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SERVICEMAN'S LOG Fixing the food processor that wouldn't I’m not sure whether it is Sunspots, Murphy’s Law or just plain bad luck, but it appears there is a conspiracy among our household appliances to all fail around the same time. Sitting among those appliances that fail is one of our food processors which is only a few years old. Last month it was the vacuum cleaner. Then a fan heater decided to stop fanning and heating. Even my own computer has been increasingly throwing up those cloying “your PC has encountered a problem so we have shut it down” screens. Between crashes, it often displays weird on-screen artefacts, such as coloured blocks of pixels and very thick black lines appearing randomly. As I write this article, it is as if someone is trying to redact what I am writing in real time. Maybe the CIA really can hack into our homes via our smart fridges (or is it ASIO?)! Hmm, we don't have a smart fridge... Obviously, the computer has a problem and I suspect my graphics card’s VRAM is faulty, though this is a wasted diagnosis because I can’t actually do anything about it except replace the card anyway. I’m not about to start stripping memory chips off the thing and replacing them. Considering that it cost a small fortune and was the single most expensive component in this system, I’m not that happy it has decided to fail just outside of warranty. I would expect more than 16 months out of a high-end graphics card, but that’s how it often goes with high-performance hardware. The irony is that I haven’t had time to play the games I originally obtained it for as I am too busy doing far more mundane things, such as renovating workshops, which is proving surprisingly difficult to do whilst actually working out of them. It’s a bit like changing the tyre on your car while driving it down the 46  Silicon Chip road; not impossible, as demonstrated by many car-crazy middle-eastern YouTubers, but for the rest of us it is definitely pretty tough. Now our brand-new dishwasher, purchased when we renovated the kitchen nine months ago, has started making odd noises and during the last few nights, the LED display has been randomly flickering between showing all 8's or nothing, to the time remaining and back again. I can hurry things up with a light tap on the door, so it looks as if something is not quite making contact somewhere in the electronics behind the door panel. That’ll mean a trip to the repair agent; I have to resist the temptation to go searching for the fault myself. For starters, I haven’t the room to pull it to bits in my workshop and besides, Mrs Serviceman wouldn’t be too keen on me voiding the warranty! The curse takes another victim Now to top it off, one of our food processors has decided it wants to stop processing. This appliance is one of the better and most-used of our kitchen tools so having it give up is a bit of a curse, as it is a few years old now and I’m reasonably sure they don’t make them any longer, so we can’t just go out and buy another one (which is I’m sure what the manufacturer intended). Then I remembered; I’m a serviceman! This shouldn’t be a problem for the likes of me! This particular mixer has a solid Pyrex glass mixing bowl forming the bottom half of the appliance. A tough Dave Thompson* Items Covered This Month • • • A Serviceman’s kitchen Brownout protection for a TV TEAC HDR PVR *Dave Thompson runs PC Anytime in Christchurch, NZ. Website: www.pcanytime.co.nz Email: dave<at>pcanytime.co.nz plastic lid then clamps securely onto the glass bowl and sitting on that lid is a chrome-and-black plastic housing which contains the motor and drive assembly. This spins a centrally-mounted twin blade system down through a hole in the lid via a splined drive shaft. This machine is so powerful, you could stuff the bowl full of ice cubes and with a few short bursts of the motor, turn them into slush. The four curved and razor-sharp blades make small work of anything in the bowl, and while Mrs Serviceman and I aren’t great foodies (or cooks for that matter), when the urge takes us, we like to have decent tools with which to do the job. The problem with this thing was that it no longer powered up. There is no obvious on/off switch; instead, it has an interesting push-switch arrangement. On the very top of the motor housing is a black plastic cap that activates a switch when pushed with the palm of one’s hand. However, for (I assume) safety reasons, there is another switch activated when the whole assembly is pushed against the lid of the bowl. This way, the motor will only run when significant pressure is put on the whole motor assembly and both switches are pushed. It sounds more awkward than it really is; in use, it is quite natural to push down to start operation. It also makes sense because the motor part of the appliance isn’t held down by anything other than the operator’s hand pressure. siliconchip.com.au The splined output shaft of the motor assembly locates into a circular moulding in the thick plastic lid, which is well-fixed to the glass bowl underneath, but other than that hand pressure, the motor assembly is free to move, so it makes sense to hold it tightly when it is running and makes even more sense to require downwards pressure before power is switched to the motor. Except for the fact that no matter how hard I pushed on it, nothing happened. So I had to assume that either something was wrong with the switch arrangement or the motor had burned out. I was hoping it wasn’t a dead motor, because then