And now the Zenith decat process.
I left the tube in the sun untill it was very hot and then tried to pull wire through the glue the wire went about 1 or 2 inches in before snapping.
I tried various thicknesses of wire both hot and cold as well as the one i setteled on. Which cold was able to go in about the farest distance before snapping.
I initally heated all the wires with a fillament transformer that, as the thickness of the wire went up, prooved to be too weak. I then managed to find the transformer that I wanted to use from the beginning. It is a transformer from a computer battery backup power strip, and this thing has got some cahonies (the low voltage secondary is wound with wire so thick that it is tough to bend).
This worked well, but the sun was going down (to the point where the work space was in shade) and the tube started to cool. I also had a hard time finding a place where the wire would melt the glue well. The wire was hot to the point that the glue would smoke when I would turn the voltage up, but the wire would stick to the glue and refuse to go in further than 2".
The following are my most important questions to those with Zenith cateract removal experience.
Is the glue on Zenith round tubes somehow harder to work with than the rectangulars?
And when one cuts a zenith cateract with a hot wire, is it suposed to be like a hot knife through butter? If not at what rate does the wire normally slice the glue? And how hard does one need to pull the wire?
How hot should the wire be?
Sorry for all the questions. I've never done a cateract before and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I like restoring and collecting color TVs enough that I realize I have to learn how to do this or live with cateracts (which I'm sick of).
Tom C.