Pioneer Elite Pro-510 problem - Page 85

Just saying 'Thank you!' to Mr. Bob! I love my Pioneer Elite PRO-720HD, and when it wouldn't power-on 2 weeks before superbowl I was trouble. When turning it on it would just "click" and then immediately go into standby mode with no picture. I found Mr. Bob here in this forum, who not only helped me remotely diagnose the issue, but also promptly performed the repair for a reasonable price. My TV is working again and all looks excellent! Many thanks for this forum and to those who participate here for your expertise, advice, and guidance. I am a loyal fan.

Another 510 owner chiming in from the east coast (Fairfax, VA).

Just picked this up for $100 from my buddy in Woodbrige. It's sat in his basement in exactly one spot since he bought it brand new back around year 2000.

It's in great shape, no scratches, wasn't very dusty inside when I took a look at the lenses and cleaned the top bits.

I'm going to take the lenses off and clean them tomorrow, but at some point would like to get into fixing the overscan I think. I downloaded the manuals and will start chewing on them in the coming days (I have a few long flights to SLC and Los Alamos the next two weeks).

When I first started reading this thread, I noticed that most of the relevant posts were from 2009. I can tell you that I'm very happy to see Mr. Bob still active and posting here in 2011, thank you sir.

I'll be sure to post up and let you know before I think about futzing with anything major.

Thanks,

-- Dave

Just know that reducing the overscan is not for the faint of heart. There's a monster learning curve - esp. on Pioneers - and once you're committed it's pretty hard to turn back. To really accomplish overscan reduction you have to essentially wreck your picture and rebuild it from near scratch. Not undoable - I do it all the time - but possibly not something for someone saying "I think..." about it, in any way shape or form. You can paint yourself into a corner real fast on the Pioneers.

But maybe you have time on your hands...

And that the Pioneers have quirks that you'll never see described or remedied in any service manual. Nothing subsititutes for experience.


Thanks for recognizing my stick-to-it-ivity! And for joining this thread!

b

I'm definitely not afraid of long and painful calibration processes and definitely enjoy the benefits thereafter.

I stared at the manual for a few mins. and noticed what adjustments are available in the service mode. Looks fun. I'll be sure to read through it at least 3 times before I decide to experiment.

I mostly learn by doing, and learn very quickly that way and have a decent mechanical/electrical background. This sort of thing is "fun" to me =)

Thanks,

-- Dave

Whatever you do, don't get cocky. I appreciate your gusto, but there are landmines in there.

Be sure to leave a good bread crumbs trail at the outset, before you dive in. Even the best calibrators do that EVERY TIME. I mark where the movable lens barrels are, against their fixed turrets. I write down the register values for GH and GV for the geometry. I write down every register value when it comes to color, tint, contrast, grayscale, etc., both in SD and HD. The owner and I make a game of it to make it go faster, I do the reciting and he takes the dictation.

BEFORE I CHANGE ANYTHING.

I made the mistake a few weeks ago of working with an owner who paid me for 2 hours of phone consultation, then said he was fine and had the service manual, and wanted to take it from there for the overscan reduction. I even coached him in how to write down all his starting values.

Next thing I knew he was emailing me, refusing to talk on the phone, saying he must have written down the starting values wrong, and just generally letting me know I had not warned him enough! That I was at fault for his screwing up his geometry/convergence by not warning him more strongly!

So now I warn people.

Don't be a cowboy in there! That is a highly sophisticated, high precision instrument. Have fun and I hope you ace it. But whatever you do, don't get overconfident!

There's a lot to know about the Pioneers which is NOT in the service manual. I will be there for you if you need me, but if you paint yourself into a corner and/or get in too much over your head, I won't be able to do much for you without being there in your viewing room, hands on and on location.

b

I know that shimming is the ideal way of dealing with correcting overscan, but not sure why the service menu way isn't. What issues exactly do you face when doing it that way? Does it mess anything up? Does is it cause extra stress on the convergence? Is it at least a good temporary option?

Temporary yes, but long term the new footprint will eventually etch itself into your phosphors, disallowing you to ever again do the shimming op, once the old and new footprints are both visible.

The shimming op retains the amount of CRT face in play, whereas the sm only method requires reducing the size of the footprint on those same faces.

The larger the amount of CRT face used the better - the more depth you'll have in your images. They'll just be more spacious. The smaller it is the more squinched up it is, and thus less expansive.

The 9" guns on the 65" screens always had more depth to them once fully dialed in, than the 7" guns on the same 65" screens.

b

Is there anyone in the Phoenix area that would like to have Bob come out and do some work on your TV? I'm interested, so perhaps we can organize a Phoenix trip and split the cost of his travel/lodging expense. Please talk to Bob or PM me.

