Thorn 8800 chassis vintage TV set from 1977.
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- Опубліковано 5 сер 2022
- Here I present a 1977 vintage Thorn 8800 chassis TV set from 1977, the last time I repaired one of these was in the 1980s so it took me a while to get back into the swing of things, and of course there are some slight mistakes in the video, but I got there in the end ! Michael Dranfield . 6-8-2022.
- Наука та технологія
So many memories. My family rented one of these and it was always breaking down. As a 10 year old boy I used to love watching the engineer repair it. It was both fascinating and also it meant that I was getting my television back - which was my window on the world.
Same for me , lots of memories repairing these back in the 80 s , un reliable due to over dissipation but Thorn never seemed to learn a lesson and always kept on making the same mistakes in later models .
Very nice tv-set. I Like this old Sets
Me too, stuff like this brings back very happy memories for me as I grew up repairing them , I have more to work on time permitting .
I remember I recommended this TV to my in-laws, I was a TV engineer back then and I liked Thorn models.
Yes I think this did have and ultrasonic remote. This really takes me back to my 20's and my TV engineer days back in the UK, thanks for posting.
Glad you liked it , brought back a lot of happy memories for me too .
Great stuff Michael thanks Michael really enjoyed the old school.
Great work Micheal
many thanks .
Enjoyed that telly repair. Thank you. Brought back memories from 30+ years ago when I fixed these things in my shed.
Glad you liked the memory, there cant be many of these sets still around now, I remember scrapping loads in the 80s because the tube was worn out .
@@michaeldranfield7140 I guess most TV's from this era have long since been thrown as more reliable ones arrived on the scene. It used to annoy me that about half of the power consumption was used to roast the components back then!
Love this design of Telly!... Its just fantastic. So wish CRTs never died out.
It was indeed very sad, tried and tested technology that had been around more or less since TV was invented , now sadly consigned to the history books .
I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Really took me back to the 70’s when I was doing the same.
your not alone , a lot of people said the same , more vintage stuff coming soon .
Love the fault finding reminds me of the day.
Me too, these old sets bring back so many happy memories.
I miss this old box style TV - no chance of the damn things tipping over. Also the old house cat used to like camping on the warm top on a cold night. Bit disconcerting with the windscreen wiper tail flicking across while you were watching Bonanza though. 😜😁
and they were built to be repaired, you didn't have to buy a new one every 18 months .
Excellent work, and yes Tantalum caps are notorious for shorting out. A common failure mode is that they will appear to work for a few minutes then the resistance drops. You can normally tell which one it is as they get very hot!
these days I dont work with tantalum capacitors any more , I think the last one I replaced for a living was in a vintage graphic equalizer a few years ago , but yes what you say ties in with my findings , the cap was OK when I first tested it, then a few minutes later its leaky .
@@michaeldranfield7140 The short often disappears when the equipment is turned off for a bit so will again work for a few minutes next time you turn it on, then away it goes again and so on. Used to get it all the time on radio equipment.
Great vid Michael. My uncle bought that model for my grandparents in 1977. As they were elderly he figured a remote control would be of help. Their fascination was priceless. Two years later we got a Ferguson videostar VCR . I remember one night there were nineteen people packed into the sitting room to watch a recording of a football match. The excitement of looking at the goals again and again was hilarious ! God be with the days .
The Thorn sets were the backbone of the British rental market and no doubt millions were produced but I bet there's not many left now .
I do have the Ferguson video star videos so may be for another video in the future .
My father was self taught from television magazine and used to buy ex rentals in batches of around 10. Scraping the worse, tube re gunning, rejuvinating, fault finding, setting them up had a mirror on the bench. The wood cabinets would be sanded and varnished. Much of the village had a tv from my father.
Only time I did sanding, varnishing was when I accidentally damaged a customers TV on the door handle carrying into the workshop, when I started out selling refurbished TV I use to buy EX rental GEC s in brown plastic cabinets as you could re cover the whole TV with a roll of fablon in just a few minutes .
Terrific keep it up. Sir. Thank you very much indeed...
No problem , more coming soon !
Great video. That brought back memories. I served my apprenticeship as TV/video engineer from 1979 and worked in the game until early 90's when I moved into the medical side.
Moved into the real money then !
I shouldn't be doing this job now but its a lifelong thing with me .
I too served my apprenticeship in Radio/TV engineering back in the UK. It was a good grounding for a long career in electronics.
@@KB1UIF Sadly no career in Television servicing any more .
Love the old workshop Michael. Real nostalgia... Excellent
As you can see I have been round a bit !
Awesome work.
Really nice looking set.looks around a 20 inch picture tube.looks very involved inside but no problem for you Michael.enjoyable video
BXL was Bakelite Xylonite LTD of Birmingham. My old Dad used to work there in the seventies. They indeed made all sorts of stuff like this. Also a Formica type product called Wareite.
Many thanks , I remember Formica, my dad glued a large piece onto our wooden kitchen table to make it look like new again !
Gosh takes me back did a little bit of work but wasn’t a qualified TV engineer … I joined the RAF about 6 weeks after the date in that job and became an electronics tech in telecoms originally
These old TV videos seem to be very popular , 40 years ago Thorn were the backbone of British TV manufacture and a lot of people would have either had one of these or rented on just the same as this .
