UPDATE - at the request of Wells Gardner, I have removed the contents of this post as they are seriously trying to improve the situation with their current models of monitors.

FURTHER UPDATE - I am putting this back up, since there is nothing here that is either not the truth, or my personal opinion. If someone has an issue with what is printed here, feel free to call and talk to my boss Andy Paul, phone (800)383-6367 or (780)532-2429. Only at his request will it be removed.

Open Letter to Wells Gardner - May, 2006
I am tired of fixing your crap. If the IT games didn't ship with your monitors, I wouldn't touch one with a 10 foot pole. I probably spend 1/2 a day a week now replacing capacitors and resoldering boards on your monitors.

Consider we operate well over 1000 pieces of equipment, 200+ of these are BBH2, Golden Tee Fore, Golden Tee LIVE, Silver Strike Bowling, and some Big Buck Hunter Pro's with your monitors.

1) The Wincap and KME electrolytic capacitors you are using are CRAP. I use exclusively Nichicon capacitors now, and never had a problem. I shouldn't have to recap monitors after 3 months! Since your company has outsourced the boards and manufacture offshore, quality hasn't just dropped, it has DIED.

Here is the cost for a set of Nichicon PW series 105°C caps:
WG7500 series - $12.10
WG9200 series - $18.10

This was at 100 piece quantity so it wouldn't surprise me if manufacturer could get these for about 1/2 that. So an average of about $7.55

So here I am wasting 1+ hours of my time, plus huge revenues on downtime, on every one of these goddam monitors, for $7.55

2) Circuit boards - I shouldn't be able to just touch components and the traces lift off the board! Never mind trying to resolder components - I end up cutting pads off and having to scrape traces back to solder caps in.

3) WG9200 series monitors - I HATE THESE MONITORS. At least the 7500 series are relatively easy to repair. These damn things have at least 3X as many parts on them. We really could have done without the onscreen digital adjustment - how many times do you have to adjust the monitor? Once a year? Without it, I bet the parts count would be about 1/2.

I have a local electronics guru that fixes the few items for me that are beyond my capabilites. And he ain't no hack - he's been in the business fixing every type of electronic device for over 20 years. He also designs and manufactures custom electronics for the oilfield industry; he gets the boards made in China, and either populates them here or has the board maker do it. So he knows his stuff.

I took him 6 of these monitors, 3 of them he was able to get working. The other 3 he just shook his head, he had spent hours trying to diagnose the problems. He explained to me on the schematic what was happening, from what he could understand it was a timing issues, with different circuits powering up at different times, otherwise the power supply shuts down. He was convinced that some parts were purposely labelled incorrectly. He would take a know good part, install it into a working monitor and it wouldn't work. Consequently he has politely asked me not to bring these monitors to him anymore.

So now I had monitors with failed chassis's sitting around. The only option I could think of was to order $300 replacement chassis for them. Which means in order to ensure they are going to work for a reasonable period of time, I have to recap and resolder NEW monitor chassis. Plus hotglue the broken yoke on the picture tubes:
Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to Login or Register!!

Is this making any sense to you?

Someone else might scream about "planned obscelesence", but guess whose monitor I DON'T buy as replacements? I use Makvision monitors as replacements now.

And here's a happy thought - have a look at those nice new flatscreen monitors in the Golden Tee LIVE. Left corner of the chassis - it says 279200.... I also heard a story about the shadowmask inside the picture tubes falling off.

NOTE - I am sending a link to this message to both Wells Gardner and Incredible Technologies.