Eric’s Story Book

So my Panasonic HDTV PT-53WX53G went out on me in the middle of watching the Alabama game (ROLL TIDE).  When i started powering it back up the only thing would happen is my red power light would blink 3 times.

First of all let me say thank you to Chris Palmer and his blog posting on how to fix his Panasonic TV.  My TV (PT-53WX53G) was a little bit larger than his but his steps and parts are right on.   Before you start with this let me say.  This is not an easy task don’t get in over your head messing with these tiny solders.  I haven’t worked with solder in about 20 years and I fumbled through it.

I ordered 3 of the STK392-110 convergence amplifiers (Panasonic C5AA00000108 from www.electronix.com and I am glad I did.  One of them came in pretty bad shape I could send it back to them but it was only 5 bucks and it might cost me more in shipping.  Here is a shot of it.

So I took a couple of extra photos area inside the TV you will be working on.

These are the heat sinks that Chris talks about in his blog.  The Convergence Amplifiers are attached to the other side of them. The are screwed and soldered all the way to the board so don’t try to remove them.

These are the Convergence Amplifiers.  They are screwed into the heat sinks with two screws on the left and right side you can take these out easy with a Phillips head screwdriver.

You will need to remove 4 screws that holds the board to the TV Chassis.  These will allow you to flip the whole board over to get to the soldered back.  There are photos of this in Chris’ Blog.  I only disconnected a couple of cables enough to get the board flipped over you don’t have to remove them all.  You can then heat up the solder and wiggle loose the Convergence Amplifiers.  It took me a bit of work to do this the solders are very tiny.   Once I wiggled them out they looked like this (a little bit worst than the new one).

You can’t see it very well but Chris was also correct with saying they didn’t have but half of the back covered with heat sink grease. Its the white goo on the bottom half.

When you pull the CAs off then you will have this wide open space to connect to.  Pull both CAs off before you start connecting.

Be careful replacing the new chips like Chris said he bent one of the pins on some solder still in the hole.

When soldering on the back of the board take your time be sure you have all of your pins connected to the board.  On my 1st power up they weren’t all connected and my convergance on the screen was way off and un fixable.  I had to pull the TV apart again and touch up the solder.  When I did this I connected two pins on accident.  This caused my TV to not power up again and the red light to blink 3 times (same thing that started all of this).  I pulled it apart one more time fixed the solder and powered the TV back on one more time.  IT WORKS GREAT NOW!!!!  Thank You Chris…