Universe brings large HDTV to my doorstep.

So i came home after a long day of work on this Monday and found someone had thrown out a 50" HDTV.

Curious mind and all snipes it up. I plug it in and their is a loud whirling sound like a fat woman and a Hitachi magic wand. The logic board tries to power up three times with this horrible sound, motherboard posts three blinking lights on front power switch.


Ended up sleeping on the project, came back the next day popped the rear and the bulb looks practically brand new. Zero ohms on the bulb leads "This is a mercury arch lamp" so a zero ohm reading is good!

power board is in range, ballast is good, DMD looks fine, the sound leads to speculative bad color wheel bearings per userCharlieBrowns flow chart.

Took a look around the internets a replacement CW will run me about $100 to $150 just for the L3 Chassis module

You Tube user "Hexagontaginal" video guide bellow makes it look rather easy job to do. I have built RedHat servers more difficult.

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Update 03/28/2012...

Dropped by a local TV repair shack SOS TV Repair shop after speaking with with a Scott we were able to locate a replacement color wheel. about 2 hours of work i had the beast up and running with crystal clear menu's.

Next step is figuring out why input video is garbled.

Their is this Youtube video by "TheXboxguy269" About reflowing GPU for xbox360 units. Its a similar theory. without all the crazy specialty equipment, might be cool to have all the proper gear but seriously how often am i going to need something like it Microsoft will not be in console video game market for much longer. :)