Old CRT monitor I thought was dead actually just had a bad solder joint

I was ready to toss my 1998 Dell Trinitron after it started flickering and then went totally black. My buddy kept telling me it was probably just a cold solder joint on the flyback transformer, but I figured he was crazy. I finally took it apart last weekend and poked around with a multimeter. Sure enough, I found a cracked connection on the horizontal deflection board. Reflowed the joint with my cheap Weller iron and the thing fired right back up like new. It's been running solid for 3 days now with no issues. Made me feel dumb for nearly throwing out a perfectly good monitor. Any of you guys ever had a CRT resurrected by just touching up a few solder points?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowan6669d ago

Yeah I actually read something about this a while back. Some old VGA monitor repair guide I found online said most dead CRTs from that era just have bad solder joints on the flyback or the deflection board. The heat cycles make them crack over time. It's wild how something so simple can kill a perfectly good monitor. Glad you got yours working again, feels good to keep old tech alive.

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jade2219d ago

That's honestly how it is with so much of the stuff we throw away, isn't it? Like I remember my grandma's old sewing machine, it just stopped working one day and she got a new one. Years later I was messing around with it and found a tiny bit of thread was jammed in the bobbin case. Fixed it in like 30 seconds. Same thing with cars too, sometimes it's just a loose gas cap or a blown fuse. We're so quick to call something dead when it's just a little crack or a piece of dirt causing the whole problem. Makes you wonder how much perfectly good hardware is sitting in landfills over a ten cent fix.