Blast City – Rejuvenator

Got my hands on a CRT tester on Wednesday night to try out thanks to hwaygo on discord – it’s the BK Precision 490 and fortunately for me, it had the correct CR23 connector 🙂

Never having done any of this stuff before, I watched multiple videos of what we needed to do, but at the highest level, we needed to set up the heater voltage, the G1 and then RGB cut offs.

There’s a website called http://tubular.atomized.org/ which provides the values for a significant number of tubes – of course it doesn’t explicitly state my tube. My tube is an A68LBT696X, this only site only has an LBS, so I thought one letter wouldn’t be too bad. I base lined the G1 on 70v.

Got everything all wired up, triple checked, it was time to give it a go and see what happens

Had a very nice orange neck glow which mean the tube was physically still OK and the vacuum on the neck was still good – not the dreaded blue glow which meant oxygen has gone into the neck.

According to what we were testing, all three guns were clearly “bad”

So hwaygo and I went through the process of “clean and balance”, re-testing and eventually hit the “rejuvenate” function. We did this a number of times until it finally tested in the “good” region

At this point, we decided, all we could do was “test” and see what happens. Wired up the chassis, turned her on and VOILA! We have picture!

It needed calibration, but it was great to see an image on this tube considering when I got it, it was so dim that it was black.

That’s where the excitement finished – I got called for a Major incident at work so we had to stop our testing, but thankfully hwaygo left the tester at my place to allow me to do some further testing/rejuving. I left the game running but by the time I checked in (must’ve been an hour or so later), the green and blue guns significantly faded 🙁

I then had the opportunity to test a little further last night and one thing I noticed when I set the G1 to 70v was when I was trying to adjust the RGB cut off in the setup, it wouldn’t move no matter how far right I increased the dial, even maxing it out. So this time, I set the G1 to 50v like most of the other tubes. I redid the whole process multiple times blasting the tube – at this point I really had nothing to lose, so I blasted and blasted 😀

After all that zapping, I finally managed to wire it all back up and I’ve got picture again! This time, I’m very apprehensive as I didn’t have much luck the previous time, so all I could do was sit and wait to see what happens…

Colour charts look good

In game looks good too

It’s definitely on the “dim” side, but I’ll take “dim” over no picture any day of the week 🙂

I had it on for about 4 hours last night just looping through the attract mode of the game and it seemed to hold up

I’ve turned the cab on this morning from 7:30 and will leave it on running just before I go to sleep and see how it holds up before putting it back in the cab. If it holds up, then safe to say it won’t do what it did the first time around and I can use it until I find a replacement tube. If it fades, then I need a replacement tube quicker as I can’t do a rejuve process each time I turn the cab on.