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Wonderfully helpful Youtube videos!
Question from Donovan: I really appreciate the videos you’ve added online. In my efforts, I have come across so many people that know the knowledge, but just won’t share! Thanks! I recently acquired my my first cabinet and your videos have been really helpful. The cabinet had an isolation transformer in the bottom which was waterlogged and dead. I bypassed it trying to just test the screen. It worked for a brief time but I had a little too much fun testing the screen and it went out on me. I think omitting that transformer killed something on the board. The screen would resize for a little while. It looked like the image shrank and re expanded. I was originally thinking it was a cap issue or a picture tube issue, but the image had no noticeable faults. It just went 100% out one day. I was wondering, in your experience, if you know the most failure prone components to check first if it was an issue in omitting the isolation transformer. Thanks for your time, Donovan
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Donovan,
First off, thank you for your kind words about our videos. We have also found many people that have the knowledge but refuse to share it. We’re just glad that our videos, posts and podcasts have helped people like you repair their arcade games. After all, a game is no fun if it’s broken.
As for your question, hooking AC power directly to a monitor chassis that requires an isolation transformer can lead to a bunch of issues. The most common result that we’ve seen is the diodes in the power supply section going bad. Check out our post on Checking Diodes On An Arcade Monitor for more information. If you’ve checked the diodes and your monitor still isn’t working, there are some other things you can check but most of them are going to be specific to the monitor chassis you are trying to repair.
To determine your monitor chassis brand and model, you might try looking for a label on the monitor with this information on it. While most monitors came from the factory with these labels on them, they often get removed or damaged over time. Whenever we are not sure what monitor we have in our arcade cabinet, we usually compare the monitor chassis to the pictures on the What’s My Monitor page on Bob Roberts site. Please let us know the brand and model of your monitor chassis if you continue to have issues.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your question and good luck with your repair.
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