After over 5 years, I finally replaced the lamp of our Panasonic PT-AX100E (after 2200 hours). However, when I handled the projector down from its ceiling mount, I heard loose parts flying around inside it. I immediately thought "uh oh, well that's not good" 
. I opened up the projector completely, in order to extract all loose parts. These were the parts:
Upon further inspection I am thinking now that these parts came from here (I tried to put the gear back in there, but without disassembling everything else, it was too hard):
I am assuming the gear fits onto the base of that axle, while the spring holds it in place and the white plastic hat goes on top of that axle (it would fit there) in order to hold the spring in place. If you zoom into the picture, you can see the teeth of the metal part (the one with the reflective surface) into which the gears would sink. I have marked the relative position of this axle in this schematic of the PT-AX100E service manual (red arrow):
I have no idea what this part is for (the one with the reflective surface, that is supposedly moved by that gear). May be it belongs to the PBS array? But what does it do? The projector seems to function normally, even with this fault. I do not notice any major issues, except that some LCD pixels do not seem to match up, but I can't imagine that this part has any influence on that.
So does anyone know what this could be for? And if so, is it worth going through all the hassle of disassembling the projector and trying to fix the gear back into its original position?
. I opened up the projector completely, in order to extract all loose parts. These were the parts:Upon further inspection I am thinking now that these parts came from here (I tried to put the gear back in there, but without disassembling everything else, it was too hard):
I am assuming the gear fits onto the base of that axle, while the spring holds it in place and the white plastic hat goes on top of that axle (it would fit there) in order to hold the spring in place. If you zoom into the picture, you can see the teeth of the metal part (the one with the reflective surface) into which the gears would sink. I have marked the relative position of this axle in this schematic of the PT-AX100E service manual (red arrow):
I have no idea what this part is for (the one with the reflective surface, that is supposedly moved by that gear). May be it belongs to the PBS array? But what does it do? The projector seems to function normally, even with this fault. I do not notice any major issues, except that some LCD pixels do not seem to match up, but I can't imagine that this part has any influence on that.
So does anyone know what this could be for? And if so, is it worth going through all the hassle of disassembling the projector and trying to fix the gear back into its original position?
. It's for special movie nights and console gaming. But when I researched how old our projector is already, I too was like "wow... 5 years already? And only 2200 hours?".
