(Topic ID: 165346)

Can anyone repair a PCB from a power amp?

By balboarules

7 years ago



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  • Latest reply 7 years ago by Tickerguy
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    #7 7 years ago

    The good news is that those sorts of boards are usually double-sided, but not multi-layer. They are thus repairable even when severely damaged. That one is pretty far down the road but it's not beyond repair.

    Replacement of the caps, power resistors and transistors along with repairing the board damage while the components are out shouldn't be very hard or very expensive so long as you can get the transistors at a reasonable price. Whether it's economic to do it if you're paying someone a labor rate is another matter.

    The same thing came up recently with an older pin I looked at for a guy; it's not IMHO a restoration candidate but it can certainly be brought back to fully-working condition. It had some board damage to a couple of driver transistors, the usual connector stuff you see older pins and the power supply was dodgy at best (the usual old capacitor and possibly leaky rectifier issues) especially in the HV area for the displays. Removing the boards and repairing them is not technically difficult nor are the parts expensive but if I'm charging someone for my time and it's ~4 hours or so of work plus the parts, well, is that worth it when you can buy a new power board for $100? When I get done you still have a used power board with some new components on it; if you buy a new one you have a new board with a possibly-upgraded design. Tough call. It's an easy call if the machine is YOURS and therefore you're not charging your time out, but much more difficult when you're paying someone else to do the work. In the case of a pin the question that remains is "did you improve the value by fixing it up like this?" The answer for this particular machine is probably "not by much", since if you sell it to someone the person who would buy it is someone who could fix it *themselves*, and thus their assessment of either new boards or repaired boards is that they embedded no value beyond the originally damaged parts cost. Thus, you only do it if you want to keep and play it, otherwise up on Craigslist it would go for me.

    In this case you appear to want to keep and use the amp, so either find a friend who you can trade some beer for soldering and desoldering skills, cross-ref the parts and source them yourself such as from Mouser or Digikey (so you eat the moderate but still present financial risk if the repair is unsuccessful) and go at it that way.

    IMHO of course.

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