CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[Curt Palme]

I thought I'd throw this out there, even though it's a bit off the norm for most of you. I have a deal going with a local recycler where I pay him cash, and can have my pick of whatever I want out of the place.

As an aside, BC was late to the recycling table, and as a result, I think it's a bit more organized than other provinces or states. Nothing (AFAIK) leaves the province, the smeltering and processing of all the electronics is apparently in house.

I've done this for about 10 years now, and get all sorts of crap, from laptops to flat screen TVs. The flat screens went through a dry spell for some reason, but recently I received a couple of late model sets that were smart TVs to boot.

I looked at both today, and got them both up and running. Both were LG. One was dead, although the power light was on in standby mode, the other powered up, but had no video or backlight.

Since there are so many issues with the VLSI chips and their ball solder connections, I figured I'd take a standard heat gun/wallpaper removal tool, and gently heat up the big processing chips. My method was very unscientific.. I'd circle the heat wave around the chip, avoiding other SMT components around the chip itself. Once the chip was too hot to touch (somewhere around 400 degrees F, I'd let it cool down. The first set took 3 tries, but it's now been working fine for 3 hours.

The second one I tried something different, I left the set powered up while heating it up. After about 20 seconds of heat, I saw the backlight fire up, stopped heating it up, and saw that the menus popped up on the screen.

Not sure how long they will last, but I'll flip them on CL cheap for $150-200 each with a new universal remote for $8 on ebay, so for 30 minutes total time, not a bad investment!

[Curt Palme]

I thought I'd throw this out there, even though it's a bit off the norm for most of you. I have a deal going with a local recycler where I pay him cash, and can have my pick of whatever I want out of the place.

As an aside, BC was late to the recycling table, and as a result, I think it's a bit more organized than other provinces or states. Nothing (AFAIK) leaves the province, the smeltering and processing of all the electronics is apparently in house.

I've done this for about 10 years now, and get all sorts of crap, from laptops to flat screen TVs. The flat screens went through a dry spell for some reason, but recently I received a couple of late model sets that were smart TVs to boot.

I looked at both today, and got them both up and running. Both were LG. One was dead, although the power light was on in standby mode, the other powered up, but had no video or backlight.

Since there are so many issues with the VLSI chips and their ball solder connections, I figured I'd take a standard heat gun/wallpaper removal tool, and gently heat up the big processing chips. My method was very unscientific.. I'd circle the heat wave around the chip, avoiding other SMT components around the chip itself. Once the chip was too hot to touch (somewhere around 400 degrees F, I'd let it cool down. The first set took 3 tries, but it's now been working fine for 3 hours.

The second one I tried something different, I left the set powered up while heating it up. After about 20 seconds of heat, I saw the backlight fire up, stopped heating it up, and saw that the menus popped up on the screen.

Not sure how long they will last, but I'll flip them on CL cheap for $150-200 each with a new universal remote for $8 on ebay, so for 30 minutes total time, not a bad investment!