@@michaeldranfield7140 yes I remember the TX9 chassis or was it TX90 haha … the other earlier chassis that was popular in its day was the BRC3000 … seem to remember terrible issues trying to correct EW, Pin Cushion distortion and other related convergence issues trying to balance everything out without having access to a colour bar, grey scale, grid and test card generator and using a large wall mirror during the BBC test card transmission time to try and get the best fit … gosh those were the days
I remember watching a TV either the same,or very similar in the mid to late 70's. My tooth fell out,and I dropped it down the back of the TV. Never saw it again.
sets of this age always had lots of ventilation holes in the back you could drop things into , they had to with the amount of heat been generated .
Yes very good nice to see someone being interested in it and repairing it to basically new instead of saying oh its not worth it.
I know what you mean , most shops now are only interested in selling a new one .
Another great repair and trip down memory lane Michael, thank you. Have to admit I don't miss having to do convergence jobs, it used to be my pet hate.
me too , didn't the 30AX make life easier .
Michael, when I was repairing TVs, I bought an expensive B+K tube tester with leads that I only used once.
I wish I could sell it.
It cost me £1200 and £70.00 for the leads
Problem is now with the demise of CRT these things are pretty worthless , I still have mine but would never sell it just for the memories it brings back.
One of my favorite models was the Thorn 3000 3500. I liked the way you could get access to everything and flip the top panels up to gain access.
Thorn also produced some excellent service manuals to aid fault finding. The guys I worked for used lighter fuel and oil to clean switches, I remember one TV bursting into flames when the VHF/UHF system switch was operated. The good old days. LOL.
The power and line boards in the 3500 were difficult to access the back of the pcb s but apart from that thy were ok but getting a bit long in the tooth in the 1980 s , I still have a few bits for the 3500 , R2008 , R2010 , red 2 amp cut out and the flywheel diode for the chopper PSU . and of course the yellow service manual folder !
We had a Thorn 3000 that belonged to someone on a steel hull house boat . They used a diesel generator for the mains. It was forever blowing up or sitting in the workshop after a repair .lt ran perfectly on soak for weeks sometimes . The owner refused to admit that his clunky diesel mains generator was defective . It annoyed my boss that we had to go 12 miles to get the set each time it failed.
@michaeldranfield7140 I still have a safety cut out in my spares collection somewhere. I found the access to the psu boards and line scan panels difficult at times myself.
Fantastic video! Thanks for sharing. A set from the days when we used to actually make stuff in the UK!! Not only that - but they could be repaired as well (and still can)!! I used to make pcb's using one of those pens as well! I used an off-balance Meccano electric motor on it's base to agitate the ferric chloride and (hopefully) speed up the etching process. Veroboard was quicker though, provided you didn't make any mistakes (which I often did!)
glad you liked it , more coming , as you say a set from when we were leaders in this field and Thorn employed thousands of people producing this British designed and built stuff , dosnt it make you wonder where we all went wrong , these were exciting times for me where you could make a good living out of straightforward repairs .
My that was a blast in the past for me that top conv pannel always cocked on them think we had 20 of them out on rent
Looks well cooked in this set , lots of Thorn designed set ran far too hot and suffered from burn ups in the line stages .Remember how bad the 9600 was round the EW modulator .
An excellent production Michael, very nostalgic for me, you did very well to troubleshoot the component faults but I’m sure the feeling of achievement was worth the time and effort. It’s a great shame that such talents aren’t financially viable. I too used to use copper clad pcb and etching fluid to produce project boards as a youngster. Such talents have been totally de-skilled nowadays by using software packages such as EWB. One push of a button and the PCB screen is produced from the onscreen circuit diagram, this enables the board to be produced, amazing. Great stuff, keep it up. Best wishes.
I have to admit I'm not a big fan of all this software stuff, give me back the good old days any day, agreed, I did think I did well considering how long ago I last repaired one of these , things kept coming back to me though and it was a good trip down memory lane .
Same here, started with srb, then quickly moved on to fibreglass, the ultimate then, still is! Hand layed out and drawn with a Dalo pen, which I still have and amazingly still works! Then hand drilled with a mini drill press, good lord it took hours! Now though, I admit to moving to the darkside, I use one of the Chinese pcb specialists. The quality, speed and price is just to good to not use. For surface mount there is no alternative for the hobbyist.
@@turboslag Had the Dalo pen with blue ink , I still do hand drawn pcb s now and ferric chloride etching , maybe I'm too old fashioned !
@@michaeldranfield7140
I don't think so, there is a place for traditional techniques and if it that is a preference then fine. Personally I could never get my DIY boards to even compare to the superlative quality and finish of the PCB specialist companies, and for me time and money are important factors. The finished project looks so good to.