we’d likely have to bin the whole thing (although I suppose we could use the bowl for somesiliconchip.com.au thing else). However, this is a classic example of the way everything is going these days. We have become a consumable, throw-away society, and this is very apparent in the kitchen. Start of Serviceman’s rant By comparison, my mother still uses a mixer she bought in the seventies. Sure, it’s had the motor reconditioned a few times and there are a few minor cracked mouldings here and there, but the point is that it was designed to be repaired and there are still parts available for it. Most of the high-end appliances you buy today don’t have anything like the parts backup these older brands have and in 40 years they’ll be part of a landfill somewhere while those like Mum’s will probably be still going. That’s not only hugely wasteful, it’s bordering on criminal. People these days buy new printers rather than buy hyper-expensive cartridges for their old one. Tablet owners chuck a tablet with a broken digitiser rather than repair it, even though in most cases it costs far less than a new one. And people chuck food processors because a part that would cost just a few bucks to manufacture gives out and because the parts aren’t there to repair them, and who can blame any of them? Most manufacturers today are only concerned with moving as many units as they can and don’t give a toss what happens to their products once they break down; that becomes someone else’s problem. Increasingly, I cannot source parts for even newer models of computers, June 2017  47 Serr v ice Se ceman’s man’s Log – continued forcing me to look to the second-hand or refurbished market. Most punters these days accept that having to buy a whole new anything is inevitable, the collateral damage of technological progression. And maybe you can’t really blame manufacturers for not wanting to have capital tied up in parts sitting around gathering dust on a warehouse shelf somewhere. It’s easier to just sell more computers and let someone else create a second-hand or refurbished market. And that’s exactly what has happened; these days many companies are buying up old appliances – whether computers, food processors or washing machines – just to strip them down for spare parts. They know what car wreckers have known for decades; that they can make good money from selling parts rather than selling complete appliances. This is exactly why I am so keen to get stuck into trying to repair anything that breaks down. I consider it a challenge to buck that wasteful philosophy and try to keep things going for at least a reasonable lifespan. If something wears out to the extent it cannot function any longer, then that’s fair enough, but when an entire printer is junked simply because a 20-cent proprietary part is not made available, that is not OK in my book. Normal service(man) resumes Getting into this blender motor looked like it could be a challenge. 48  Silicon Chip From the outside, there wasn’t anything much to suggest how it was held together. There was a hole where the power cable entered the case but that was about it. After having a closer look at the bottom of the motor assembly, I could see a black plug about 5mm in diameter that could be hiding something. I used one of my favourite tools, an old dentist’s pick, to pry the bung out and sure enough, it was covering one of those annoying safety-type screws. I found the right bit for my driver and removed the screw. After a few attempts to pull the cover off, I concluded that something else must be holding it on. However, I couldn’t find anything, and so after sitting and contemplating it for a few minutes, I decided to give it a gentle twist. Sure enough, the cover slowly gave way to the sideways pressure and after turning ninety degrees, the whole motor mechanism began to pull out from the plastic case. It only came out part way as the power cable held everything in, so I forced the cable through the stress-relieving sleeve bit by bit and pulled the motor far enough out until I could see the power switching arrangement. The series-wound universal (brushed) motor was switched by a large two-stage microswitch that was actuated by two formed, plasticcapped copper-coloured springs. One of these springs was actuated by press- ing down on the plastic cap by way of a captive plastic rod. When the cap was pressed, the rod was forced down onto the spring and that flexed and pressed onto one toggle of the power switch. The bottom spring actuated the second pole of the switch via a clever little plunger arrangement; when the motor body was pressed down onto the lid of the bowl, a corresponding solid piece of plastic in the lid pressed onto the plunger, forcing it upwards into the second spring and causing that to push the switch’s second toggle. Only when the two toggles were actuated would power flow to the motor. This was actually quite a clever “manual” safety system, as it meant the motor could neither be run without the load of the blades to govern its speed nor without holding it down quite tightly. Pressing down also engaged the blade assembly down in the bowl and unless this was all connected properly, the bottom plastic plunger would not be actuated. Simple and effective; and broken. The motor wouldn’t power on because the bottom spring had somehow broken away from its mount, meaning that it simply flexed out of the way when the plunger touched it, instead of transferring that pressure to the switch. I hadn’t noticed any plastic shrapnel floating around in the case but