To help jog your memory, in the last episode, I found this ratty old monitor at Computer
Reset that had been stored outside in a pile for at least 15 years.
It was horribly filthy.
I took it home and powered it on to find that there was at least some sort of picture.
Then I cleaned it up.
Next I took it apart and discovered that this corroded diode was arcing.
And that’s more or less where we left off last time.
If you haven’t seen that episode, I recommend you go watch it first.
And so here we are a couple of weeks later.
I have removed the old diode.
And while it did break during the removal process, it didn’t totally disintegrate
like in the other monitor.
I also bought this part here from Mouser.
It’s a modern, plastic style diode.
It seems to have mostly compatible specifications to the one that was in there before.
But, as you can see, it looks considerably different.
So, I’ll just go ahead and stick that in there like so.
And of course, solder from the backside, and of course chop the legs off.
Pretty easy.
And here we go, I’ve re-attached everything necessary to power it up.
Now after weeks of waiting, we can all find out of it works.
And, unfortunately, I get nothing at all.
The screen is totally black.
So, at this point I was kind of bummed out.
I thought “ok the diode must not have been compatible or some problem like that.”
And I’ll be honest here, high voltage analog electronics is not my area of expertise and
I’ve never claimed that it was.
So, I really had no idea what was wrong.
I talked to Adrian Black again and he suggested turning up the brightness on the flyback.
Now that actually made a lot of sense because during my troubleshooting before, I had turned
it down.
Now admittedly, even after I turned it down, I was still getting a picture on it before.
But, I thought well, I should certainly at least turn it back to where it was.
So, I did that.
So when I powered it back up, I got this on the screen.
At first I thought the monitor was going crazy, but upon closer inspection, I realized these
were actually pixels from the computer that were being displayed.
So, I went around back and started messing with some of the adjustments for sync and
size.
And sure enough, a picture emerged!
And while it was nice and clear, there wasn’t any color.
I thought maybe I had left the color killer switch activated on the monitor, so I checked
that, but that didn’t help.
But then I realized the laser 128 itself was set to mono, so I change that to color.
Still nothing.
But then I remembered the color knob on the front of the monitor.
And there we go.
At this point, just needed to adjust the tint control some.
I think we have a winner.
I wanted to retrobrite it right away, but it must have been monsoon season because it
had been raining for almost two weeks straight.
So I had to wait a few more days because I wanted to do this outdoors.
I’m not really in a position to be able to do an indoor retrobrite for the moment.
Fortunately, the weather finally cleared up and we got a nice sunny day.
But I can already see that one problem I’m going to have is fitting the pieces, especially
the large back piece in my bucket.
But I can do these two for now.
I was going to need to leave this outside all day because I had somewhere I had to go.
I didn’t want it floating to the top, so I put some rocks to hold it down.
In my past experience, I found that shadows have little effect on the process as it seems
the sunlight mainly needs to hit the water, not the plastic.
So I’ll add a whole bottle of peroxide and we’ll check back at the end of the day.
By the way, I get a LOT of emails from people asking me what is the proper ratio of peroxide
and water?
Well, I’m not sure that there is a proper ratio, I mean what I’ve seen in the past
is that if you use more of it, it goes faster, if you use less of it, it goes slower.
But not only that, certain plastics react to it differently than others.
So there really is no telling.
I don’t think there is a magic ratio.
Fortunately, I had an opportunity to come check on this after a few hours.
And well, looks like I was wrong about the shadows.
I moved the rocks over and my face probably looked something like this.
So I moved all of the rocks off, and when I returned around sunset fortunately, I could
see some improvement.
I left the rocks on the monitor near the controls because that area wasn’t yellowed so I hoped
it wouldn’t matter.
At first glance, it looks like all is better now.
So fast forward to the next day.
I’m getting ready to treat it some more and you can clearly see here that the rock
shadows are still visible, although not as bad as the day before.
So what I’m going to do this time is put the little door in its own bucket.
And hopefully by the end of today it will have a consistent look to it.
And I’ll just have to check on it periodically to make sure it hasn’t floated to the top.
But one problem with this monitor piece is that no matter how I put it in there, some
of the sides are going to be blocked from sunlight.
