notANON

For months now Vapor Trx has been driving me crazy.  Every time I looked at it I wanted to sort out the issue.  The problem is that sometimes all of the colors were there and it would work great.  Then usually red would flake out and sometimes green.

I had pulled this board out and reworked it over a good bit.  It had a lot of lifted traces from heat issues and other solder issues along with needing a few caps.  I had done all of this, shoved it back in and it worked great for about a day.   I finally got the chance to dig into it a bit more.

I started by re-reworking the neck board since this is the most likely place for a failure with a color channel to occur.  I popped it back in and it was once again fine for a bit and then it died.  I popped it out and felt that there are 3 color driver transistors that looked very suspicious.  Those were the main spots where the traces had lifted due to heat and they all have crappy clip-on heatsinks that were kind of loose.  I decide to see if the part was bad or if I was having connection issues on the PCB.  I decided to swap the red drive transistor with the green one.

When I tossed it back in the machine, it worked perfectly until I came back the next day.  Luckily it was once again missing a color, but this time green.  So now I could be certain that the transistor itself was failing under load.  I stopped by Vecto, grabbed 3 NTE198’s and popped them in.  I tightened up all the heatsinks and fired it off.

I don’t want to jinx it but I’m now pretty certain that this one is fixed.  Hopefully people start playing it now that the screen actually looks good…