cthia wrote:
BTW, as far as the old CRTs, a lot of people were "incidentally" taught by those things. They were nothing but bombs. There was a standing joke that if you work on one you had to be a bomb specialist. Red, blue or green. Don't cross the wrong wire. LOL
I am sure a lot of people here in the forum have seen one explode in their lifetime when acted upon by an outside force. I guess it is only fitting that they are used in a lot of "tv" shows and movies as homemade bombs. Can we say MacGyver.
I remember stories of Mac techs from the 80's - the whole case of the original Macs was so small, that before you did any other work on a MAC which required you to crack the case, you had to release the charge on the CRT flyback transformer.
In every Mac repair kit was a degaussing rod with a grounding cable, called by every tech I spoke with the "Divining Rod". Never having done one myself, the one repair manual I was shown warned that the force given from grounding the flyback would forcibly throw the rod backward - possibly injuring the tech's arm. My one friend showed me a technique of striking the transformer with what looked to be considerable force, but the energy release cause the rod to stop in mid air before damaging the transformer - he called learning the exact force necessary to be an acquired art.