It’s just too darned big.
But admittedly, the front of it looks pretty nice at this point!
I did come out and rotate it about once an hour to see if that would help get the sides
a little bit more.
And here we are at sunset the second day.
As you can see the little door actually looks pretty good now.
No sign of the shadows from those rocks.
What about the front panel?
Well, it’s looking pretty good too, at least on the front surface.
So let’s have a closer look now that I have it dried off and back inside.
Here’s the front panel.
It’s actually still not perfect, but it’s a million times better than it was before.
And what about the front bezel of the monitor.
Well, it actually looks fantastic from the front.
But there is still a little yellowing on the side here, and a lot of yellowing on the other
side.
In fact, it should be interesting to stick the two pieces together and see how much contrast
there is.
And well, yeah, there’s quite a bit of contrast!
However, this brings us to the next two problems.
Problem number one is that we only got a 2 day break from the monsoon season or whatever
we’re having in Texas right now.
It appears we’re back to rain for the next week.
So there won’t be anymore sunlight.
But even if there were, that brings us to problem number two.
As you can see the rear case of this monitor is just too darned big to submerge in my crate.
Part of it would be sticking out.
And even if I didn’t care about the back, as you can see it is so close to the side
walls, there would be no sunlight reaching most of the case.
So, I took the case over to my brother’s shop and built a little rig to hold UV lights.
I just made this from some scrap pieces of wood laying around.
The idea is, I can mount the lights to this and have them shining at the monitor case
from all 4 sides.
I happen to have exactly 4 of these powerful UV lights, so let’s use them all.
Now the thing is, I still can’t submerge this.
I don’t have a tub big enough.
So I plan to use the plastic wrap method.
Now, as most people know, I abandoned this method a couple of years ago because it was
prone to streaking and I found submersion worked better.
But, since I can’t submerge this, I figure I’ll have to make due with this method.
However, I’ve never tried this method with UV lights before, so I don’t know if it
will work better or worse.
So, I’m again entering unknown territory here and we’ll all just have to wait and
see how it turns out.
I’m pretty much going to leave this going all night and check on it in the morning.
And here we are the next day.
You may notice I’ve elevated the monitor up a little bit, which I did early this morning
to hopefully get more direct light on the lower part.
It has been sitting in the UV lights for about 14 hours at this point.
So, I guess it’s time to take it home and clean it off.
I can already tell the color has changed, but what I can’t tell is if it is finished,
or if it is streaked, or marbled, or anything like that.
OK, so let’s rinse this stuff off.
As I dry it off, I can tell that it didn’t come out 100% perfect.
But, it’s not bad, actually.
This side here appears to be the worst.
The front looks great.
And this side here actually looks just about perfect too.
So yeah, this seems to be the absolute worst of it here.
And there is a little but if marbling over here, but overall, not to bad.
So, I decided to give it another 12 hours of treatment and here it is.
It’s still a little wet, but as you can see there is further improvement on this side.
Of course the other side already looked great, so no problem here.
Oh, and the top looks fine too.
So, time to reassemble it.
I did go ahead and scavenge this ground wire from the other monitor since it is not so
rusted.
And I also scavenged this power LED because the other one was not working.
I’ve got the laser128 setup here and now it’s time for a final test before I put
the back cover on.
And, it does appear to still be working.
So, let’s finish the reassembly.
And everything looks great.
I did notice the horizontal centering is slightly off, but I’d have to take the monitor apart
again to adjust it because there is no external control for that.
And yes, I’m going to play Petscii Robots on it, yes, I know I’m tooting my own horn,
but it’s actually my favorite Apple II game at the moment.
Also, we should test the monochrome mode of the monitor while we’re at it.
Might as well pick the mono-tiles from the menu to go with it.
And yeah, everything looks great in monochrome as well!
It’s certainly a far cry better than it looked when I first picked it up!
OK, so now I thought we could have a fun little experiment.
So, I’ve got this other monitor that I picked up, which by the way I got a lot of criticism
in the comments of the last video for using this monitor as a parts monitor rather than
trying to restore it or whatever, or leaving it for somebody else.
The thing about it is, I just wanted to clarify something.
