LG DVD. Disc spins at high speed but no audio no video.

This LG DVD was brought in by a friend of mine, it was not his so not much history of the problem but the owner has told him that the DVD has never gone to any other technician.

It didn’t take long before I realized that this was not true, usually equipment from other technician referred to another has its challenges especially if the one handling it before was not a professional.

Before opening I powered it up and it came up pretty well, the disc is spinning at high speed but no audio or video coming out.

I took some time observing the DVD and I noticed that the track count is also stuck, I opened the set and tried to push the pickup to the outer side..Alas the pickup was very hard to move, it should move softly either way.

I checked the sled motor by applying some dc voltage to it and rotated very well minus the load of course. Never apply power to the CD motor in circuit. You might end up doing more harm to the circuit.

With this I concluded that the sled motor was health. Then I applied power to the set with the pick up on the out lane. To my amazement the pick is supposed to move toward the center but this time it stayed at the same place (stuck).

I checked the gears and all seemed ok to my judgment. So what next….. After careful checking I realized the gear is not locking up well. Someone might have opened the set before and did not return the gears correctly?

I suspected previous repair because one bolt was also missing which hold the Loader mechanism. Remember the owner claimed that the set was never opened before.

So always be careful to check if the unit was ever opened before because this will allow you to think outside the box. Always be careful with unit which had previous repairs by other people.

I believe the previous technician repaired the machine but only missed when it came to re-assembling the machine, as a technician please note that there is no school to teach you how to open and close the equipment you will be working on and therefore it is up to the technician to be keen when opening especially new machine because when closing up you will be doing exactly the opposite of what you did when opening.

So I reinstalled the gears correctly and the DVD started working like new.