then again, any fragments might have been small enough to work their way through the small gap for the blade shaft in the lid and fall down into the bowl below. I suppose we’ll find them when we defrost and eat the Ćevapi my wife made when she last used the blender! Now though, I would have to rebuild the support for the bottom spring so I made a rough-and-ready former using strips of gaffer tape stuck to the remainder of the plastic mount. It was originally a rectangular shape and thus easy to recreate. To build it up, I utilised a two-part compound that comes in a tube and one simply slices off a small amount and rolls it to mix it. It sets rock-hard in about five to 10 minutes, depending on the ambient temperature, so you can’t faff about once mixed. Another smaller piece of tape held the contact in place while the pressed-in compound set and I siliconchip.com.au left it overnight to be certain it was properly cured. The next afternoon, I removed the tape and tested the contact’s travel, making sure it reached and actuated the microswitch. It did, so I reassembled the motor back into the case and with power applied, tried it a few times to ensure it started consistently with the usual amount of pressure. Hopefully, that fix will last and we’ll get a bit more use before we have to consider chucking it away. DIY circular saw upgrade goes awry And in one of the funnier service moments this month, a customer (and neighbour) brought in one of those bright green, plastic-bodied benchtop table saws that he’d stripped down in order to mount the guts into another more solid benchtop. He’d made a nice job of swapping everything over but had needed to remove the power switch connections and associated wiring in order to get it out of the original housing. After throwing away all the old parts, he’d fixed the saw and motor assembly into a recessed pocket in a sheet of 32mm custom-wood. That would certainly make a far sturdier base for it than the original flimsy plastic body and thin, cast aluminium table top. The problem was that he’d chucked away the diagram he’d made of the wiring and was too smart (or afraid) to mess about with mains wiring. Fair enough; sometimes power tools can be wired up in weird ways and just randomly re-connecting spade connectors and plugging it in isn’t the best way forward. The first thing I did was look for a circuit diagram for the saw. I found plenty, all American and not much use for our configuration. I Googled the paddle-style safety switch’s part number and found a suitable usage diagram in the datasheet, and with it all wired up correctly, I plugged it into my Variac and wound on 50VAC before pushing the green button. The motor spooled up but there wasn’t enough juice to hold the button in. I added another 100 volts and away it went. Pushing the red “Stop” button switched it off as expected so I called my neighbour to tell him it was ready. The next day, he brought it back, claiming the motor was running backwards. Puzzled, I drew a quick wiring diagram and looked at how changing the connections on the switch would make the motor run in reverse. There wasn’t any configuration that would do that; to swap rotation, I’d have to change either the armature polarity or the field polarity with respect to each other and as it had run properly before, I couldn’t see how that was all necessary. After pondering it for a while, it hit me; he’d put the blade on backwards, which of course made it look as if the motor was running the wrong way. After flipping it, all was well. At least it was an easy fix! Browned off by brownout protection G. M., from Pukekohe in New Zealand, recently had a call-out to a remote location to a malfunction in a new TV installation which proved to be a case of “too much protection is too much”. I am the local service agent for a well-known and popular range of home entertainment products. I normally restrict my call-out radius to about twenty-five kilometers from base but this was one of those occasions when Murphy's Law kicked in, and a faulty TV as far away from base as I could be enticed to go became a siliconchip.com.au real head scratcher. This law is closely related to the one which decrees that when a screw is dropped, it will always roll to the darkest, dustiest, most inaccessible corner of the workshop! A local retailer phoned me with an appeal to talk with one of their customers who had purchased a 55-inch TV three months earlier and he was now convinced the TV was faulty. The farming owner lived near the end of a long peninsula, a 60km onehour drive over reasonable but quite twisty roads. I was very busy with other work so I was not keen to waste half a day unproductively driving back and forth all that way, despite the very scenic vistas I would enjoy on the journey. So I was eager to solve the problem by any other means, hoping for an installation or operation issue which I could talk the owner through. I phoned the owner and he explained his problem. The TV would completely cut out for two to three minutes and then come on again with no sound or picture. It would repeat this several times an evening and it was happening virtually every night. Soon after cutting out, the screen would show the word “SAT” in the top left corner. When the picture and sound eventually came back on everything worked normally until the next time. He had only experienced these problems since purchasing the new TV. The old plasma TV had worked just fine. I asked some obvious questions such as whether the problem was occurring on all sources which was