There’s like 20 of those up there at computer reset, and there’s not exactly a lot of
people lining up to buy them.
So…
Because they’re in terrible condition.
So, most of those are going to wind up in either the dumpster or an e-waste facility
or something like that.
And that’s exactly where this one’s destined to go too.
If somebody wants to come pick it up from me, I’m totally fine with that.
But I have no intention of keeping it.
I just wanted to make that clear.
But, I figure while I’ve got it, this one is about as yellowed as that one used to be.
So, a lot of people have suggested these various chemicals over the years that I should try
as a substitute for retrobriting.
So we’ve got this headlight restoration product by 3M.
We’ve got PlastX, which is another type of plastic polisher.
And then I have two different kinds of toothpaste.
I got one of each kind, Crest and Colgate.
They’re supposed to both be whitening toothpaste.
So, yeah.
I’m going to clean this monitor up a little bit, just to get the dirt off of it.
And then I’m going to try these various things and see what they do.
Now, if these do work, they’re going to be working on a different principle I suspect.
Because, I know this yellowing is basically just surface deep.
Like, it doesn’t go all the way through the plastic.
For example, if you were to sand it down, it would absolutely be the right color, but
it would totally lose the texture that it was supposed to have.
So, it’ll be interesting to see if these can sand just enough of it down to kind of
get rid of the old nasty layer and leave fresh plastic underneath, but still leave the texture.
Let’s give it a shot, let’s see what happens!
First up is the Crest whitening toothpaste.
I’m going to use this circular brush.
It’s sort of like a tooth brush, but should be much more efficient for what I’m doing.
I actually keep the brush over this same spot
for several minutes, but I’m not going to make you watch all of that.
So let’s see what happened.
Well, the plastic is very clean.
But still just as yellow.
So this was pointless.
OK, let’s try the Colgate instead.
Again I run it for several minutes with a decent amount of pressure.
And the result is exactly the same.
I’d call that a failure.
But I wanted to try one more thing, which to apply the toothpaste by hand using a lot
of pressure.
And again, no noticeable change in the color of the plastic.
So we’ll move right along to the PlastX product.
I’m going to scrub this on by hand as well.
And after several minutes I clean it off, and as you can see, no noticeable change in
the color.
Moving along to the 3M box I bought, this doesn’t actually contain any chemicals.
It turns out it just has some various polishing pads and this drill attachment.
I’ll just read through the instructions.
It says to use a specific pad for plastic, so that’s what I’ll do.
And well, I can see right away that this is having an effect.
In fact, I only do this for about 20 seconds.
Let’s clean the dust off here and see what we have.
Hahaha.. well, that spot looks nice.
But I can feel the texture is totally gone.
It’s like glossy plastic now.
So, I guess that means I’ll be sticking with more traditional tried and true methods
of retrobriting.
Unless somebody comes up with any other ideas and then I’ll try those out in a later video.
I also need to tell you that this video is sponsored by nobody because we don’t do
that sort of thing on this channel.
But I will tell you what I’ve been up to the last couple of weeks besides working on
this monitor.
I’ve actually spent a huge amount of time working on finishing up studio room studio
room number 2.
And I’ll show you a little video clip of that right quick.
But yeah, I’ve built the desk, put the carpet in, did the cabinets, et cetera.
And then soon I’m going to refocus my attention on finishing up this room.
For example, a lot of people hate this wall and I’ve already promised to get rid of
it.
A lot of people think this is painted on, but it’s actually not.
It’s vinyl and you can actually peel it right off.
So, I mean, it’s going to be super easy to take this off.
And what I’d like to replace it with are these felt hexagons.
I want to coat the whole wall with them.
And I actually think it will not only look really cool, but it’s also sound deadening.
Which I need a little extra sound deadening in here.
I’ve already done the ceiling but I need a little bit more.
And so a lot of people have been asking when is studio build episode 3 coming out?
Well, it can’t come out until I’m done, because that will be the final episode, but
I’m actually hoping to start filming that as soon as I’m done with the Laser 128 and
XT documentary.
So, you’ll be seeing that in the next month or two.
Other than that, I think that wraps it up for this episode.
So as always, thanks for watching!