Dave

I thought I would give a update on my 710 in FLA.

I'll give a quick history. I picked up a 710 that wouldn't come on. I found this forum and thanks to Mr Bob found the power board dead. After Bob did his magic on the power board the 710 was up running and looking good. The only problem was after the 710 was warmed up it would blow a five amp fuse if you turned the set off and right back on.

I did some researched and figured that it was probable the ICs chips. I had the chips replaced and as soon as I put power to the set the five amp fuse would blow.

Then I took the Pwd, IC and defl boards and put all three of them in my 510 and everything worked except the conv was off (expected). So I wasn't sure why it didn't work in the 710. I was able to pick up the inners of another 710 and was going to try to replace some other components in the set. I put the 3 boards back in and the 710 fire up with the conv off.

Now my problem is I can't get the conv to adjust properly. I'm in the service menu and the green doesn't move through the static option, and every time I try and move the blue to get it close to the green and red it splits into 2 line and then come back together after moving so far.

At this point I'm starting to think the IC chips I had put in might of been bad to start with. I'm going to have them replaced again with chips that I bought from MGM. At least that way I know they came from a good source.

Any thing else you might think I'm missing?

At least the set is up and running and now I just need to get the conv corrected.

Splicer 010 in Ohio has offered to put one together too, so I have suggested we combine the 2 and have PHX be one of the stops along the way. Sidney seemed to like that idea...

So if you could not get in on the recent Philly/St. Louis tour, here's your chance! Contact both of us, cc us with whatever you've got by email or phone, no pm's please -

b

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes in response to an IC croaking - sometimes opening, sometimes shorting internally - a resistor blows and takes down just its channel. There are 6 channels in there, h and v for R G and B. If green doesn't move on either its h or v directions, study the pinouts of the appropriate conv yoke plug-in at the board to that color, and find which part of the ICs it goes to, and test the resistors in that section.

One will most likely be blown. It's usually visually apparent, but doesn't have to be.

If you want me on it, just send me your convergence board and be done with it. I'll test it in my 610 here before I send it back.

If it's splitting up then going back together, chances are you've pushed its Coarse or Fine register values way off the beaten path and into being close to their extremes. CRT sets don't like that. This can cause so much stress on the system that fuses can blow in response to that. It might be your whole problem. Seems to fit your symptoms.

b

Speaking of landmines...

No, nothing too scary, but I just started seeing the blue flashes last night and unplugged the unit

I remembered that from reading your bit over here:
http://www.hometheatershack.com/foru...ttent-ops.html

I wonder if this is why the original owner decided to part with it. I'm not sure if I want to deal with desoldering this whole board and putting it back together either. I may have to send this your way once I find the instructions for removing it again...

-- Dave

I am surprised you found it over at the Shack, when the original thread about this phenom started here! That's the theme of this thread, this thread IS the original! This is the primary thread you will find the most information on, about this challenge. And again, don't pay attention to the beginning of this thread re. the repair, that info was in its infancy then and is now actually dangerous to practice. Pay attention only to the latest info on this situation, from the last 10 pages.

Of course the screenshots on page 45 and other pages are valuable too, but stay away from any advice on how to fix the problem taken from the earliest pages.

Glad I posted it over at the Shack tho, especially now!



No, if you are not a professional grade soldering person who does this every day for a living, I would definitely not recommend you try to resolder that board yourself. I don't recommend ANYBODY who is not a professional soldering person who solders every day, attempt it.

Far too much is riding on it. One false move and game over, once you put your finished product back into your set. That's why I test each board here in a fully functional 610 before I send it back to its owner.

Send it to me, allow me to do it for you, and I will warranty my resoldering work on that board for the life of your set.

ie, from now on.

Be sure it still works properly from dead cold before you remove it to send to me, tho. And don't keep it on for more than 40 seconds until fixed properly. Do NOT allow it to warm back up to cruising temp again, even once, before getting it fixed properly.



b

Phew, managed to re-solder ~160/~230 pins on the primary side of the board tonight and then ran out of solder.

I can't believe just how thin this board was assembled! I can visually see that at least 1/4 of the board has cold solder joints.

I think I have about an ~hour:30 left to complete the board, and give it a final look over between all of the close-spaced pins for solder that shouldn't be there. I think I'll lay it on my scanner bed and scan past it at my highest DPI... should provide a good image of all the solder joints.

