Thanks for the good info Ian,

I remember the power tranny ,PCB and their ruggedness, but nothing else. Sure wish I had one today.

Yet another well constructed item gone forever.

Changed over the 680pf cap, although I was interrupted by a power outage for about half an hour while the supply authority replaced a burnt wire on the street transformer.

The picture starts up every time now, but of course there's a new problem - the left side is wobbly, like there's hum in the picture, and the side sometimes comes in a bit, leaving a black area there. It wasn't like that before, when it worked. Could I have messed up something?

Changed over the 680pf cap, although I was interrupted by a power outage for about half an hour while the supply authority replaced a burnt wire on the street transformer.

Didn't think a 680pF cap could cause that, but there you go.

I decided not to wait around, and put the set back together and stored in a cupboard. (Project is ended)

Before that I had a look at my 3 VCRs to see if any of them could be used as an input source, but that isn't possible. Firstly all of them are faulty and are unable to play a tape, and secondly they all transmit on UHF.

1. NEC centre play, 6 heads - it all seems to work fine, except the picture is just snow and hash, no sound either. The tape path appears to be clean, and it all worked last time it was used a few years back.

2. NEC DVD/VCR combo - the tape gets drawn up to the heads then the arms retract, it does it twice then stops, leaving a loop of tape caught on the arms which are not fully retracted. Eject then crunches the tape. The DVD side works mostly, but on some spots it slows right down as if it encountered lots of errors.

3. My main Panasonic DVD/VCR combo - no longer turns on after one of the many power outages we get here.

I suppose I should find someone who can fix them. Labrat perhaps?

Sounds like you need to adjust the Horizontal Hold. The new cap may have slightly different capacitance to the old.

Tried that, it made no difference. But without any input signal, who knows.

Just had another power fluctuation, which reset a computer and a clock. A constant problem here.

Er, yes, you do need a signal with some valid sync pulses.....

A bit off topic. Over the years, there have been a plethora of incidents with power here, some of which cannot be prevented. At one point we had a "Re-closer" which was bad news for computers and I ended up putting an Omron, timer on the computer line to hold out the circuit for three minutes, because of it.

Entertaining is the LED lights & a couple of fans that keep going, to an extent, when a phase fails, & the volts go down to 100V or so. That does motors no favours and one had a voltage sensitive contactor on it, for those occasions.

For the computers etc. Decades ago MOV's, Capacitors, and line filters were introduced for RF & Spikes. Several are designed & coppied with the intent of killing the circuit & tripping the RCD's (and they do). I have also introduced a No break to one radio and a UPS to the computers & peripherals.

I am on my second UPS and the group that sold the old one should be taken to task for it: Obviously made on the cheap. It has 24V from two sealed lead acid batteries. In a fault that cannot occur in my no break, as it has a barretter as acurrent limiter; In two incidents involving a battery dropping a cell. As this UPS has niether an over temperature fuse nor evidence of a current limiter: Twice this UPS had it not have had a visual display, could have easily caught fire as the batteries buckled.

Some of the issues related to spikes from a failing Solar inverter and the other from the seals failing in the "Pole Pig" (transformer) and it lost a large amount of its PCB coolant, and started to go over voltage. I am sure that the inverter was activating the protecton.

Back in a previous life I repaired both the AWA P1 and the GE portable with the satellite 240 to 110 transformer.
The P1 was a delight to work on but the little GE was a pig of a thing.

Today I dragged out a Dick Smith VZ-200 computer, with its disk drive, and plugged it into my main TV (still using a CRT here) via the RF line. With the TV on Ch 1, there was a nice picture, but with a bit of computer interference. Amazingly, the computer still works, as does the disk drive and the single large floppy disk from 40 years ago (or whatever it is).

After playing a few games from the floppy disk, I moved the RF cable to a balun then short wires to the P1. The picture shows, but it wobbles lazily from side to side, and the horizontal line lock is quite narrow. Changing channel then back again caused line lock to be lost. It took VERY critical adjustment of the hold control to get it to be stable, although it still wobbled side-to-side. I tried the fine tune to get the best picture.

So I guess there's still problems.