responded to with a considerable pause. So I clarified my question by asking if there was anything else connected to the TV such as a set-top box or DVD player. Yes, there was a Sky box (pause again); not sure about a DVD player. Now we're getting somewhere – or are we? I gained the impression that he was not sure what a DVD player was. He only watched Sky broadcasts. The owner explained that he had had the Sky people out twice attempting to solve the issue and they had eventually replaced the decoder, to no avail. Having eliminated that as a cause, he surmised that the problem now had to be with the TV. He even took a photo of the malfunctioning TV June 2017  49 Serr v ice Se ceman’s man’s Log – continued with his phone and sent it to me so he was obviously not completely technophobic! I talked the owner through the procedure to reset the TV to factory condition and left him to test it that night. The next morning, I phoned a couple of satellite installers whom I knew and discussed the possibility of there still being a decoder or satellite signal issue since this was not my area of expertise, but neither of them were convinced that the problems were Sky related. However, since they had both been in the trade nearly as long as me, neither was prepared to lay odds that it was not a Sky reception fault. Meanwhile, I forwarded the photo to the TV brand’s technical manager and had several discussions with him by email and phone regarding the fault. He seemed to be quite certain that the "SAT" logo appearing on the screen was not something being generated by the TV so the problem had to be elsewhere. We were running out of elsewheres. The last straw caused the frustrated owner to send a curt text to my phone a couple of days later that 'Now everything had cut out, nothing was working – I'll pay for you to call'. I phoned him and waited while he fetched an electric drill to plug into the wall to test that the power was on. The drill whirred into life so I said I'd think on it and let him know. He was slowly convincing me that the TV was to blame and had somehow now caused everything to fail. I talked with the brand's head technician again and he agreed to cover the considerable cost of a call out if it proved to be a TV fault. I phoned the owner and he was happy for me to call on the basis that if it was not the TV at fault then he had to bear the cost. He was quite convinced that the TV was faulty, so was confident that he would not be writing a cheque. I called the next day armed with a small loan TV of the same brand with a twofold job for it – first, to pacify the owner by leaving him something to watch and second, to act as a test unit while I checked his new TV at my shop. The first thing I noticed when I arrived at his home was that there was indeed no power. The TV, decoder and sound bar/sub-woofer were all dead. 50  Silicon Chip Up until this point I had not known there was a sound bar. It was now I also learned that the TV and sound bar had been delivered and installed by the retailer at the time of purchase. I knew there was power to the wall so I peered over the back of the TV and saw a nice new multi-outlet power box there, no doubt sold by the retailer as an add-on to give protection to the new equipment in the event of a power surge. In my opinion this is a duplication of the sort of protection which is now already built into most equipment, but having been a retailer myself in a past life, I was not about to cast aspersions on the practice of up-selling. The box had an on/off switch on the top so I reached for it and toggled it to the other position at which point I was greeted by an encouraging green glow from beneath the switch button and now everything was working. I quizzed the elderly couple about how the switch could have been bumped off since there were obviously no children around at which point the lady admitted that one of her cats had chased a mouse behind the TV the previous day and must have jumped on the switch. This seemed quite plausible since the switch button was quite large and the switch took little effort to operate. So, the immediate no-power problem was solved but I was fairly sure this had no connection (pun intended) with the original complaint so I carried on with swapping the TVs and after the loan TV was connected and working, I checked some of the menu settings on the decoder and sound bar. These were both connected with HDMI cables to the TV. I’ve experienced some odd behaviour in the past by allowing such appliances to talk to each other. I went into the menu of each device and switched off this interactive feature to eliminate arguments between them as a possi- ble cause of the original complaint. If the owner wants this feature, it can be readily restored, once our present issues were behind us. Back at base I connected the new TV to an HDMI source and left it running. It didn't miss a beat. That evening I received a text from the exasperated owner to say the same thing was happening with the loan TV except that this TV displayed the "HDMI1" in the top left corner, not “SAT” which the new TV had displayed. It was now that he offered a little more information which in hindsight, I probably should have asked about earlier. The problem only seemed to occur at around dinner time each evening and it did not happen so often later in the evening. Now armed with another clue in the timing of the fault occurring, I wondered whether this could be a power supply problem after all, but the owner wasn't convinced of this since despite living at the end of