Them old colour sets had such good build quality
Nice work. Some months ago my LCD multistandard TV that does VHF band 1 & 2 UHF & digital, it has PAL & PAL 60, NTSC 4.43 & NTSC 3.58 & SECAM with HDMI & SCART & componant in & a smart card reader with USB & a DVD player, so too nice to throw out. Im a ham radio operator anyway so know the script. It went down & it was a cap on the PSU on the 12 Volt rail. The cap was a fraction of its original value 2700 mF was reading only around 6mF but it was its low resistance that caused the PSU to keep tripping out. This was my thinking that it was a smoothing cap down & it was the 3rd cap i tried. I did not have a 2700mF so I inserted a 3300mF but there was a place for 2 caps the original & the next value up & the slightly bigger cap fitted perfectly. So the other day repared it. Working again.
Very common now in all types of equipment due to the fact almost every manufacture uses cheap caps sourced from china to keep the cost as low as possible .
The first tele we had when I was a kid was a Thorn. It was in a Rosewood cabinet with a coil antenna that needed constant adjustment and tweaking depending on weather, number of bodies and their proximity in the room and adjacent rooms. It was a bugga for eating rectifier valves. Good thing it was rented and repairs were handled by the rental Co.
I remember having a day off school watching the moon landing on it.
Cheers Eric
Thorn sets were very popular with the rental companies, prob because of there ease to repair, back then a lot of people chose to rent as a television set was a very expensive luxury to buy outright.
Great video had me on tenterhooks👍
Bit of a shock when the cap exploded though !
Exact TV we had in the late 70s until about 1985 for when it went wrong and we bought a teletext TV from Hitachi... I remember exactly what the remote control looked like, and if you jangled keys sometimes it would mute or change channel, also the remote would scare my nan's cat. This was our first colour TV and when we got it my dad played a Joke and had the colour wound down, we bought it second-hand, we never rented. It was much more reliable than our previous black and white TV with valves, as the repair man was such a constant visitor back then
yes , these sets had ultrasonic remote control, you could point the remote at a cat and its ears would prick up , and as you say a bunch of keys would replicate the frequency .These sets were getting pretty un reliable by the mid 80s and most of the tubes didn't last too well either .
Great job mate
Glad you liked it , many thanks for watching .
Nice one MD that bought back some memory's , I was a field engineer working my way to workshop foreman for Rumbelows happy days ,always liked the 8500 easy to repair, remember beware the blue tant (and red).
you don't come across tantalum capacitors in modern equipment any more but I will now remember this for the next time , glad you liked the memory's, I don't even think rumbelows even exists any more
@@michaeldranfield7140 Rumbelows are long gone, there is a facebook group for ex Rumbelow staff mainly sales.
Tants are notorious for going short circuit. My mate fixes lots of military grade comms equipment and they use loads of Tants and he’s always changing them.
I dont see many of them nowadays but will try to remember this for the next time .
Magic Smoke! Rifa capacitor? I love these videos. When I was about 9 or 10, I remember finding lots of scrap telly boards behind the Radio Rentals shop across the road from my parent's house. Me and my best friend at the time would scavenge through it all and I used to bring back lots of panels and circuit boards, not to mention valves. I always remember seeing lots and lots of tropical fish capacitors which fascinated 9 year old me. It formed my interest in electronics and TV but I used to play with the boards more than anything else. It must have been the local service engineers using it as a base to dump their scrap. I didn't really understand what I had at the time, it was when I got to my early teens that I got my first Micronta multimeter and Weller soldering iron from Tandys!
if you were to ask me how I got into electronics in the first place I could not give you a definitive answer but as a very small boy I remember going out for long summer walks with my dad and seeing discarded bits of radios and TV sets lying in the grass I would twist off the pretty colour dog bone resistors and take them home, so like you it must be a colour thing , problem is I'm still like that now , if I'm building something and say I need a transformer I will buy the red or blue on over the black one !
@@toddblanks Glad you liked it , doing these videos help me to remember better times , in fact everything was better before we had flat screen TV s ,
Im lucky that I convinced a friend of mine , who is by the way a much bigger hoarder than me , to get rid of some of the TV he's has had for the past 25 years as sets like this don't come along very often and when they do they command very high prices , so more coming soon !
@@toddblanks Glad you liked the memories, more coming soon ,
@@toddblanks I am self taught but in the 90s I took a 4 year city and guilds course so I could get a qualification just in case I ever needed another job ,
back in the day there was no internet and I shared my skills , like many others did by writing for a magazine called Television which has now gone bust.
I'm glad you liked the video , it helps me to relive my past, the problem now been as I'm getting older I'm forgetting a lot of stuff I use to so I'm not as good as I use to be back then . .
Most Excellent! Thanks for sharing! You have jogged my memory once again Michael. I now recall getting caught out by that same tantalum cap next to that I.C. and not marked on the diagram back in 1981/82-ish LOL... That was at southern rentals, and after a take-over by Rediffusion and everyone at got made redundant, I never ever got to see one of these ever again. I only ever worked for one independent retailer after that before gong self employed, so I can only assume the 8000 series were only rented and never sold, down this way.
Someone else commented that there were many different variations of this pcb and that's why it was not on the diagram , glad you liked the video brought back a lot of memories for me to !
Turned out to be superb what a great tube and set
That's what I thought, I don't think there will be many of these about with a crt as good as this .
I used to go to the back of our Rumbelows branch in Heswall in the Wirral. They had a lock up around the back and they used to throw out all the old TV sets and the PCBs not cost effective to repair. I used to go and grab loads of stuff and strip off the components for my projects.
