Beautiful Service Manuals

[funkyant]

Inspired by watching Dave's Sony Walkman Teardown, I have always loved really nicely done service manuals. I repair a lot of Pioneer Pro gear, and have always appreciated their manuals and this example is one of my favorites, with it's scope screenshots of operational waveforms, colour PCB pictures and exploded parts drawings:

http://www.dropbox.com/s/dcq9wplr12hkq9z/Pioneer%20CDJ-2000-Service%20Manual.pdf?dl=0

Are there any other manufacturers doing nice manuals from any other niche industries? I'd love to see some. (I think we can omit the millions of laptop manuals).

[Mashpriborintorg]

Here you have service manual for medical / hospital equipment, some are really nice, some are crappy as hell...

http://www.frankshospitalworkshop.com/equipment.html

I can spend hours, doing virtual teardowns of such unobtainium stuff 

Other websites for "regular stuff" free service manuals are eserviceinfo and elektrotanya.

And yeah, old Sony manuals are usually quite nice.

[Richard Crowley]

Yes, back in the "good old days" Sony produced some works of art when it came to service documentation.
Dunno what they are like these days as they are pretty much available only by an expensive subscription service that only commercial shops can afford.

And at the other end of the spectrum were the documents for the big IBM mainframe computers back in the 1960s. They were "ASCII art" printed on poorly-adjusted line printers on huge 14" sheets and held in gigantic ring binders.  They were practically incomprehensible unless you were a trained IBM repair-droid.

Well, since it was IBM, I suppose it was "EBCIDIC-art" rather than "ASCII-art".   

[German_EE]

Unless you were a trained IBM technician you had no business doing anything to your mainframe as it was a very expensive piece of kit (and probably leased from IBM). This was men in white coats behind glass windows stuff.

A friend of mine works at a large IBM Z-Series installation in Eastern Europe. One day an IBM Engineer arrived and told the site manager that he was there to replace a power supply that had gone faulty, they asked around and nobody had placed a service call. It turned out that THE MAINFRAME had made the call, a power supply had drifted out of specification and the machine itself had emailed IBM Service and reported the error. No manual required.

It's not known if they had to open the pod bay doors to replace the part 

[Neilm]

I have had to write service manuals for equipment. It was company policy that there should be enough information that the tech could work out which board to change and that was it. I could do PCB references (we don't put them on the PCB) but they could only be A4. That won't be a problem with 0402 pack resistors now will it? I could also put BOMs in it, but as the document was never maintained I never saw the point. It would almost certainly be out of date after 3 months.

[m100]

Yes, back in the "good old days" Sony produced some works of art when it came to service documentation.

Ditto, some, maybe the camcorders had multiple translucent overlays over the bare board layout and schematics so you could strip away or add detail as required.  Quite reasonably priced too.  Last service manual I recall buying from Sony would be late 1990's, after then everything seemed to go to CD's and later DVD's and then presumably online. 

The most comprehensive manuals I ever saw for consumer oriented kit were the JVC / Ferguson ones for video recorders.   Everything 100% explained, lots of photos of the mechanicals, lots of waveforms, all the signal paths, very wide schematics printed at a size you could easily read on foldouts  At least an inch or two thick in a ring binder on high quality paper.   

Philips TV manuals in the 70's and 80's were extremely nice too, very well written, lots of multicolour printing, fold out schematics of every board,  component layouts at double size.

[funkyant]

I have to admit that these days I prefer the PDF's. I have all the printed manuals, but it's just much easier to search parts digitally inside the PDF

[tom66]

I've always appreciated Pioneer service manuals. Here's one for their last plasma TV series; I've repaired a few of these sets, and frequently refer back to these manuals. It is absolutely top class and an example for all manufacturers to follow - sadly with the new generation of LED stuff it's all throwaway so most manufacturers barely produce a power-supply pin out in their manuals!

http://www.toms-service-manuals.com/getfile.php?mode=viewpdf&req=Pioneer_PDP-5010FD_[SM].pdf&mfg=Pioneer

[Richard Crowley]

Unless you were a trained IBM technician you had no business doing anything to your mainframe as it was a very expensive piece of kit (and probably leased from IBM). This was men in white coats behind glass windows stuff.

Yeah, maybe.  All I know is that I had to maintain our IBM 1620 for several years. I even added a Centronics parallel port to it so that we could add a drum line-printer.  We had to keep the computer room chilled to 69F (20C) to keep it happy. If it got a few degrees hotter, it would start forgetting bits in the core RAM.  And much colder and all the mechanical stuff (card reader/punch) would start seizing up.

Then one day the local IBM office called us and asked if I could go out and repair another 1620 in Palm Springs.  It turned out that they had nobody left east of Los Angeles that knew how to work on 1620 systems.  I had my hands full just trying to keep ours running and declined the "honor". 



We even had a pair of 10MB(!) removable-pack hard drives!...

[SL4P]

Aah.  AMPEX
Broadcast equipment from the 70's and 80's - absolutely the top end of mil-grade technical reference documentation.
A single VTR would typically have 4-6 ring binders, about 4-5 inches thick, with detailed schematics, parts lists, circuit operational theory and heaps of test scenarios.  Beeyootiful!

All original print, no copies or hieroglyphics.  Just perfect docs.

I also worked for DEC / Digital... their docs were good, but not a patch against Ampex.
...and I worked for Sony (Broadcast) as well.  Easily the best of the prosumer gear. Their pro/broadcast gear was a bit more 'black box' than Ampex manuals, but still pretty good.

[retrolefty]

H.P. manuals that I used in the 80s were among the best I ever saw. Tektronics of the same era were pretty good also.

