Installing a Cap-Kit

These are capacitors. Over time they dry out and go bad. This happens to old monitors, then the picture goes all icky.. colors go bad, brightness gets uneven, sometimes the picture just doesn't happen anymore.

To fix this, you replace them.
First you have to remove the board from the monitor chassis. This always scared the hell out of me, since there's about 10,000 volts charged up in the flyback/tube. (The flyback is the big blocky thing with the big nasty looking red wire going to the suction cup thingy on the picture tube... as seen in the foreground on pictures below...)

Since i was going to be working a lot with this all night, i also cleaned off most of the dirt and dust buildup from the 20 year life of this monitor. You can still see quite a bit on the capacitors in the above image.

It takes a lot of time to do... This monitor (A Wells-Gardner 4900 series) required 16 capacitors to be changed. I spent a lot of time staring at the bottom of the board looking for the capacitors to change:
"where the heck is Capacitor number 301?"

And of course a lot of time soldering: (This took about 3 hours all told.)

All in all, it went pretty well. I expected a louder crack from discharging the tube, but i was happy when it was done. heh. The monitor now has solid colors instead of everything being darker on the left side. But the brightness is still off. It either wants to be dim and sharp, or comfortably bright, but very out of focus. And it doesn't seem like a new flyback is available for it. Oh well. I'll figure out something with it... It's good enough for now.

Here is someone elses' recount of their events doing the same thing on the same monitor.

Special thanks to Tala for saving my webcam images for me. Thankee, Tala!