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Chat with a retired TV repair guy last week about modern boards
He said back in the day you could fix anything with a schematic and a soldering iron, now you just swap whole boards and call it a day. Got me wondering how many of us actually bother trying to trace component failures anymore, or is it just dead weight on the repair bench?
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craig.parker2d ago
Is it possible we're losing the ability to diagnose stuff by ear and feel too? My dad was an old school mechanic, he could hear a bad bearing from across the shop. Now everything has electronics and sensors, so you gotta plug in a scanner first. I had a fridge compressor that was humming weird last month, nobody even thought to check the start capacitor. They just said "board's fried, time for a new fridge." Took me twenty minutes and a five dollar part to get it running again. Sometimes the simple stuff gets overlooked when everyone's looking at a screen.
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the_drew2d ago
Yeah that's a really good point. But I think you're mixing up two different things a little bit. The fridge compressor thing, that's just bad service no matter how you slice it. A good tech should still check the obvious stuff before jumping to replacing the whole board. The real problem is that a lot of places now only hire guys who can read a scanner, not guys who actually understand how the machine works. So they don't have the basic troubleshooting skills in the first place. That's on the training, not the technology itself.
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