I will say that if you don't have steady hands and a lot of patience, you should not attempt this =) I also noticed my iron getting mucked up pretty quick with the old solder. Gotta clean the tip frequently.

Thanks for the time on the phone tonight, Bob. Hopefully I'll be seeing you in the DC area this year.

-- Dave

Hope your resolder job does the trick. Sounds like you have your finger on the pulse.

Yes, let's hope a couple other owners jump in and we can form a tour for your Washington DC area -

b

Finished the resolder job earlier today.

Here's a BIG (5MB) image of the board showing all the shiny new bits.

http://dave.oc7.org/gallery/main.php...serialNumber=1

I think I did alright. I only bridged two pins @ C111 (Primary side, near top middle of board), but they are all on the same trace anyways, so it doesn't really matter. They just serve to leapfrog over another trace on the top side of the board anyways.

Gonna go put the board back in the TV and start putting everything back together.

Wish me luck.

-- Dave

Well, I re-installed the board last night after several inspections. Everything works as it should!

I celebrated by attaching the composite cables from the PS3, feeding it a 1080i signal, converging it, and then watching 3 hours of Planet Earth (David Attenborough version) =)

As a strange side-effect, I think the TV changes channels faster than it did before. I remember there being a distinct delay prior to cleaning up the power supply board...

Next up: deep optics cleaning and lens focusing... I'll probably save that for next week or so though...

-- Dave

Well I think you meant component cables, but who's counting...



You're gonna absolutely love what the optic cleaning will do for your set. You must report back here on that -

b

Yeah, component, sorry.

So I was thinking about that focusing technique... is there any reason I can't install the screen slid 50% to the right so that it's in position for focusing, but still allows me to reach behind it to adjust the lenses? I think that would be easier than having to have it 100% back into place all the time.

I'm going to take some before pics of the display this weekend (gotta find some detailed planet-earth scenes I like first and figure out what manual exposure seems to work out best). I plan to remove one lens at a time, clean the CRT below, and clean the glass again on both sides. Going to get some sprayway to keep Mr Bob happy

Once done I plan to fine-tune the focus on the optics and am just trying to think up some faster ways to do it. I'm assuming I should have the screen 100% in place, but I might experiment a bit as well.

Either way, it can't be as bad as fine-tuning the backstop for the autofocus mirror in my SLR camera bodies... that takes a LOT of patience. Mostly nothing is as scary as having to stick hex keys up against the sensor of an SLR camera anyways...

-- Dave

Hmm, so I undid the 4 screws that hold the red focus assembly to a large metal plate with what looks like a large concave red lens in it.

The lens is held in by this plate, and somewhere beneath it is the CRT...

Now my question is, how do I access the CRT face? Do I remove the lens and clean through the hole that might remain, or do I have to undo the two brackets underneath the CRT, and lift the entire assembly off of the CRT?

Slightly confused, searching for step-by-step pics on this forum.

Thanks,

-- Dave

Nevermind, figured it out...

Recommendations on CRT coolant Mr. Bob (I only let a little bit out)?

Looks like I'm taking the entire red gun out this week and need to make some kind of vacuum pump based on my readings...

I'm assuming this stuff is non-conductive? Feels kinda like mineral oil, but I suppose it is not, probably glycol?

Thanks,

-- Dave

Yer on yer own, my friend. I tried to warn you not to go in unguided when we talked on the phone, I sensed even then that you were a diehard DIYer who did not like taking anybody's advice when I tried to get you interested in my phone coaching, so I could keep you safe. But you had no such interest, my offers fell completely flat, from my recollection. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course...

It's conductive and glycol is part of its composition. Do not allow it to stay on any of your electronics as it will corrode them, from the electrolysis involved. This takes awhile, but is inevitable when you have coolant leakage. Leaving coolant in your electronics is a time bomb waiting to happen.

No CRTs ever have to come out of their sets when you do the optics cleaning my way. Removing a CRT has its own hazards, not the least of which is potential implosion. Be sure to wear eye protection if you insist on continuing down this path.

If you want to sign up for a phone coaching session I will be glad to help you out for my normal fees. Contact me off board, please, not by pm -

b

Well, you warned me when it came to the soldering, but when I mentioned optics cleaning above, you didn't warn me about the potential to let the coolant out. I also assumed that there would be a more obvious seal for such a thing. But there are many problems with assumptions =)

Speaking of assumptions, I assume there is some form of seal I need to source that lives between the coolant housing and that concave lens that seals it in?

I did also mention possibly doing sessions over webcam if/when I got into experimenting with overscan.


Yeah, glycol and I go long ways back... I've spent many nights up to my elbows in it...we have an interesting past.

