Art is far more technically perceptive than I am.

Remember I had to ask Dad for help then. I have managed to acquire some skills over the years of wishing I knew more about little black boxes. I consider it my final frontier to explore.

I have had moderate success or call it dumb luck and really have surprised myself from time to time. I can honestly say that practicing with what people call junk has let me be fearless and very observant in general of how things decline or hold up under working conditions.
You can compare the works of other designs and train your eyes to see what you are looking into.

As Art alluded to about the two layer circuit boards. In the beginning, the boards had components on one side and traces on the other. Nice simple stuff until their skills improved.
Then they got more creative and doubled up with components on both sides.

Now they can combine one circuit trace thru to the other side with or with out a component in the hole and intermingle the pages of schematics.

Now to add more toppings to the pie, they use any spare room that may be available. They literary apply a trace or wires on top of the insulating coating or attach a separate circuit board to an open one spot with fine pin connectors.

All these little joints, pins and thin waves of solder can lead to a possibility of loss of continuity. These are the things to look for. You are looking for anomalies that either nature hand a hand into, or were an outright flaws that were man made.

Beyond this, you have to get electronically involved with your volt/ohmmeter and poke around obvious connectors.

A nice schematic does make it easier. With the continued rise of using integrated circuit chips that condense major functions, it helps to indentify those functional chips and locate problem areas or sections that control a defect you are experiencing.

I try looking up component numbers in cross references to identify what is. Sometimes it helps me define what part of a circuit that I am looking into. Power supply, audio signal amplifiers, display counters, etc. I find out what is proprietary or obsolete and what it costs. To scrap or not to scrap for parts is always in the background. This is very much like our Bricks.

I have dinked around a bit I must say and I still have many things to learn.
As Art might have said, it could be an AFC chip, or I might say, another less costly transistor, or capacitor that has change value that is in a feed back circuit to a chip.

This same thinking/engineering that is applied to say a 0-2 sensor malfunction. That sensor feeds back information to the ECU on our engines. This is the same principle we deal with everyday. It is just a bigger circuit board that utilizes a harness with bigger components.

Just as Davy Crockett (Fess Parker) might have said, “you have to go hunt into the woods to know if you are going to find something,” or simply, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Phil

Good stuff here Art!

But the Mafia Don subject is the best!

Good laugh off of stress....

Judd

Hi Art

Howard Sam’s is still out there but they were force to become more into a subscriptions oriented company. Dependence on what is available and or what limits what their catalog coverage today has to be in the production numbers. The service industry is so proprietary with circuits/components; I bet it is a real jungle out there.

Thanks for the kind words for my Dad's skills. He did work for RCA during his last years when they were into manufacturing T.V. sets in Memphis during the seventies. It really did hurt him to see them close up and go to Puerto Rico.

He worked as a troubleshooter before and after final assembly there. He said they tested the sets by bouncing them and then beating them with rubber mallets.
He was very good at just looking at the screens and zeroing in on the controlling section. He wrote up the boards with the component(s) or a dead board problem. He said it could be a bad batch of components, bad soldering practice or a connector’s pin. That sounds familiar for the Brick Board or anything built today I guess.

Soldering of the connections was and still is the number one reason for failures. Cheap and fast is always lurking to sit on someone’s shoulders.

Silver looking paint for a trace does not work when you factor in the oxidation of time and temperatures. Those are my conclusions and it appears it is yours too.

He always said that the decline for skilled electronic technicians started with the Quasar TV sets. Their slide in replacement solid-state circuit boards took away the repairing of things. Just remove and replace. He hated the idea of cable over the free air television too. He said we would end up paying or renting for everything.
We all know it has gotten ridiculously worse today, by looking at the monthly bills and the landfills anywhere in the world.

He became a more depressed American worker during the late eighties. He reached retirement and just gave up. He drank the rest of the twenty years of life away. If I could have stood to see that, I would have tried to get him to teach me some of what he knew. It was a true waste for both of us.

This has been going on in this country for a lot longer than anyone wants to admit. I had to change careers and luckily in enough time. I was able rethink the experiences of my father and self improve to gain other skills. They call it diversifying today.
I was able to look over the horizon and I adjusted around the other careers that left this country. I am very lucky to be comfortable in retirement.

Taking something apart and learning from it, inventing or reinventing is a basic form of learning since the beginning of time for humankind.

I remembered this just for you Art!
A quote from a famous automotive maker of flexible cylinder hones. They are the ones with the cutting balls on a bottlebrush like affair.

“Nothing improves, until someone Stops and questions an accepted assumption.”

It may prove to be a shame that our own schools have lost their roots in so many places and yet, they have grown so well in the minds of others on our planet.

Phil

Ya I know, but the look just isn't the same.

Ya got that right. Surely I am mistaken, but every time I see a 240 with a gleaming new audio device in the slot, I think "kid's car." There's one in one of my kids' cars.

Alternatively, you may be able to find a real one in the classifieds, on e-bay, or if real lucky, from grandma's car that just made it into the pick'n'pull. The latter has been my luck. Or you could just wire in an aux jack for your ipod or ipod-like device. Or maybe find someone in the auto radio repair business (there actually are dinosaurs walking this earth).

post about aux jack

But please do check the antenna before pitching it, although I suspect if you're underneath the tower and the subcarrier audio still breaks up, it isn't that.
--
Art Benstein near Baltimore

A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.

Just look around for a black faced head unit that will not stick out too much. I like the lower radio compartment it kind of hides the nice new unit from the thieves. I left an old decoy radio in the upper location of my daughters car after her first one was ripped off by some low life.
Dan