with you, so we are able to learn along with you! Thank you for being honest and for all the time you put into making these fantastic educational and most enjoyable videos. Cheers, Darren
Glad you enjoy them. I actually want to convey that the repair game is mostly about working on unknown equipment you have never seen before, and the process used to repair it with no prior experience or service information, rather than just a how to fix this particular fault. Learning to diagnose is what I want to teach. Its why I get calls like last week to look at the pressure pump in the local community hall. We could have just got the municipal council to get it looked at, but that would have taken days or more, and we have people hiring it daily to run a small school. So I turn up and look at an Onga pump with pressure bladder on top which I have never worked on. I quickly determine the electrics are good, but the pressure switch doesnt operate when a water tap is opened. I then have to work out what part does what, and come to realise the water inlet to the switch is probably blocked up. As I unscrew the metal over the diaphram, the pressure is released and the switch operates confirming it must be the case. It was some rust and other mineral build up in a tiny inlet tube that I cleared with a screwdriver and bit of fencing wire, and it was fixed within half an hour. It was ability to diagnose things that got the job done, even though it was not an electronics problem at all. Shame I didnt think to film it.
Great Little TV, and interessting to know, that you know the German Brand Telefunken.. :) one of my first Televisions the Telefunken PalColor 1320 anl later the P540 in Stereo. and many others.
I actually worked for a repair shop that were a Telefunken repair agent in the mid 90s. They also did many other brands. I dont think they sold many here but we did see a few. They had service manuals for quite a few models, and I photocopied the circuits which came in handy for the few Thompson chassis that I saw later on. They also put the brand on some very cheap early Chinese stereos from memory that we repaired a few of under warranty.
Yeah by the 1980s quite a lot of the smaller European companies like Brandt, Nordmende, Telefunken and later Thorn-Ferguson were in the process of all coming under the Thomson umbrella even before they were completely taken over... this definitely has some similarities with mid-1980s Ferguson portables from the UK. The Ferguson ones were brilliant little TVs, very reliable. There is a Japanese connection - Thomson, Thorn and JVC (J2T I think they called themselves) formed a joint venture - JVC designed the VCRs and Thorn/Thomson did the TV's.
Now that you mention it, I think JVC TVs of that era had Hitachi tubes and even a grey coloured LOPT, and maybe even a similar upright power transformer. Maybe there is a connection. JVC VCRs were rebadged as Rank Arena, HMV and GE here on early models, and then almost every VCR for Philips from the mid 90s. HMV also rebadged their televisions after using Fujitsu General for their smaller sets and an Australian designed chassis for a while in the bigger screen sizes.
Hi Steve, I absolutely love all your vast and extended knowledge of most things electronic. You don't edit out the parts where you need to nut out the problem to make yourself look like a genius, you take us on that journey with you, so we are able to learn along with you! Thank you for being honest and for all the time you put into making these fantastic educational and most enjoyable videos. Cheers, Darren
Glad you enjoy them. I actually want to convey that the repair game is mostly about working on unknown equipment you have never seen before, and the process used to repair it with no prior experience or service information, rather than just a how to fix this particular fault. Learning to diagnose is what I want to teach. Its why I get calls like last week to look at the pressure pump in the local community hall. We could have just got the municipal council to get it looked at, but that would have taken days or more, and we have people hiring it daily to run a small school. So I turn up and look at an Onga pump with pressure bladder on top which I have never worked on. I quickly determine the electrics are good, but the pressure switch doesnt operate when a water tap is opened. I then have to work out what part does what, and come to realise the water inlet to the switch is probably blocked up. As I unscrew the metal over the diaphram, the pressure is released and the switch operates confirming it must be the case. It was some rust and other mineral build up in a tiny inlet tube that I cleared with a screwdriver and bit of fencing wire, and it was fixed within half an hour. It was ability to diagnose things that got the job done, even though it was not an electronics problem at all. Shame I didnt think to film it.
Great Little TV, and interessting to know, that you know the German Brand Telefunken.. :) one of my first Televisions the Telefunken PalColor 1320 anl later the P540 in Stereo. and many others.
I actually worked for a repair shop that were a Telefunken repair agent in the mid 90s. They also did many other brands. I dont think they sold many here but we did see a few. They had service manuals for quite a few models, and I photocopied the circuits which came in handy for the few Thompson chassis that I saw later on. They also put the brand on some very cheap early Chinese stereos from memory that we repaired a few of under warranty.
Yeah by the 1980s quite a lot of the smaller European companies like Brandt, Nordmende, Telefunken and later Thorn-Ferguson were in the process of all coming under the Thomson umbrella even before they were completely taken over... this definitely has some similarities with mid-1980s Ferguson portables from the UK. The Ferguson ones were brilliant little TVs, very reliable.
There is a Japanese connection - Thomson, Thorn and JVC (J2T I think they called themselves) formed a joint venture - JVC designed the VCRs and Thorn/Thomson did the TV's.
Now that you mention it, I think JVC TVs of that era had Hitachi tubes and even a grey coloured LOPT, and maybe even a similar upright power transformer. Maybe there is a connection. JVC VCRs were rebadged as Rank Arena, HMV and GE here on early models, and then almost every VCR for Philips from the mid 90s. HMV also rebadged their televisions after using Fujitsu General for their smaller sets and an Australian designed chassis for a while in the bigger screen sizes.