Electronics repair shop needed

bighatnohorse wrote:

garyemunson wrote:
That kind of work is so labor intensive you'd be better off replacing with new. Without factory support with board level schematics and possibly of proprietary parts, I could see several days of shop tinkering with no guarantee of success.

I was hoping to get lucky. There are a few thousand of these units out there and an electronics shop willing to take on this kind of project could capture a nice income stream.
Replacing with a new system is the most likely conclusion.

A few thousand units, not worth the time it would take to sit down and trace out every single trace then figure out the resistor/capacitor values, lookup and determine all of the ICs and transistors... That process could take weeks or even months to fully reverse engineer. Then if the unit has some sort of processor/EPROM/Memory and all of the functions of the circuit and if those parts are custom made for that device you will be 100% out of luck.

Spent a lot of my youth working in little Mom ans Pop electronics repair shops, spent a lot of time working on equipment without schematics. Often times if TV manufacturers did not sell enough of a model, then Sam's would not bother doing the footwork I mentioned above and no schematic was available.

Ran into special custom made IC chips that were obsolete and the only way to fix was to find a used "donor" set which had a completely different problem that you could use the chip and hope that chip was good. Doesn't always work and often only fixed the unit for a short time.

As time moved forward, TVs got cheap, too cheap for folks to spend $75 or more to get repaired and that business pretty much died out. Just can't earn a living charging $50 for the amount of time it can often take to diagnose..

As a well seasoned Electronics Tech of well over 30 yrs I wouldn't touch anything like an important safety item like this with a ten foot pole for a customer. No way I would want to stick my head out that I fixed a critical brake system and you were involved in an event and the failure pointed back to my "repair".

While I might "tinker" with my own electronic stuff, it becomes a whole nuther beast when other lives may depend on some cobbled together repair.

Do yourself and everyone a favor, buy a new system..

Rather than reselling yours as parts, junk it. Good chance OTHER folks will have the very same problem that yours has (common problem) and reselling the junker as parts like you have found is a mine field of garbage..