It's mostly cleaned up, but I'm going to probably pull the board beneath the red gun tonight and clean it some more...not how I was planning on spending the first nice Friday night we've had here on the east coast this year, but it's okay.


I'm not opposed to phone sessions at all.

I have everything disconnected red-tube wise, currently checking manuals/etc...pretty sure I have to remove the yoke... trying to sort that out now.

Thanks,

-- Dave

Well, I have the red tube ready to be pulled, just left the high voltage wire for last (whatever day the bottle of coolant arrives next week).

I also need to acquire a flexy screwdriver to get the rear screws of the coolant cover out (I already broke them free) that way I can pull the unit out as a whole. My goal here is to leave the blue/green untouched so that it'll be less things to align when I reassemble.

-- Dave

If not enough coolant escaped to affect the look of the set's red image, you might get away without having to remove your red gun at all. If just a trickle, you could be home free. Leakage is only a problem for your picture if enough of it leaks out and in that portion of the space you don't have a lens being formed by the coolant itself.

Without that primary lens the picture is totally out of focus and undecipherable. If part of that lens is MIA because the coolant level has gone down to half or 2/3 or even 7/8, that part of your pic will not exist in any normal state.

The part of the pic that's missing will be upside down when it comes to appearing on the screen. Top will be at bottom, etc.

b

Yeah, that was my first hope, but there's air in there on the lens surface, so SOL. At least it's the red gun and easier to remove than the green =)

I didn't expect that lens to be the seal at all, I watched videos and found many tube replacement pictoral guides for other RPTVs and on each of them, that first lens is a free part and isn't part of the CRT coolant housing.

Oh well, you live you learn. I'm not mad, I'm just learning a bit more than I cared to learn this lesson =)

I'll keep you posted if you are interested.

Thanks,

-- Dave

That coolant forms the primary lens on ALL CRT RPTVs I have ever seen, and on the type designed for that in the ceiling pj realm as well. The Dwins had an air gap and I have seen that also on the Sonys, but rarely. Usually they design that coolant to be up against the CRT face to assist in keeping those faces cool, since they get quite a workout. Without that coolant they would overheat much more readily than with.

Since that gives them the opportunity to form a lens, they take it. Comes out like in my high school chemistry class, where we added oil between the slide and the lens of the microscope, and the optical characteristics changed accordingly.

You don't need to remove that gun to replace the coolant, but that might be easier than tilting the entire machine appropriately, like I did once when a Panasonic CRT RPTV needed the same treatment, for exactly the same reason. We used 2x4s to prop it up at the proper angle - straight up on the affected gun - before I went in and removed the coolant cover lens to replace that coolant, watching very carefully for the top air bubble. Ideally there's no air bubble in there at all, edges of which can reflect back the light from inside the chamber.

In the future you might want to consider paying me for 2 minutes of my time before you embark upon a journey you may not need to be taking. That's all the time it woulda taken to warn you off on all of this and into the correct direction. The deeper optics cleaning NEVER involves removing that lens and dealing with that coolant! No optics cleaning involves that. Cooties in the coolant yes, optics cleaning no.


The kind of time one loses by insisting on recreating the wheel himself rather than learning from someone else who has already been there - it's just uncountable, in hours. When you have a family or a highly paid profession that takes up all your time, you just don't have that kind of risk time available.

If you continue and proceed to break the neck off the red tube before you're thru, rack up a few more hours plus expenses plus setup from scratch on a new gun.

Most people don't have that kind of time on their hands. Congrats David, I know you'll pull thru OK, you're emminently/incredibly tenacious, I get that, and my kudos to you.

But I would not recommend your avenues of approach for most of the readers here. Owners, please let David's adventure here be a lesson to us all, and not an example of the ideal approach!



Try learning from someone else's mistakes. I am a fan and long term follower of multi-millionaire Marshall Sylver, and that would be one of his first advices: learn from the mistakes of others. It's much more cost effective in terms of your valuable, irreplaceable time than starting from scratch and making 20 years of mistakes just to catch up!

Check out Marshall on Facebook if you're curious, and contact me directly if you want to know more. I'll get you in -

b

The kicker here is that when I cleaned that red lens assembly and the lens on the coolant reservoir, they were pretty darned clean.

Then it made no difference?

Acid test is shining a strong flashlight onto the surface at a steep angle in a darkened room. Did you do that first before cleaning anything?

b

Well, I had already cleaned the top lens, the bottom lens had some dust on it, but the one in the coolant cover was pretty clean.

I don't see how that is possible, as it should be just as dirty, if not more dirty than the lens assembly.

-- Dave