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Old 03-10-2012, 04:31 PM
W3XWT W3XWT is offline
3 Phase 480VAC is QRP
 
Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: California
Posts: 212
My implosion experiences are in two categories, accidental and intentional.
I ‘ve only seen one accidental implosion. When I was about six or seven, one of my grandmother’s neighbors had a house fire. And, the portable TV on a rollaway stand came rolling out of the house and onto the sidewalk. (With the help of the firemen…) The TV was on fire! And, less than a minute after hitting the sidewalk, the CRT sort of “collapsed”. And, when it did, you could see flames inside the TV set!

Years later, when I was in high school, the electronics teacher was anxious to get rid of several years accumulation of old and obsolete CRT’s –no doubt very valuable today! In that era, growing up in countryside being turned into suburbs, there were numerous places where we took CRT’s after school. A favorite area was a nearby abandoned gravel quarry whwer we’d go after school. (Yes, there were guys who had rifles in the trunks of their cars in our school parking lot! But, this was a different time. We used the weapons on old cars, old CRT’s, etc. –not each other!) Many an old CRT met its fate face down in that quarry with its neck the target of a .22 LR bullet. We had one guy who had no fear at all of what a CRT could do. He sat an old CRT face down in a dumpster, slipped a pipe collar with a piece of wire on it and pulled really hard! The neck snapped at the bulb and all that happened was a slow escape of phosporus. Said rocket scientist then took an old CRT and placed it in the dumpster. The then threw another CRT at it! The resulting double implosion was quite spectacular!

While shooting the neck off an octal base tube at 50’ feet or so was fun, when my grandfather had the opportunity (with a set from one of my cousins), he “did the deed” with the miniature base of a more “modern” CRT. He wasn’t impressed with the “whooosh” it made. He just muttered, “they just don’t make ‘em like they used to!”
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