Gemini000 wrote:Damaging a CRT from the front is hard. Damaging it from the back is easy. 😜
So true. The front glass is incredibly thick and the neck is incredibly easy to snap by clumsiness with tools and such. On the other hand some CRT rejuvenation procedures require you to tap the neck with the back of a screwdriver with considerable force. I've successfully dislodged cathode debris and repaired heater-cathode shorts without breaking the tube in the process. 😀
One of the very first monitors I've attempted to repair had the neck board glued to the tube. Being young and unexperienced I tried to pry it off with a screwdriver thinking the glue should be brittle but it wasn't, the neck cracked and air rushed into the tube in such an unceremonious way it really pissed me off. 😜 Sometimes the gust of air blows the phosphor coating off the screen, especially in monochrome tubes. Since then I have broken several bad tubes for safe disposal. I just take a hammer to the neck, pretty boring actually. Having a CRT fall from a great height does make a pretty loud explosion when it hits the ground, though. 😵
By the way that metal strip around the front end of the tube isn't just for anchoring purposes, it's a safety-critical piece. It contains the implosion and should never be removed, the CRT might even violently implode on its own without it. Very old TVs before the use of anti-implosion bands would place a thick sheet of glass in front of the screen in order to protect the user from sudden implosion - it wasn't just a decoration. 😜