Same here , in the 70 s I use to climb into the industrial bin at radio rentals looking for boards , never found anything good though, all my best stuff came for the tip !
Bit of memory jerker this one Michael, on my pathway in the industry as a young 18 or 19 year old I worked at the giant Thorn Consumer Electronics (BRC) in Bradford.
At that time it was the biggest TV factory in Europe employing north of 3000 people. In my time there we designed and built the 8000/8500 series and the 3000/3500 series, the last product before closure was the Cyclops 9000. I continued in the business - field and workshop , rental and retail for various companies and ended up at Pace Micro ( closed 20 odd years ago). Racking my brains, I cannot ever remember Thorn using the Toshiba tube, Mullard and Mazda but not Toshiba, besides, the emission was far to good on your set for an original fitting. A mate of mine worked for Telebank - they were the slot TV leaders.
I liked the pun when you described the sound as a low rumble on switch on when it was an ex Rumblelow set !
My first job was with BRC Hainullt making radiograms.
Makes you wonder where it all went wrong ,BRC, the biggest factory in Europe, pace micro leading the field in sky digital boxes and they have all gone , now nothing more than a memory ,glad you liked the video , brought a lot of memory's back for me , when I was good at repairing TV sets ,
I remember the Thorn syclops 9000 chassis , always had the EHT tripler breaking down to chassis .
Talking about convergence, the early sets had a fairly large board which you pulled up from the back. Some of them showed a 'start' arrow. A pal of mine asked the customer for a dice as he had to throw a six before he could start 😅😅
This is giving me traumatic 1980s flashbacks...
Glad you liked it , more coming soon .
Great video Michael. Keep up the good work.
Glad you liked it , there is more coming !
We had one of these when I was growing up, it was our first colour TV. The TV was positioned on top of a cabinet where the cutlery was kept - the sound of knives and forks being put away regularly toggled the volume between high and low, but I don't think we ever had "stray ultrasound" that changed the channel. I remember that as the set aged the brightness slider slowly has to be pushed higher and higher - it was close to the top by the time I left home, don't know what happened after that!
A bunch of keys could also produce the right sound for remote operation , one good thing about ultrasonic remote is you didnt need a special tester to see if the remote was working , a cat would be sufficient !
I remember this set well, we had one at home and yes the channels would change whenever any high frequency sound was around. We used to have a bottle full of pocket change that we would count out, bag up and take to the bank each December. Pouring the coins out would change the channel - oh how we laughed. Loved the reaction to the bang! Having worked on Monitors/terminals, including on site from late mid to late 80's my reaction to leap out of the way if something 'popped' was just the same :-) I still do some LCD TV Repairs for friends and neighbours but find that unless it's a replacement of bulging caps, it's easier to buy a board off e-bay. Thanks for bringing back some very happy memories. Just need a video on the Ferguson Videostar piano key VHS unit!
Glad you liked the memories, I do have some JVC piano key video recorders so may be in a later video I will get one of these going.
Good video as always brings back a few memories seeing the 8800 back into life , just beware the servisol switch cleaner think we changed to electrolube because of the disintegrating plastic caused by servisol👍
I still have bad memories of servisol and plastic cabinet sets such as the GEC which would disintegrate a couple of weeks after spraying noisy tuning controls .
wow funny how quickly my mind remembers so much about these and the 8500 the moment i saw the back cover. you took me back to my teen years late 80,s early 90,s collecting these from fly tipping sites all around plymouth usually ex radio rentals always with good condition mullard crts and just simple faults, sound output feed resistor o/c , eht tripler ,loptx and occasionally faults that turned out to be design errors requiring component value changes- companys were really honest back then !
So many memories for me too , life was so much easier repairing sets like these , as you say all the stock faults and easy to get spare parts , its a far cry from the crap produced today .
@@michaeldranfield7140 well wasn't all plane sailing I can always remember how replacement parts the quality was terrible you ended up fitting 2 new loptx to find a good one but the tech support was there and the sharing of information between competitors when you got stuck on a set was amazing
@@darrenmurphy6251 The worst LOPTS for this were made by HR and as you say fitting one of these could cure one fault but bring on another , I remember once fitting a HR transformer in a Thompson set and it cured the tripping but then I had lack of width , after much time wasted I replaced the transformer with a Konig one and the width problem was gone .
That has good colour for a 45 year old TV 👍
I know , the tubes never lasted too well in thorn sets so I don't know how this one is so good .
Really interesting. We had one of these from about '77 for nearly 10 years. It was badged Baird, from Radio Rentals. The touch tune buttons were more recessed into the panel, otherwise identical. The wood effect case was more thermoset plastic than this one. The ultrasonic remote, powered by 9v battery so it was quite thick was just two buttons. One for sequential channel change, the other muted the sound to almost silent. Seem to remember the main on/off switch often failed.
Mains switches were a common problem in a lot of sets back in the day , some used in Sony sets use to burn up , I remember the remote but don't have one for this set but a viewer on here has offered me one .
Great video Michael. Your warts and all approach is much appreciated. It wasnt only me that had these problems then:)
I hated these sets back in the day. So I went over to GEC. Ment only a few sets of stock boards for emergencies.