the road at the tip of a long peninsula, it couldn't be a power voltage drop because the lights remained bright. Now clutching for straws and wanting to resolve the problem before I headed away for a brief break in a few days, I connected the new TV in my shop to a variable transformer just to eliminate that from the mix of possibilities. I slowly reduced the voltage from the normal 230VAC and I was surprised that the TV worked perfectly down to 80VAC, at which point it cut out. As soon as the voltage came up a bit, the set burst back to life without so much as a hiccup. I reset the TV a second time and adjusted some of the menu settings. The next day was a public holiday. Despite that and being so keen to get on top of the problem, I loaded the owner's TV into the van. I included the variable transformer and set off with some trepidation, knowing that if I did not solve the problem this time Servicing Stories Wanted Do you have any good servicing stories that you would like to share in The Serviceman column? If so, why not send those stories in to us? We pay for all contributions published but please note that your material must be original. Send your contribution by email to: editor<at>siliconchip.com.au Please be sure to include your full name and address details. siliconchip.com.au around, I would have to admit defeat. Who would want to pay me for the many hours I had already invested in this job if I couldn't provide a solution? On arrival, I connected the variable transformer to the wall socket and the multi-outlet box in turn to the transformer and turned everything on. As I slowly reduced the voltage from 230VAC to just above 200VAC there was a click and everything died. Turning the voltage back up a little produced another click and everything except the sound bar powered up again. The clicking noise was coming from the power multi-box and it was now obvious to me that this was a feature of the device to protect connected appliances against brown-out damage due to prolonged low voltage supply. A press of the power button on the sound bar remote control turned that on again. When I repeated the exercise, I noticed the TV came back on almost immediately after the voltage was restored but the Sky decoder took several minutes to reboot itself. In the meantime, the TV patiently displayed a blank screen with “HDMI1” showing in the top left corner, until it once again received a signal from the decoder and then displayed a perfectly normal picture. These were exactly the symptoms the owner had described. Eureka! After substituting the power multi-box with a cheap discount store version, without the brown-out protection feature, he has had no further problems – so far. Epilogue So I had been hoodwinked by a tech- nological feature of the power outlet multi-box which I did not realise it had. In any other location, the protection would most likely not have tripped until a real and rare brownout event happened and I would have remained blissfully unaware of the feature. After the power was restored and the protection reset, the viewer would continue to enjoy uninterrupted television for many more months or even years, before such an event might happen again to trip the protection. Since I was never present in the owner's home when the unprompted fault happened, I can only suspect his mains voltage is regularly dropping below 200VAC. I was not planning to spend an evening there monitoring the mains voltage to find out. I suggested to him that he purchase a $30 plug-in power monitor available from Jaycar to check for himself; it is not uncommon for there to be power fluctuations in rural locations. The owner was hoodwinked into believing he did not have a power problem by a different technology – CFL lights which maintain their brightness despite the voltage drop. Unlike incandescent lamps which give a visual indicator of the voltage of your power supply; flickering or obviously dimming when the voltage dropped. Yet another hidden and overlooked clue was that the Sky decoder was housed in a cabinet with a tinted glass door, so it was not obvious to the owner that the decoder was going through its reboot sequence after the power interruption. All he saw was the blank TV screen which came back to normal by itself after a few minutes. I suggested the owner have an electrician check his power supply as such a severe voltage drop could suggest a high resistance in one of the three phases supplied to the property, which in turn could pose a fire risk. All of this happened in late summer so it was destined to be much more of an issue come mid-winter when heaters, hot water and ovens are all working harder. The “SAT” word which sidetracked me briefly must have been programmed into the new TV when it was installed by the retailer. I was surprised he had gone to this much trouble. It is a feature within the menu of some TVs which allows you to enter your preferred label for the various inputs. Resetting the TV the first time erased this entry and it defaulted back to the HDMI1 label. Another little twist was that despite purchasing a nice sound bar and subwoofer, again maybe an upsell by a keen salesman, the new owner was missing out completely on the muchimproved sound these systems offer over the standard TV speakers. From the very first time the power dropout happened, the speaker system had not automatically restarted. It was the only device not to do so and despite a scan through its menu, I could not find any reference to power settings which would allow me to select auto power on. It probably