Monitor Convergence or Perfect is the Enemy of Good

[flynn2000]

I made a mistake. I don't know how big yet. I was doing a monitor convergence on the Nanao MS-2931 monitor from my Blast City, the final thing I needed to do before putting it all back together. I had made strips out of sheet plastic and bits of snap off utility knife blades, just like I had seen in an online guide, and had all four corners of the monitor almost perfect. But like a dummy I couldn't just let things go like that. One of the corners was still off by just a tiny bit and I had one more strip, so I thought I would see if I could just get it a bit more perfect. After a few minutes of pushing the strip in and out I could see no improvement and was going to leave it at that only to have the convergence of all three colors fly wildly apart. I tried to get it all back into alignment, then screamed for a while, then went back to trying to fix it. I pulled my strips out and started from scratch finally getting the colors to within a few millimeters of each other on the grid, but that is as good as it gets. Thats far worse than I started with. The two original strips are still in place and I am afraid to try and pull them because the strips are made from some kind of rubber like material that is fragile and seemingly stuck down to the tube and I really don't want to have to disassemble the whole thing to pull them out.

I'm at a loss here as to what I should do. Should I try to make new strips with magnets? I would be eternally grateful to anyone with ideas to help me fix this. Ahg... If I had only left well enough alone.

 

[nem]

Is it just the one corner or is it the whole screen? Did you lose a strip inside the yoke or did you accidentally bump it?

 

[flynn2000]

Just the upper right corner. It's possible that one of the original strips fragmented inside, but I wasn't being harsh while i was moving the new strip around. As to bumping the yoke, I don't think I even touched it.

 

[flynn2000]

OK! I got it fixed. After letting the monitor sit and thinking on the problem, I figured it had to be the old and brittle original convergence strips that was the problem. Looking closely and sliding around another strip, I realised that one of the old strips had totally fallen apart. Knowing that I had to fish the old strip parts out, I put down a blanket and rolled the monitor over onto its tube face. Then I shot some compressed air from one of those cans of air, up into the crack between the tube yoke and out came four fragments of the old strip. I then set the monitor back up and was able to quickly get my convergence back with two new strips.

I may have overreacted, seeing how easy it was to fix this in the end, but I hope this can help others who may want to fix their own monitors convergence. It's actually rather easy to make your own strips and to slide them around to fix things up. In fact, it's getting the bloody monitor out that's the real battle.