Ampro Resource

Thanks to Erie Patsellis and Thurman Witte for sending me some other manuals to post. There is now a 2000 user and service manual, and a 3600 / 4600 service manual.

I find the .tiff format to be not very user friendly, so I’ve taken the liberty of converting to .pdf format. If you download a manual and suspect the conversion process has mangled it in some way, let me know and I’ll see what can be done.

I’m guilty of not spending very much time tweaking my home theater (and its starting to really show) — I’ve been working on building my new theater room, so all of my free time is construction at the moment.

I’ve also posted two new files, the 3300/4300 service manual and the 3600/4600 user manual. See the file section http://www.lowtek.ca/ampro/files. If anyone has other manuals to contribute I’m happy to host them.

Its been a while since I’ve updated the site, so a quick update on what I’ve been up to.

The fan mods are still going strong. I haven’t had any problems so far with them. While I would strongly recommend any Ampro owner consider doing this, I also would caution that every unit may be different and you should measure before and after to satisfy yourself that the change is safe.

As for stability, its better now. I still have to sit down and do a full mechanical alignment since I know that the focus is a little off on one side, and the projector isn’t perfectly square.. but no one but myself can actually tell — for all of my guests, the picture is pretty amazing.

I’ve picked up the parts I need to try out Guy Kuo’s solar cell gray scale, and I have plans to borrow my friends ocilloscope and check the tube voltages to see that I’ve got fairly good linearity (I think this is off right now). So I have lots of plans..

BUT, currently I’m working on finishing the basement — which includes building a theater. I may post some updates on that progress here, but that’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Picked up some 120 Ohm 2W resistors and installed them inline with the fans. This effectively dropped the power to the fans from 20V down to about 12V. They run almost silently now (as designed) since they are intended to run at 12V being PC case fans.

There is something almost magical about having the projector be so quiet. If you get close to the fans, you can hear a gentle ‘whoosh’ sound – but that’s it. Not enough to intrude on the movie at all.

We watched Austin Powers (the original) — I checked the temperature during the movie a few times. After running for 2 and a half hours (there was some amount of warm-up) — the internal temperature was only 5C higher than it was with the original fans. Safe enough for me.

I’ll keep monitoring the temperature(s) to see that its stable. I’m sure that once I ceilnig mount the projector things will change a little as well.

The next modification will likely be some HVPS maintenance and possibly the addition of a fan to help keep it cool.

I’m also anxious to get my setup more stable, as I’ve been moving things around so much the setup isn’t all that great. The convergence drifts more than I’d like — and my mechanical setup is off at the moment. Always things to do..