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Repairing a Sony Dream Machine ICF-CL75iP

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Sony's glue choice leaves much to be desired and apparently causes oscillators to malfunction.

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cl75ipfan wrote 01/17/2019 at 01:52 point

thanks for these great instructions

my mother has this identical clock radio and it suddenly stopped keeping the correct date - always resetting to 2009, and the day of the week would toggle between Sun/Mon a couple times a second - but otherwise the radio and clock seemed to work. I found this page, followed the instructions to disassemble and found the same crud deposit near/around the crystal. Took a while to clean it off using alcohol, Qtips and small tweezers, but in the end the solution worked just as advertised and the clock radio is functioning normally again. Trickiest part was probably reattaching the LCD data cable. 

Thanks again, the instructions and photos too were very helpful.

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Andrew Jones wrote 09/23/2016 at 16:18 point

Thanks for your notes and photos. I had the same problem and could not set the clock. I cleaned up the glue and it seems to be back to life now with the clock running just fine. However I found the clock did not start working straight away, I left it and after an hour or so and it seemed to magically spring into life again. Perhaps the acetone I used to dissolve the glue had not totally evaporated. Anyway, it's working again now!

Thanks for documenting the solution so clearly.

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chrisnelson242 wrote 03/31/2016 at 07:52 point

THANK YOU very much to leadacid44 for the well illustrated information supplied here!...

A neighbours Sony Dream Machine had the same problem......even the colon flashed but the time would not advanced....Maybe good for use on Ground hog Day..

Don't think I would have bothered pulling it down if not for the encouragement here..

Sure enough, it was the monkey snot (as we call it in the trade), plastered all over the crystal and worst still, the I C next to it that caused the problem....It goes dark brown after a while and turns hygroscopic, trapping water under it which shorts things out..

It's contact glue and should be kept for purposes such a gluing the soles on shoes .

Having cleaned all that up, it worked well..

You would think that after 50 odd years, manufacturers would have woke up to this..or maybe they like to plant time bombs !

NOTES...

The connector for the LCD data  cable has a brown flap along the front...You can prise this up vertically..Then the cable will slip very easily in and out of the connector...A sort of zero force arrangement....Quite common with these screen type connectors...I had one in a tablet that had been knocked open by a loose battery, causing no display.

Have a look at the back of the screen board while you have it apart...There is another crystal there that might have some of the dreaded brown stuff on it

Cheers all.

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