Great work. Brought back many , scary memories
The GEC in the plastic cabinet was my preferred choice and we use to buy van loads of them at a time for refurbishing and selling, the thorn sets were getting a bit long in the tooth in the mid 80 s and most had a poor tube any way.
Glad you liked the memory.
Oh yes..I hated these bloomin sets. We went over to GEC almost completely
I remember that chassis with the touch channel switch. I seam to recall it liked to change channel all by it's self about once every few days.
Amazingly it worked fine in this set considering it was in the cellar !
Really liked the video Michael! I have had across the line and snubber caps in open reel recorders blow up while testing also! Scares the dickens out of you, but relatively harmless to the equipment. Great job on this old Thorn.
Lots of people commented that the exploding cap was to be expected as the brand is particular bad , I will try and remember for next time !
Ein Schciker Alter Kasten aus der guten alten Englischer Ptoduktion ;=) ^^ .
Mich wundert das in dem Fernseher noch eine 140X Delta Röhre Verbaut ist , ich kenne die Fernseher von 1977 die haben schon X510 oder sogar schon X540 In Line Farbbildröhren verbaut.
Ein Super Bild für einen so Alten Fernseher mit so vielen Betriebsstunden .
The 120X series are 90 degrees tubes, so less power draw and easier to converge.
bloody hell this brings back memorys :) used to work on these and many others back in the day
valuable memories for a lot of people, me included !!
BXL was Bakalite Xylonite Ltd which also used to make plastic bottles for Fairy Liquid and others as well as Palitoy dolls. A huge conglomerate with factories all over. Owned variously by Distillers of Thalidomide fame and BP!
Amazing you managed to get it going with all those dry joints, in 1977 we had an itt KB hybrid set, always braking down , I remember watching are you being served on it :) thanks for posting
ITT KB hybrids such as the CVC5-CVC9 were notoriously un reliable due to the amount of heat generated in the cabinet from the line output valves .
@@michaeldranfield7140 yes the engineer was in the back every 3 seconds. Ours was 26 inch tube, only 4 mechanical channel buttons . First thing I ever saw in colour was nationwide. Was outside broadcast about 1976 at a fair I think, that's when 625 was turned on in Oban and we had for the first time 3 channels. The set before was black and white 26 inch dual standard itt KB on 405 lines with only bbc1
Hi Michael,I remember these sets,I cut my teeth on this make of set meny moons ago - thank you for the look inside
All the best
Glad you liked the video I am sure it will bring back many memories to a lot of people , me included !
Hi Michael. I've just watched your video from 2020 A lifetime of electronics - A tour around my workshop. Brilliant, but I daren't let my wife see it or I'll lose my workshop at home. LOL. PS I would love to see that old Thorn 1500 sometime. I cut my apprentice teeth on those. I still have the Thorn 1500 service manual I was given for my training course.
I have a video on the Thorn 1500 Chassis on youtube already , a 20 inch set , I put a new tube in it but never got round to finishing some small jobs on it .
@@michaeldranfield7140 Thanks, I've watched it. What a blast from the past. I remember having to change the droppers out on all the customer's returned sets. They'd all be decorated like a Christmas tree with resistors patched in, just like yours. I remember the valve bases always needed re-soldering or tightening up. I remember I liked doing them though, so much easier than the colour sets. No convergence to deal with. That 3500 chassis was the toughest for me at the time. All the dynamic convergence controls would be overheated and brittle. The line and power boards got so hot that components dropped out of them. Not designed to be left on all day really.
BXL was Bakelite Xylonite Limited, they made laminated products including SRBP circuit board.
very many thanks for the info .
Fantastic content as always Michael, I love your videos they always take me back to when I fixed stuff as a teenager and made things on bits of PC board using a Dalo pen as the resist before etching with Ferric Chloride. Back to the Tantalum's we always had problems with those little fire balls if used on RF decoupling as the low frequency path to ground in conjunction with parallel 1n ceramic caps, the ceramic caps are fine but the often the Tant's went on fire, we stopped using them and used normal Mullard electrolytic caps which never had any problems. The products we made where high power RF power amplifiers back in the days when I was working at Microwave Modules in Liverpool.
Anyway keep up the good work and keep well
Regards
Dave.
Glad you liked it , more coming , I don't see many tantalum capacitors these days , maybe they went out of fashion if they were very un reliable , I still use Ferric chloride for my projects these days but have to use black indelible ink marking pens , not as good as the dalo with the blue ink . For thick tracks though I still use red nail varnish .
Reminds me of when I worked for Data General. Since they were new, the Tantalum capacitors usually didn't fail unless they were inserted backwards, but when they did, it was always a fireball. In a dusty old TV in a wood case, that could be a real danger. I've never noticed them in consumer electronics; but it would have made sense to have special rules for enclosing them so that any flame would be contained.
@@pcno2832 Last time I had dealings with tantalum was a few years ago in an old graphic equalizer.
You've taken me right back to my apprenticeship at D|E|R in Ashton-under-Lyne 1983-6. That tube is the best I've seen it must be newer than the set. As the convergeance panel and power board look high hours. I don't ever remember them being made by Toshiba. Of course Rumbelows may have had a different supply chain to D|E|R even though they were both owned by Thorn-EMI I think. The remote for that set used to be a three button ultra-sonic. Sound up/down were the two black buttons and the red button changed channel and turned the set fully off with a relay if you held it on. Great video thanks for sharing it.
