Got it back, but it involved shaking the player with a reasonable degree of vigour until the picture stopped wobbling. That's not recommended, by the way, unless you're as potty as I am, so don't.

Despite trying as best as I can to think of this picture-wobbling as a minor irritant, and trying to focus very much on the fact that I'd brought a dead Domesday Player back to life, this occurence really, really had me totally baffled, and left me with a very much tainted sense of achievement at what I'd been able to do.

My bafflement accumulated the more I tried to put the newly-repaired player to use. You see, it wasn't just that it appeared to happen randomly when putting a disc in, sometimes playing correctly, sometimes doing the wobble. I also found that the same effect happened when I was overlaying the BBC computer video on top of the LV-ROM player picture, and if I changed mode it would sometimes result in the laserdisc picture going wonky.

Add to this set of circumstances the two methods I'd found of bringing the picture back to stability. The first I've described above, shaking the player about, or as I evolved the method over a period of time, rotating the player sharply about a quarter-turn in one direction and then bringing it back sharply to its original position.

The second, and again this isn't recommended so definitely don't do it if you like your hands and you like your LV-ROM player, is to slow down the disc whilst it is playing with a finger or two. When the disc returns to the correct speed, this sometimes has the effect of stabilising the video.

For a long time, I couldn't understand why changing screen modes on the BBC when it is connected to the LV-ROM player causes the same jittering picture effect. Then I read in the service manual that the disc rotation speed is slowed down slightly during a video mode change to facilitate the genlocking of the BBC overlay to the laservision picture.

Since the wobble effect can also occur when scanning through a CLV disc (but not so much during scanning of CAV discs) where the disc rotation speed reduces or increases as the laser unit traverses the disc surface, it would seem to suggest that the wonky picture problem lies somewhere in connection with the disc rotation speed.

There's very little I can do about that, and I'm going to have to settle with being content at having revived this LV-ROM player into an almost perfect state.

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