the next big problem for collectors of bpc sets.brittle plastics.
 

while tossing a bunch of late 70's-90's sets today i found quite a few that the plastics had gone brittle.
as in falling apart!aoc,sony,and sanyo being the worse.the spectricon(rebadged aoc)literally fell apart when i picked it up by the side handgrips.the broken plastic stinks too.looks like these may turn to dust like catalins by the time they are collectable.
many played but could not even give them away without waiting months for pickup.
good news is nearly no effort to bust em up in the cans.

I've seen that issue with the plastic going bad on Sonys and Sanyos, and also Emersons (even fairly new). It's VERY dangerous; not only to the TV from falling in on itself, but I have received some NASTY slash wounds from fall-apart TV cabinets. On the Sonys, you have to watch for the gray plastic turning brownish. Particularly the KV-25XBR, and the 27" late 80s sets with the bone colored cabinet and gray backs.

Charles

I know that polystyrene will become brittle with excessive heat but I thought all modern plastic cabinets were made of ABS plastic. I have not noticed this on radios from this same era, even the Sonys. I hope this does not mean the CCRadio 2 I just bought will disintegrate in fiteen to twenty years.

Lovely. I have loads of BPC Sony's and now a Sanyo. Somebody up there hates me...

I remember first hearing about this happening to s0nys at the ETF meet, I can't remember who told me though....

Sounds like a good reason to not collect worthless sets.

It is age that makes junk into collectables.
For instance if fosilized dinosaur turds wern't bagilions of years old no one would want them.
Some sad day BPC sets will be collectable, but that time is still far off.
Not too long ago monochrome sets that are not being sought out by collectors were considered junk (I have an 80's electronics magizine that had a project which called for a 10KV cap and instructed you to make one or pull one out of an old junk TV).

Worthless?

I've run into the brittle plastic problem with a lot of the 90's Panasonic sets. We have removed several of them from customers homes for an update or because the set failed and have had them just about fall apart in our hands. Some of them barely made it out of the house and into the van.

Back around '89, when I first started collecting tube radios, most collectors thought anything later than 1940 was junk and they certainly didn't pay attention to the AA5 radios of the '50's and '60's. Now, the younger generation is into the later tube radios and some people even collect the solid state radios of the '70's+. Back then, TV collecting was unheard of and those who did were not interested in sets newer than the 1940's. TV collecting has a long way to go in order to catch up to old radios; but, there are people who seek out the newer sets from the '70's and '80's. One day, I can see collectors getting into the BPC and SPC sets of the '90's and 2000's. Heck, up until a few years ago, I focused my collecting mainly on old radios. Any TV's that I brought home were for the purpose of fixing them for resell. During the '90's, I can't tell you how many tube TV's from the '50's-'70's came thru here. What I could fix easily was sold and the rest were junked. Now, I wish I had some of those sets.

Not entirely, you can always pull the copper from the yokes and sell it to the scrapyard. :D

Or get one off the curb as a decent set when your not able to afford a newer set.

worse than worthless.soon we will have to pay to be rid of them.the copper junkers just make a mess getting yokes.so i pull them myself when i bust the set up into the can.thought of setting 20 or so of the ones that play somewhat onto the burn pile and plug them up.record and post to youtube.that pile is huge right now.iirc secret life of machines did that with a big pile of junker sets.

What is it about the plastic that makes it degrade? Is it the chemical composition? I am very curious to know what exactly is happening. I have 30 to 40 year old plastic cabinet TVs and there is no sign of plastic breakdown. Could it be the bpc sets were built with lower quality material?

Answer, yes. Remember cars built in the 80's (mostly) where you would see plastic trim parts degrade and discolor? The more non virgin plastic (reground) that is used in the mix, the more unstable the life of the plastic will be.

Re-used plastic originates from the runners used in the molds and those pieces are seperated and sent back into the grinder machine and then mixed with new pellets to be liquified and extruded (injected) into the mold. Cabinet pieces, bad runs, etc. all go back into the mix. Some perchantage of regrind is acceptable but there are limits.

As with anything, plastics will age and outgas just like most everything else, some do better than others.