[VK3DRB]

Unless you were a trained IBM technician you had no business doing anything to your mainframe as it was a very expensive piece of kit (and probably leased from IBM). This was men in white coats behind glass windows stuff.

A friend of mine works at a large IBM Z-Series installation in Eastern Europe. One day an IBM Engineer arrived and told the site manager that he was there to replace a power supply that had gone faulty, they asked around and nobody had placed a service call. It turned out that THE MAINFRAME had made the call, a power supply had drifted out of specification and the machine itself had emailed IBM Service and reported the error. No manual required.

It's not known if they had to open the pod bay doors to replace the part 

My first job out of uni was working for IBM fixing 029 and 129 card punch machines, and the old unit record 557, 082 and 083 machines. Add yes, I wore a suit, a white shirt and a tie to work every day.

The manuals were very good but in the end I had to diagnose bugs to below component level. Replace a relay, a transistor, vacuum tube or cam contact. Actually usually the specific relay contact inside a relay was replaced or repaired with a burnishing blade. Each key mechanism or component inside a keyboard was fixed. None of this replace the keyboard assembly rubbish. The job was challenging.

I have heard it said the electro-mechanical IBM 557 (a programmable alpha-numeric interpreter) was the most complex electro-mechanical EDP ever made by anyone in the world. It was immensely complicated. Anyone who has had to work on one would agree it was a bastard to debug, especially intermittent problems. No help available except the detailed schematics and timing diagrams. The oldest IBM (CTR) machine I worked on was made way back in 1926. These old machines were ingenious by design and in some ways were in some ways a lot more interesting than modern day electronics.

The very first machines I worked on...




and these...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment

[Richard Crowley]

My first job out of uni was working for IBM fixing 029 and 129 card punch machines,

Wow, so you worked on essentially the LAST (most modern) generation of card punch machines.
By the time IBM came out with those models, there were already CRT-based terminals taking over the industry.

When I was in college (late 1960s), we were phasing-out the "unit-record" card-based workflow.
We had a room full of Selectric typewriter-based terminals to program in "APL"  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

[miguelvp]

In Spain they were still using punch cards in the 80's at the university. You didn't get to feed them, you handed the cards to someone, they would feed them and run the program and give you the paper print with the output with your cards hopefully still in order.

[mtdoc]

I remember my dad giving me a tour of his building at Northrop Electronics in the early 1970s. There were rows of female "punch card operators" working away at their machines.

In Spain they were still using punch cards in the 80's at the university. You didn't get to feed them, you handed the cards to someone, they would feed them and run the program and give you the paper print with the output with your cards hopefully still in order.

Also in the US - at least in 1981.  I remember as a freshman in college then all the computer science majors throwing their stacks of punch cards out the window of our high rise dorm building after their final project was done.

[VK3DRB]

My first job out of uni was working for IBM fixing 029 and 129 card punch machines,

Wow, so you worked on essentially the LAST (most modern) generation of card punch machines.
By the time IBM came out with those models, there were already CRT-based terminals taking over the industry.

When I was in college (late 1960s), we were phasing-out the "unit-record" card-based workflow.
We had a room full of Selectric typewriter-based terminals to program in "APL"  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

Hey, I remember old APL! The IBM 5110 predecessor to the PC had APL built in.

We used to call card punches and verifiers, "crunches and terrifiers". But they were not as much fun as working on the unit record "old iron" equipment. The 129 was the last of the 80 column card punches, but IBM did make a machine called the 5496, a 96 column version in the early 1980's. Myself and another engineer were the last people in Australia to be fully trained by IBM on unit record in Australia. As you suggest, the crunches and terrifiers were replaced by 3741's and 3742's which were CRT based programmable data entry machines, using an 8 inch single sided 160kB diskette drive.

The first hard disk I worked on was a 5.1 MB Winchester which was so big and heavy it took two men to lift it. It was used in the IBM System/32 and cost around $100K in today's money as a replacement. The IBM System/38's 3370 DASD (Direct Access Storage Device) disks were 700MB, as big as a washing machine, and cost around $200K each in today's money. Today, 2,000,000 MB Seagate Barracuda drive costs under $100. That's around 400,000,000 times increase in cost per byte compared with the System/32 hard disk. Mind blowing to us veterans, but young adults and teenagers today think of it like this... .

People have it easy these days. Drive breaks... throw it out. No need to know how it works. No need to be even interested or excited. Same with Intel's PC processors. Most people have no idea how they work. And they don't need to. Sadly, it appears teenagers today have lost the "WOW FACTOR" that we had when we were teenagers. I found the wow factor with ham radio around 1977, via CB radio, and got my license in 1982.  Even today, I still find there is magic in HF. Most engineers today don't even know what ham radio is. And for them there is no wow factor.

IBM's unit record manuals were superb in quality, but they did not find the faults for you. It required diagnostics skills which I struggled with when I started at IBM, but over several years the brain wired itself to be pretty good at diagnosing faults in pretty much anything including TV's and video recorders, preferably with the help of a schematic diagram. These days I do design & development work in electronics (medical) but the experience from the old iron days is still very useful.

[funkyant]

Wow, this thread really derailed!

[miguelvp]

Sorry, I guess the nostalgia took a hold on all of us

[atferrari]

Service manual for the LX 850 - Epson printer was good at explaining how to disassemble the whole thing.

Even at board level it was reasonably good.

Copies in the Web, seem to be all copies from the same bad original awfully made .pdf.

[HighVoltage]

In the 1970s to 1980s, German made TV's by GRUNDIG had the most beautiful service manuals and schematics. Little scope pictures were printed on the huge schematic page when it seemed to be important. And the paperwork was inside of every Grundig TV for free.