Big Screen Repair Success!!!

I finally broke down and decided to fix my big screen. A guy from work was nice enough to drive down from San Fransisco to help out. Mike had experience soldering but not much experience replacing chips. I opened the TV up and wrote a diagram of the circuit boards and all the connections free hand and labeled where each connecting wire should go, and any wire not labeled, I labeled myself with tape and a sharpie. Mike laughed at me a bit for being so cautious but I figured it would make a good check list when we were reconnecting everything to make sure we didn't miss any of them. We spent an hour on the first chip trying to remove the solder on the chip. Finally Mike figured out that he could melt the solder and push the pin through with the soldering iron. After figuring this out the second chip took 5 minutes to remove. Then we use the wick to clean up the solder from the empty holes.

Inserting the new chips wasn't that easy as the pins (20 of them) were really flexible and they didn't match up perfect so it was another 15-20 minutes to get the chips in. After being super careful reconnecting everything I plugged the TV and turned it on. There was no smoke so that was awesome, the 10 seconds or so waiting for the TV to warm up was intense. Did the fix work or not. The TV came up in setup mode and the picture looked terrible... but I made some big adjustments to the conversion when it went out in the first place so I reset the conversion and whoohoo!! the picture was perfect. A couple high fives and some fist pumps followed. I was so happy I saved a $500 repair bill. In all I spent $10 on the new chips, including another $5 for shipping, and another $50 or so for the soldering iron and solder. I bought a battery operated soldering iron which didn't have enough wattage so I ended making another trip to Fry's for a plug in soldering iron. So I could've saved $15 had I bought the right soldering iron.

The entire repair took about 2.5 hours. I probably wouldn't have figured out soldering myself had Mike not been there, so I owe him a big thanks and a lunch or two. He soldering the first chip in less then 2 minutes. He let me attempt the second chip and then cleaned it up after I was done. I'm pretty confident if I had to do it again, I could get it done in under an hour. I'm happy I got the experience of fixing it, not only did I get to try soldering, I got to see what the inside of a projection TV looks like.