Glad you liked the video, hopefully more to come soon as I have some more vintage sets to look at.
Great video Michael........ I worked for Rumbelows in Dartford Kent, back in the 70's, as a tv engineer. Done 2 year in the workshop, then 2 years of repair in customers homes. Thorn was one of the main brands, 3000 through to the 9000 chassis. I did repair these 8800 at the time and remember the failing components, you highlighted.
Thorn sets were the backbone of the British rental market although pretty un reliable and tubes had a short life but designed to be repaired which is something you cant say about todays stuff.
Hi Michael, You were in the Television magazine as I remember. Repaired dozens of Thorn 8800.
Correct , I wrote for Television magazine right up to the day they went bust .
Me to repaired lots of 8800s but its a long time ago now !
I knew the name seemed familiar! But did anyone remember Les Lawry-Johns warning? Beware tge blue tants
@@robertharris2262 Don't remember that one, but I used to read all his stories.
@@scotisland The gypsy's warning, specifically madame Martine, April 1980. Step one, discover I no longer had the download of all articles. Step two, retrieve all articles again. Step three, attempt to skim through and find reference without getting sidetracked. Setp four, fail - but have fun doing so...
@ 0:15 - wow you spoofed me there. Just as you say "a trip down memory lane" your camera suddenly de-focuses. I was fully expecting a cinematic dissolve into your memory LOL -- but no, it just focuses again on you!
I'm not a professional film maker like some on youtube but I think my content is ok .
I also used to go to the tip to see what electronics I could find. I was once thrown off site by a worker there, but he let me keep the PCBs I had found. Later I got friendly with the local TV repair business and they let me take a pile of PCBs from their junk room.
In the 70s the tip was a place you went for a Sunday day, ust an open space of ground or quarry where any one could dump or take home anything they wanted and I loved it, these days though the tips are usually owned by the council who have latched onto the amount of money they can make from what people throw away and getting anything at all is impossible now unfortunately.
Another great video..nice to start with an exploding RIFA cap.
with the buzing choke we used to paint then with varnish untill the replacement were releaste and to quote LLJ beware the blue tant.
I have heard of people talking about RIFA caps before but this is only my second experience with a faulty one , the last time I had one go faulty was quite a few years ago in my vintage Farnell 350v bench power supply and all it did was pour out loads of smoke .
@@michaeldranfield7140 , i have experienced a few times a blown Rifa capacitor in more modern devices (3Kv Electrophoresis powersupply), but i still remember the smell allmost like burned wood, that stays for days.
8800 and 9600 were being scrapped when i joined thorn i always liked the tx100 and tx10 chassis, the oldest one i fixed was a 1500 mono with a faulty dropper.
Got TX10, TX100 and 1500s in my collection but dont have a 9600 , I seem to remember the 9600 having a single pcb at the bottom and always having burn ups in the east west modulator circuit .
In Australia, a big name was 'Philips', who made their own picture tubes, but occasionally their 20 inch televisions had a 'Toshiba' manufactured picture tube fitted. A 22 inch set (with a 90° deflection angle) had an 'Hitachi' picture tube fitted, and that covered a few other brands; Kriesler, Pye that I know of, aside from the actual 'Hitachi' brand television. I did see Toshiba were the biggest manufacturer of picture tubes in the world at the time...
Toshiba made far superior tubes than anything mullard made and the Toshiba black stripe were legendary.
i didn't come across many 8800's in my time but hundreds of the 8500 and i sold and repaired just as many. they had just started to come off the rental market and so were quite cheap and easy to sell on. Radio rentals still had loads of the things and my friend used to bring some of them to me as his workshop couldn't cope at times. apart from the tubes going a bit soft, but after a bit of a boost and resetting up they were a decent set. of all the sets that came through me i only ever changed one tube, which isnt bad. then the video recorder came along and they had to be modified with a change of capacitor in the timebase circuit as the picture at the top used to bend because the tv couldn't cope with the syncs from the video recorder.
I remember , the time constant of the sync separator had to be changed to suite video, later sets had a dedicated VHS button , usually the last one , either 6 0r 8 .
You can’t beat a moving coil multimeter
Much better than a digital for testing semiconductor junctions .
@@michaeldranfield7140 exactly mate … I always preferred a nice moving coil meter I was given an AVO Multiminor Mk4 … a lovely little small sized version of the old 8 …
nice, i used to have an 8500 chassis model but got damaged in storage and had to get out of the storage barn anyway, so was stripped out for parts, still have a ferguson 3712 8000 chassis thing, worked very well when last powered up in the early 2000s, apart from flyback/teletext line interference, which also afflicted the 8500, which also worked reasonably ok,
insides look very similar to the 8500, i sold the lopt and eht tray to a 'collector' on facebook, i still likely have the psu choke somewhere! that one didnt have a thermistor but i read somewhere it was advised to fit one , i dont think mine buzzed excessively ...if it did i'd have likely removed it and doused it well in transformer varnish
I love this, always have.