relies on the HDMI interaction feature which I mentioned earlier, switching itself on or off in sync with the TV. The owner had been using the TV speakers only and I know this because he complained that he had to hold the TV remote control high in the air ualiEco Circuits Pty Ltd. siliconchip.com.au June 2017  51 to adjust the volume. The sound bar was blocking the infrared signal to the TV, unless the remote was raised sufficiently above it. When I explained to the owner that he needed to deliberately power the sound bar back on after a power interruption, I could tell he had not been doing so. In fact, he was completely unaware that it had not been working and that he had been missing out on much improved sound fidelity from his entertainment system. I had another job recently with a near new TV which came in for service with both speakers blown; this despite the owner having a sound bar. I wonder if this was another case of the sound bar not being able to come back on automatically after a power interruption? Faulty capacitors don’t need to be bulging L. W., of Logan, Qld, replaced bulging capacitors on the main board of his malfunctioning PVR and thought that would fix it. But it wasn’t that simple and it took a lot more detective work to complete the repair. About 12 months ago, my TEAC HDR 1600T Personal Video Recorder began to exhibit erratic operation until it finally failed and would not complete its start up boot process, hanging approximately half-way through. I had experienced problems before with the unit which had turned out to be a bulging electro in the power supply circuit, so it was with some hope that I removed the cover to take a look inside. After spending some time examining the power supply and finding no signs of distress, I turned my attention to the main board. Only part of this board was visible as the hard drive is mounted above it. There was nothing obvious here either so I decided to switch on and measure the outputs from the power supply. I waited for it to complete as much of the boot process as it could and then took some measurements. There was no joy here as all appeared to be well within tolerance. At this point I started to lose interest as the machine was now getting a little long in the tooth and much better machines with larger hard drives are available on the market. However, there were a couple of weekly shows that I had recorded and 52  Silicon Chip I really did want to view them. I decided to remove the hard drive for a better look of the main board. And it was here that I struck pay dirt or so I thought. Under where the hard drive had been sitting I could clearly see three electrolytic capacitors with their tops bulging. I didn’t have any of the correct values (all three were 220µF 16V types) so after a quick visit to the local electronics store, I wasted no time fitting the capacitors and replacing the main board. The HDD was reinstalled, power supply connected and switched on. Well, you can imagine how I felt when this time there was even less response from the unit than before I had started. In disgust, I switched off, pushed it to the rear of the bench and that’s where it sat for 12 months. During that time it got in my way on several occasions but I just ignored it as best I could. I did make an attempt to boot the HDD from my PC in an effort to retrieve the information from it but even with the assistance of the internet I wasn’t able to achieve an end result. Having recently purchased a replacement machine, the time came to decide whether to have another go at fixing it or consign it to the wheelie bin. It was still in a dismantled state and picking up the main board, I noticed that there were several other similar capacitors in the same area as the ones I had previously changed. All were black with blue labelling while most of the other electros on the board were black with white labelling. So for no other reason I decided to change those too, as I felt the symptoms dictated a faulty electro somewhere. I didn’t have the correct values but decided to use what I had at hand rather than waste any more money buying new ones. In all I ended up changing CE2, 3, 11, 15, 16, 24, 29 and CE223. Some of the capacitors I used were physically bigger, so I had to leave their legs fairly long and bend them over into what space I could find so as to reinstall the HDD which, as stated, fitted over the whole lot. The photo shows some of the replacement capacitors. I didn’t hold much hope of success, so it was a surprise when the machine booted up and all appeared well. That was several months ago now and I am gradually catching up on episodes of the weekly shows I had recorded some 12 months ago. However, it did bug me in not knowing which capacitor was actually the culprit. So one night I fired up the scope and oscillator and measured the ESR of the capacitors that I had replaced the second time around. Again to my surprise, while it was a 220µF capacitor like the bulging ones I had originally replaced that was obviously faulty, all the others were at various stages of deterioration, with much higher ESR than they should have exhibited. So there you go; another piece of electronic equipment saved from the tip for just the price of a few electrolytic capacitors. You can be lucky SC sometimes. Bulging 220µF 16V electrolytics weren't the only issue in this video recorder as it wasn't until some of the larger capacitors were changed due to high ESR values that the set came back to life. This photo shows the new capacitors installed. siliconchip.com.au