newshound wrote:
On 01/03/2021 16:46, Brian Gaff (Sofa) wrote:
Yes, lots of dangerous stuff in the home. Remember CRTs? Now its more
likely
a lithium battery burning the house down, or an exploding electrolytic
capacitor taking an eye out if you are working on an open PC.
Brian

IME CRTs don't go off very spectacularly. Long long ago my father sought
to make one safe (while I watched) by wrapping it in multiple layers of
blankets and sacking, then lobbing bricks at it from a distance. After a
number of failed attempts, the gun extension just snapped off with no
detectable "bang". (By the end of the war he was training people in how
to blow stuff up. He won't have done a "stored energy" sum and, on
thinking about it, there's not much stored energy even in an old-style
45 degree tube).

CRTs can be energetic.

You just have to know how to tease them,
to max the output.

One of our fine grad students in the chem department,
decided the picture tube in his colour TV was "gassy".
That was the story that was told to me. He brings
the tube into work, sets it up on a bench at one
end of the lab.

He heats the neck of the tube with a torch. Presumably
this heating was done where there was a sealing
nipple or something. Well, he only got to apply the
torch for a few seconds, before the thing imploded.

It blew glass the length of the lab. There were flecks of
glass down at the other end of the lab, a distance of
around 50 feet.

I couldn't believe it. I wasn't there when this happened,
but I used that lab, and I was finding bits of glass
for several weeks afterwards, in all sorts of weird spots.
You'd find pieces in sinks and so on.

Most of the glass stayed up the head end of the room, but
there was still glass all the way down at the end. I just
couldn't imagine how the pattern ended up like that.

I've imploded picture tubes at the city dump (landfill)
back when I worked a maintenance job, and none of those
did anything spectacular. They were all duds. I put a
brick through the front of one and... nothing. Just loss
of vacuum and nothing thrown back at me.

And the guy who carried out this feat, I don't know
if he ever graduated. He would make one hell of a TV
repair man :-) I could see him bringing his Bunsen
burner over to your house now.

Paul