I'm quite enjoying the trip down memory lane myself !
I remember the 8800 sets well, must be 30+ years since I have seen one. Had to laugh when the Rifa cap went pop, usually filled the workshop with plumes of smoke!
Definitely replace all the tants, these were unreliable back in the day. Looks like an excellent CRT, would be nice to find an original ultrasonic remote for it.
most thorn sets of the day were pretty un reliable and had a dreadful tube life so this set is a rare item to have such a good tube , I remember the remote it had two big silver buttons at the top, there's always a good chance my friend will have one somewhere.
Like no. 625 .. I'm getting too many coincidences! .. we had a rental 8500 (ALBA branded) in the early 1980s and in this case, the tube flaring was indeed down to the CRT. It came on gradually, first the green gun and then the red one started to creep in.
A replacement CRT was fitted and following that, we had a fantastic bright vibrant picture .. as commented on at the time by people we knew, the best they had ever seen.
These old BRC designs must have been amongst the best. I have a BRC1400 (Freguson Courier III) which produces a really nice picture, especially on 405!
Edited to add: re. the coin meters, the one we had took 50p coins and had the front slot and rotary knob, which got rather difficult to turn. I have an example of these, which I lubed up, and a pound coin version (presumably these came out later) with a drop-slot mechanism in the top & a motor which gradually fed the coins through. Both could be set for the desired rate. It's a shame they changed the coins as they'd still be useful for saving for e.g. the TV licence.
I have both 1400 and 8500 TV sets , some of these are already on youtube,
I remember back in the 80s a TV shop who use to do rentals giving me a great load of slot meters and I went on to sell them to a company advertising in Television magazine for something like £1.00 each .
Seeing the coin meter holes in the back reminded me of the ex- Telebank/Granada ITT CVC800 and 1200 sets I used to buy, they would always do a good job of sealing up the mounting holes but the electrical wiring was a different story. Always the cables were just twisted together and sometimes covered in insulating tape, otherwise just floating about in the cabinet.
Got an ITT set a 14 inch portable but I don't know what chassis fitted yes as not taken off the back , but I remember the CVC800- 1200 series and still have all the service manuals .
Not just televisions for tantalum failures, notorious in 80s early computers, IBM XTs a case in point where the motherboards are smothered with them and are often found with their heads blown off.
Lovely old set Michael. Thanks for sharing. These must be the last to use a delta gun tube.
This is probley the only one left that has a good tube ! they were looking very tired in the 80 s , got more old TV s to cover yet , many thanks for watching .
I spent many a happy hour as a young lad on our local rubbish tip after the old televisions and radios lol i wasn't the only one it seems he he
I remember a place down Oxford Rd in Manchester.. long gone buried under the university new buildings.. called "Romany Palace". In the mid 80's it was like a huge old engine shed filled floor to roof with rack on rack on rack of ex rental tv's. £5 a pop take your chances. (£2 for the dual standard B&W sets) We had a van.. we made an absolute mint selling them virtually door to door at £25 each. (B&W which I used to gt off the dump a tenner) Rumbelows did the Thorns and if memory serves me well Granada did Finlandia which I seem to remember being more reliable overall.
My house was more like a tv showroom.. must have had no less that 50 indoors at any time.
Our "guarantee" was.. 30 days complete replacement/repair.. after that depends on what's died and if we have bits available. Often because our customers were broke or unemployed we just used to swap them for another one which maybe wasn't cosmetically or something quite as good.. I don't recall anybody ever saying they thought they had been treated unfairly.
Did my apprenticing at Julie TV on Blackburn Rd in Bolton.. and then decided I could make more than 30 quid a week going freelance with a mate with a van.
Mother ran a HMV 2000 until her death in 2001. One of my early tip finds along with half a shop of spare boards and bits plus youthful hernia!!. I wish I still had that museum piece.
These days just fixing the modern junk ones for neighbours and making small occasional bits of cash from street finds.. but there is no money in it so I got out of the trade in the mid 90's... as did everybody else.
Back in the 80 s ex rental TV was big business and places sprung up all over the place selling these , as you say , easy money because everyone wanted colour TV but they were so expensive to buy brand new compared to wages back then the market for second hand was massive, its how I started my business, although as new prices began to fall and wages increased I later made a successful career out of selling brand new sets.
Fine Work Michael Rember Useing That BXL Board When I Was Young Etching Projects Fiberglass Board Much Better But a Lot More Expensive Thanks For The Upload Michael Regards mike.
Glad you liked it , that pcb board was an exciting find as a young boy , as you say though fiberglass is far superior these days and you can heat it to a much higher temperature for soldering SMD .
Great video thank you.
I must have a look for my B&K tube tester, not sure what I did with it.
at one time I would have known the numbers on the bases off by heart, I bought this late 80s for the sole purposes of testing tubes in a non working sets to make sure repairs were viable first.
OMG - RUMBELOWS.... talk about being hit in the nostalgias!! I'm SURE that's the same TV we used to have on really precarious trolleys about 6-7ft high when I was in primary school... I was a monitor, so I got the privilege of nearly being killed by...er...I mean... puhsing the trolley into the classroom. Had a top-loading VHS underneath it!! We had a few of these TV trolleys for the whole school.... wow. Times change don't they!!
