Yesterday while scraping a few TV's, I had one Picture Tube blow up, glass went ever where. I was very lucky. I have never seen this before. WOW. has anyone eles had this happen. Thank you.
Yesterday while scraping a few TV's, I had one Picture Tube blow up, glass went ever where. I was very lucky. I have never seen this before. WOW. has anyone eles had this happen. Thank you.
Cant say that's ever happened but safety is no joke, Steel or composite toes, pants, proper gloves, and safety glasses are always a must when doing any kind of work in this field. Accidents aren't always avoidable but injuries are.
As a kid (maybe 10-12 years or so), a friend and I were playing at a dump... We would look for copper windings and other copper items to stockpile and scrap. There was a TV and I was standing right in front of it, maybe 15 feet or so. He said, "watch this!" and hit it from behind with a coke bottle and it blew like a bomb. I found chunks of glass from the corners as big as my fist twenty feet behind where I was standing. I did not get touched by even a small piece of glass, but it scared the crap out of me!
Yes, even all those years ago, I was looking for metal scrap.
Hasn't happened to me personally, but I've seen it happen. My dad had a 15 or so year old tv on top of a rack in the garage. About a 21 inch or so. Top of the tv almost touched the ceiling. He wanted to replace it with the couple year old that was in the house. Well the plastic on the old tv was so brittle that when he slid it forward and tipped it sideways to take it down, his hand went in. The way it bent in was like a one way trap on his arm so when he pulled his hand out it hurt so bad he basically dropped it to the ground so the weight was off his arm. Tube and plastic exploded like a grenade. We were finding bits of glass and plastic in random places for weeks. Luckily all he got was a few scratches and minor cuts on his arm where it went through the case. But man was it some noise and a mess.
Wow, I guess I've been lucky. Never any excitement like that (so far).
1. it's not gas
2. never had it happen to me
3. listen to Mech
~You have to start somewhere to get anywhere~
Don't breathe in the vapors!
Sirscrapalot - Never been sarcastic a day in his life...
I have had this happen before to me once.
Unless its happened to you, you have no idea how scarey it is. It really is a huge glass grenade.
Its caused by the energy stored up inside of the tube from the vacuum pressure.
So the first thing you should do when you can is let air into the tube to get rid of the vacuum inside.
I grab the board on the end of the tube and give it a twist to break the glass there and let the air in.
Inside the ring of metal pins there's a little glass 'pig tail' that's where they sucked the air out and sealed the tube.
So I think its safer to let the air back in there. (Rather than sticking a screwdriver under the red suction cup looking thing)
When the tube exploded on me, it was sitting on a rubbish bin at waist height and I had stuck a screwdriver under the big steel band to lever it off.
I now know what happened.
There's a glass join there under the band, its a weak point, I broke the weak point and the vacuum caused it to break right around the whole tube on that weak point, then the vacuum really took the whole screen inwards and the energy caused the glass shards to explode outwards.
I didn't get a single scratch on me, but the ground was covered in a 10foot radius of glass shards up to 3 inch long.
I did see the shock wave around the screen as it exploded.
It is sooo scarey (Scarry) how they explode like that, unless you have actually seen it happen...... And I hope you don't.
The other thing I did to get rid of the vacuum (in a rubbish pit) was to have it face down and shove a long steel tube thru the vent slits in the back of the TV and break off the Copper coil part of the tube where its tapered to the point where the electron gun plug is.
Last edited by eesakiwi; 04-17-2016 at 06:33 AM.
The weird thing is my brother just pulled up my to the back of my truck, where it was sitting and where I was standing, then my wife came out to see what blew up.
Back in the early 1980's, I worked for Zenith Corp in Indy. I was in the parts department, so one of our jobs was sending all the warranty and exchange parts back to the factory to be remanufactured. Before shipping the CRT's, we were told to lightly smack the neck of the CRT with a hammer to 'make it safe'. Funny, I don't remember ever being told to wear safety glasses.
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