So i’m not really sure how this happened, but at some point the cable jacks (there are three, i assume they are all on the same board on the other side) went through the holes and fell into the tv and now there are just 3 empty holes. This is disconcerting. The tv is not under any kind of warranty as i bought it off craigslist. I was thinking about opening up the back of the tv and seeing what i can do, but i seem to be under the impression that TVs contain capacitors, and am worried about the risk of electric shock, even with it unplugged. This is a big, 36", big fat CRT tv. I am not sure what model number it is exactly but it is very large and unweildly.
So, is it safe to open up the back of my tv? If, so how should i go about it, and what should i look for?
I don’t have an answer for you (well I do, but it would involve carefully popping open the set and retreiving them) but I just wanted to mention that if you do manage to fish them out and you don’t see any type of screws that backed out that caused it to fall in I could put a coupler on one of the unused ones (assuming they are all on one board) to keep them from falling in again. Something like this
That’s a male to male coupler. If you do need to use all three jacks, you’ll have to get a female to female coupler to get the coax on it. But that should at least keep it from falling in again.
I’m not sure how the RCA jacks are attached to the main circuit board but if they are anything like a coaxial input they are attached solidly to that board.
If they pushed inside the TV and broke off the main board there is no easy fix. The entire board needs to be replaced and at a high cost.
When I worked electronics retail we had a lot of sets where the coaxial input broke off the main boards either by someone yanking on an attached coaxial cable or something hitting the coaxial input.
Believe it or not these sets typically got disposed of since repair costs outweighed the cost of the set.