I have some of the first top loading JVC , Ferguson videos also , Thorn sets were very popular back in the 70-80 s and models had a very long production life so this could well be the same model of set you had in school at that time .
@@michaeldranfield7140 I bet. Could I pick your brain on identifying an old Sony set we had? It was the first TV I remember, ever, so I'm nostalgic about it. How would be best to reach you?
@@NiddNetworks Im away on holiday now, but there is my e mail .md@digifixltd.co.uk
I remember well the 8000 chasis. The Slot meters were Dimpmex (somthing like that). My favorate chasis to work on were the Finlandia line.
I have a couple of 8000 chassis sets as well , one featured in an earlier video .
The BXL on the PCB was Bakelite Xylonite Limited of Manningtree, Essex.
Many thanks for that , someone else gave the same name .
Hi, I would normally do a purity adjustment check prior to doing any convergence adjustments.
Something I did notice tho when I would swing the TV's around on the bench the purity would go out wildly.
I put this down to the earths magnetic field and how the TV was oriented at the owners house for years,
I never came to any real conclusion and as I left the place I worked I never got to the bottom of the issue.
I am sure you are right, and thinking back I think it was also recommended to do a manual degauss before attempting any adjustments , the earths magnetic field does affect CRT and its for this reason analogue scopes were fitted with a trace rotation potentiometer .
For the ultrasonic to work, because you don't have the remote
1. Screech in a high pitched voice
2. Get an Owl
3. Jangle Keys, near it
or a set of keys .
Brilliant thanks for the entertainment fella, 😉
Glad you liked it , more coming !
In the mid 80s I visited the Phillips pcb plant in Adelaide South Australia, they would sell 300mm square pcb material off cuts to hobbyists for $1.00 each....I loaded up my motorbike rack and took 30 sheets the 400klm home to share with some friends.
I would imagine in a production environment a lot of offcuts would be produced and been copper they would have a scrap value .
I have a 1979-ish 9800 to be worked on some time, it was the last in the series of chassis that started as the 8000 and was also the last delta gun CRT TV built.
I remember the 9800 vaguely, I think it was a 22 inch in a plastic cabinet .
One of the first all semiconductor/ IC TV's I worked on was the Thorn 8000 series. Prior to that I was working up a sweat on the Philips G6 and G8 chassis, which had hundreds of screws to get at anything. The main issue with Fergie's /Thorn's was they always used underated components. Everything on those boards just got too hot.
Too right, sets like the 9600 use to burn holes in the board around the EW modulator , I have Thorn 8000s .
Imagine showing engineers in 1970s the tech of today. I wonder if the designers of this set can view this video.
I dont think you will get a set of today still working in 50 years time , I bet there will be still people about that designed and worked at the factory .
BXL is Bakelite Xylonite Ltd of Tyseley Birmingham. Made Bakelite, Warerite and many sorts of plastics.
Yes , someone else made the same comment .
I still have my (ten years younger) 1987 Ferguson 14" Portable in good working order. I just need to find an appropriate digital tuner for it. I had a TVonics that died. Not sure where to go now
set top boxes with built in RF modulator are quite rare these days buy an old sky box and dish is just as good .
Ye can't beat a Rifa cap for a bit of excitement😆😆😆..
This is only the second faulty one I have come across but I keep hearing people talking about them , I must be more careful next time !
Rifa madness.
Yes those tantalum caps were abugger for going s/c when they were used as LT decouplers in lots of stuff ratings were only 25 or 35 volts and have a habit of failing when not powered up for a long time
Don't know why they had to use tantalum when they were only supply decoupling .
These were generally looking well tubey even by the early 80s!
the CRT never seemed to last in most Thorn sets
Nice patient work Michael, ans it's a small world, my brother who lives in Sparrowpit had his set into you on Fairfield Road at that time(not this set 😀) 👍
That's a long time ago !
I left the Fairfield road shop in something like 1999 .
I know Michael, but happy days and local too .Good reputation .
@@558vulcanxh I remember going to sparrowpit on my chopper bike in the 1970s with a friend of mine to see some guy he knew called Froggatt .
Hard to believe I'm still in business after all those years !
I did have a good reputation in those days but then things were repairable back then .
With regards to the meter holes that had been drilled in the side: could it perhaps have been used in a hotel?
It could have been , back in the 1970s TV sets were a very expensive luxury and a lot of people had to rent
Keep these videos on old colour sets coming michael, i love em, im getting pretty addicted to watching them now haha, these had an ace picture but 70s solid state stuff was stupidly complicated
complicated and un reliable due to heat dissipation but they were the backbone of the British rental market and easy to repair , I loved repairing in the 80 s and doing these videos help me to remember those days .
@@michaeldranfield7140 Yup, back in the days when we built our own stuff instead of chinesium plastic rubbish, that noise on the speaker is called the rumbelows rumble haha, those slide potentiometers were horrible especially if you were a smoker (in the 70s most people were) manufacturers soon realised this then newer sets 1979 onwards used rotary pots
10p slot meters. On rental. In the early days I had the job going round emptying and giving back the over payment. Oh. My what a job ha