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Back in the day when CRT 'restorers' first came on the market, a big deal was made of how "restoring" was fundamentally different than the older "rejuvenating" process. Rejuving or "shooting the tube" was brute force stripping of the cathode, while restoring was a more benign "boiling" of the cathode surface to bring up more of the underlying emissive material. The restore process had to be scrupulously time limited to prevent destroying the cathode.
I often wondered how much of a real difference existed between rejuving and restoring.
One thing we learned early on was to never rejuv or restore a CRT in the customer's home, because the tube would almost always be flat again in a week or two. Learned this the hard way when a competing shop came in and hung a brightener on the tube, which brought it back up again. And the customer called up raising hell. Afterward, we always gave the customer the choice of a brightener or CRT replacement, but never a rejuvination or restoration.
A brightener would generally give the jug a few more months of useful life.
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