I Took the TV Apart...

I decided to take the TV set apart today.  I was always curious how TV's work, and I thought that if I took it apart I could figure out how it works.  Great idea, right?  Actually that would be a really dumb idea, actually.  What really happened was that I had an audio cable running from the back of the TV over to the Hi Fi amplifier and speakers to hear the sound from the bigger speakers.  THEN I tripped over the cord and it yanked on the jack on the back of the TV, and broke it!  Then I could only get one channel of sound.  Bummer!  So I thought I would take the TV apart and see if I could fix the broken jack.

So I couldn't fix the broken jack, BUT...  There was another jack mounted on the circuit board, and I decided to remove the broken jack and remove the other jack, and then put the good one in place of the broken one.  The hardest part of the process, was to "desolder" both jacks from the circuit board.  You use a soldering iron and copper braid which you place on the old solder and heat both and the braid sucks the solder into it.  But this was the hardest desoldering job I ever did, for some reason.

After the jacks were off the board, switching the good one to where the old one was, and soldering it in place was trivial.  And, after all that, IT WORKED!  We now have stereo sound out of two speakers.  SUCCESS!  Whew!  What if I broke the TV completely?

This is a real closeup of the circuit board.  The jack that I replaced is the black thing which I have put a red dot into.  The 1/8" stereo plug goes into the spot where the red dot is.  There are so many delicate traces on the circuit board that I had to work around, an make sure I didn't damage anything.  I am so glad my repair worked!