Disassembly of Panasonic AG-1980P boards required for recap?
 

Hey there!

I've been having a (truthfully) lovely time carefully disassembling my newly purchased Panasonic AG-1980p for a recap job this week. I was very happy to come across i86time's cap list and run-down of his experiences recapping his unit, along with aramkolt's wisdom along the way. I was even happier to find that nearly all of the boards i86time had in his machine were the same models and revisions as mine (besides my main board which was a A-7 instead of an A-6). I plan on replacing all the caps in the unit, which I realize to many is a bit of a fool's errand, but I find it a fun challenge and like to eliminate any possible reason to have to take it apart to service these very difficult-to-reach parts in the future. I also like the idea that some of the now-defunct functions of this unit work, like the analog TV function.

Having said that I had a few questions, particularly about getting to some of these caps on the boards. As of yesterday I fully disassembled the machine and was able to get all of the daughter boards off the main board (by some miracle the only damage that was sustained was a small chipped piece of plastic from one the notoriously difficult-to-remove connections between the I/O Pack board and the main board).

Forgive me if some of these answers are obvious, but I'm curious for those who have disassembled and/or recapped these units:

1.) Do I have to desolder all of the I/O connections in order to remove the small black back panel cover to get to the caps on the I/O Pack board or do I just sneak them in/out in-between? The black plastic tabs on the back of the PCB that poke through look slightly melted as if the board was soldered in place while the plastic was there, which I find interesting.

2.) Do I completely desolder and remove the little board from the risers on top of the Audio 2 board to get to those caps? I assume yes but just had to ask.

3.) The VHF/UHF input/output board that connects through the back appears to be simply soldered to the board and does not need to be desoldered correct? This seems obvious as well but I would just like to service the necessary parts as safely as possible.

Thanks again to this dedicated community. Can't wait to get this up and running again!