13th August 2007: Hi everyone again. I'm writing this on my old desktop computer sitting at my nice new workshop bench - reclaimed from The Wesleyan building in Birmingham where they are overhauling the office and its furniture. It's a big hefty wooden desk and it replaced the clapped-out metal thing that I had from The Medical Sickness in Exeter many years ago. Anyway... First of all, an enormous thank you to Steve Pendlebury from Bolton (see Steve's website in the Links page) who let me have a fantastic working Bush CTV162 - I am absolutely over the moon with it Steve and it was very kind of you. It was one of the very few sets that the little museum in Devon needed to complete its collection of dual standard colour TVs. The other sets are the Rank 22" hybrid set (Bush CTV174D, Murphy CV2210D), and the 19" Pye dual standard set (Pye CT71, Ekco CT104). Thank you Steve. I'll put a picture of it up in the CTV gallery once I have a good enough photo. On the technical side of things, I've been doing lots of fixing of Rank A823-chassis sets recently. I modified the blanking circuit on a big white Murphy CV2215 using the circuit provided by an excellent chap called Colin Doman. The modification involves changing a few components on the tube base, and adding a couple of high-speed high-voltage BA148 diodes to the tube base panel. If anyone would like Colin's circuit (that appeared in "Television" magazine many years ago), I can give them a copy. (I hope you don't mind Colin) :-) The Murphy also had the standard fault where the resistor on the common rail at the bottom end of the A1 controls goes open circuit, and produces a bright white raster. That was easily found and replaced to reveal a pretty-good picture with poor EHT regulation and bad PAL Hanover Blinds. The poor EHT regulation was cured by replacing the 82K resistor between the line output transformer and the tripler. The resistor had gone completely open circuit. This resistor is one of the most awkward components to change as it's mounted on the back of the line output transformer which is virtually impossible to get to without removing the lopty or unbolting lots of mechanical stuff, stripping chunks of metal off the chassis itself, and then moving other chassis-bits to one side, and holding them there with anything which comes to hand. Even then it's not easy to get to the component without burning yourself or other nearby wires. Anyway, the resistor cured the EHT regulation, and a slight tweak to the decoder panel helped the Hanover Blinds a lot, although they are still not cured so I will give the decoder a realignment one of these days. (Although that can be a pain-in-the-neck as well because you can't get to any of the tweakers with the panel in the set - you really need a set of panel extension leads.) I got another little Bush CTV1120 going too, simply by replacing the HT adjustment pot on the power supply panel and giving the frame panel controls a slight tweak. I still have to fix a dodgy convergence pot which makes the red convergence on the right hand side keep flickering. Another A823, a Bush CTV1122, had a peculiar problem in that the picture was just too dark. After a lot of head scratching and circuit-studying, I noticed that the value of the resistors on the decoder panel which received a large pulse from the line stage to correctly clamp the picture, were not the same values as in the circuit diagram. On the diagram they were shown as 6.8K, but on the board they were 4.7K. Finding no reference to any modifications etc., I changed the resistors back to the higher value and the set worked like a dream. I still have to fix an I.F. problem now though (to cure a peculiar noise pattern on the chroma) before the set is 100% fixed. Anyway, sorry for waffling on. And on. Thank you everyone for reading my rubbish. I'll see you next time. From Mike.

5th January 2008: Good morning everyone. It's Mike here again. I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year. As usual more things have happened than I can probably remember, but I'll add in later anything that I have forgotten now. Firstly many thanks to an excellent chap called Colin who let me have a trio of Rank A823 TVs, one of which is on here at the moment showing an old British Transport Film called "The Driving Force" from 1966. This evocative film is about the transition from steam to diesel and electricity on British railways in the 1960s. Exciting stuff indeed. I also bought some old Video 2000 machines and a Telefunken VR40 from ebay which looked enticing at the time. Thank you to the chap (I'm afraid I don't actually know your name other than your ebay ID) for the Video 2000 machines, and thank you also to another great chap called Anthony for the VR40. I've put pictures of all the new video machines up in the Video 2000 and VCR galleries. Christmas was spent lolling around down at my parents' house in Devon (Hello M and D) where (among other things) I had a stab at repairing a pair of old CTVs in my nice cosy room above the garage. The first set was the Murphy CV1912 shown on Page 2 of the Colour TV Gallery. The set had no colour, and a very non-linear frame with no frame synchronisation either. Not much was done on this set until my good pal Peter, who also lives in deepest Devon, very kindly let me have an old oscilloscope which was surplus to requirements. A quick trip to Maplin in Barnstaple for some bits-and-bobs and with 'scope probe in hand, some progress was made. A couple of leaky capacitors and an open circuit resistor were replaced which went a long way to curing the non-linear frame, and a replacement OA91 brought back the frame sync too. Because these sets use a combined frame oscillator and amplifier, a loss of sync can be caused by a problem with the "Amp" bit. I.e. a problem with linearity etc. can also cause a loss of sync, although in this case the 2 problems were entirely separate. I still have to try and get to the bottom of the colour problem and sort out another slight frame problem, but I will do that the next time I'm down there. The other set was a GEC 2113 which uses GEC's first generation solid-state chassis. Unfortunately, after sorting out a power supply fault, and after an hour of faultless working, the tripler started arcing so I am now need to replace that when I go back down to Devon too. As for New Year's Eve evening, my mates Tom and Kam came round and we watched junk on You Tube in the lounge whilst eating Tesco cheese and getting drunker and drunker on beer, wine, antifreeze, meths etc. until about 11:30 when everyone bundled off to their respective rooms after realising the last of the surgical spirit was now gone, You Tube had just about exhausted its possibilities for mindless drunken entertainment, and that New Year probably wasn't really all that much to write home about anyway. I was woken up from my drunken haze shortly afterwards by fireworks going off, so I guess I kind-of saw the new year in, although it didn't really seem terribly significant at the time. New year's day was all a bit of a fuzz, and boring old work has been taking up most of my time since then, so no more proper fixing has happened since, but I still have a house full of junk that wants looking at this year so no chance of me ever getting bored. Fed up to the back teeth of all the bloody TVs and VCRs strewn everywhere maybe, but never bored. Anyway, that's it for another exciting installment. See you soon. Bye everyone. From Mike.

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