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Comment by gbil | Hacker News Reader

Personal anecdotes from my early mid teen years

1. Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….

2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.

CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!

EDIT: I meant to reply to the other thread with the dangers of CRTs

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I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically.

That was nothing compared to the time the CAT scan machine fell face down off the lift gate on the back of the delivery truck because our driver pushed the wrong button and tipped it instead of lowering it, but I missed the flack from that because I was on a move somewhere thankfully. Afterwords he was forever known as the quarter million dollar man.

Oof, a whole CAT scanner is insane! Did insurance cover it?

Oops just saw this! I never heard, last time I saw it, it was sitting busted up against a wall with blankets thrown over it. The warehouse usually ate breakages because that was cheaper than insurance overhead in the long run.

I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes.

> Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….

My father ran his own TV repair shop for many years. When I was a teen he helped me make a Tesla coil out of a simple oscillator and the flyback transformer from a scrapped TV. It would make a spark 2 or 3 inches long and could illuminate a florescent light from several feet away. It definitely produced higher voltage than normally exists in a TV, but not orders of magnitude more. The high voltage circuits in CRTs are dangerous as hell.

In high school we used them as a high voltage source to make lifters: https://youtu.be/jrfBrrDfdEA

My high school electronics teacher had a screwdriver that was permanently welded to the terminals of a capacitor he’d pulled from a TV set. “This is why you use a resistor to discharge one of these things,” he said.

TIL. I always used a screwdriver to discharge those capacitors lol.

It was high voltage but low current. I touched high-voltage circuit in the back of TV accidentally while poking in it as a teen, and while it was quite unpleasant, all it did was burn a hole in the skin of my finger. It eventually healed.

I used the CRT HV powersupply to make a little electronic hovering thing back in high school http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm

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