I picked a smashed vape pen from sidewalk, and used the USB-C socket to replace charging port on my BT headphones. I can always come here to feel slightly less crazy.
I'm having a lot of nostalgia for how I taught myself electronics in the 1960s. When my father would take me with to the local city dump I would collect all the radios and portable televisions that looked either reparable or like good for parts and take them home. There was a public use tube tester in the front area of a grocery store and a couple of the local repair shops would sell me parts and occasionally offer troubleshooting advice. I could check out Sam's Photofacts from the public library, which was mostly to see what voltages were expected and on color TVs to get the convergence procedure. By selling the repaired items I could afford to buy what I needed from Radio Shack to experiment. Good memories.
i grew up working for TV shops, and became an expert in CRT TV and monitor repair. i've done many CRT swaps, and even done "the hard part" of swapping yoke and convergence assemblies, and doing the full alignment process, usually a 2 or 3 hour process. i even wrote my own test pattern software because the company i worked for couldn't afford the $10,000 for a test pattern generator for Mono, CGA,EGA,VGA, and SVGA. i wrote test patterns for general monitor testing, as well as specialized test patterns for the convergence adjustments.
What are the 80s-90s tv called the smaller portable ones that have a clear square lens that goes over the crt screen that gives it’s a kinda futuristic look? I’m trying to find some more of those but don’t know what they are actually called…?
@@petergunn551 19” range. For example I have a 84 jcpenny model 685-2073. The ones that look just like this. I was surprised to see a 84 model with rca on the back it’s pretty top of the line model for that year. I have a wood grain trinitron that doesn’t even have rca I was like wth..!
So awesome that you used your CRT tester. I don't know why you didn't just desolder the yoke wires directly froim the yoke then you don't have to cut any wires. This is what I have done then I did a tube swap in the past.
Yeah, with the yokes being identical I'd have just desoldered and re-soldered the deflection wires, bonus is that then the loom is exactly the right length too.
This kind of video brings me memories. I am (2 weeks shy of) 55 and from 14 to 16 I did electronics apprenticeship and one of the things we did quite a bit during the last semester was to repair TVs and at that time, of course, it was always CRTs.
That discoloration on the old tube you see, might actually be the glass itself turning brown due the electron bombardment and soft x-rays that are stopped when hitting the glass.
The lines separated at the very top of the picture indicates worn-out capacitors around the vertical power amp IC. You adjusted the vertical position so the issue is out of sight, but it's clear that the picture centering is wrong, it needs to be pulled down a bit, but then the bad vertical linearity on the very top will be visible. You should do a vertical output recap, and I would also replace all the capacitors on the primary of the PSU (except the mains filter). If you do the RGB mod, I hope you will address this, too. I suggest to put a blob of silicone on the end of that convergence fine tuning strip, because there's a good chance the glue under it will dry up and the strip falls off at some point.
It's amazing how cheap something can get once the economy of scale gets going. It's also why once that great machinery stops, there's really no getting that stuff back.
@@Nukle0n Indeed. When the demand was hundred of thousands per year, you could make CRT's relatively cheaply. Now, it's forgotten tech. Nobody can make these anymore. While we still have the knowledge, the infrastructure is long gone. There are new vacuum tubes being made, but they are expensive, since they tend to be hand made. But nobody, as far as i know, is making CRT's. I have a couple of new in box CRT based monitors, and i am holding on to them for dear life. ^-^
TBH the cheap stuff was pretty much crap. Those small TV screens were really low-end. Low resolution, produced whine, no good antiglare surface, nothing. Similar could have been said about the cheap monitors (by monitors I mean VGA). The high-end Trinitrons that produced really great image and handled resolutions like 1600x1200 or 2048x1536 at 85hz were pretty expensive. Did I also mention they did not whine? Pretty much monitors never did, I noticed that only on TVs I wonder why. Anyway, the quality was there. This ironically greatly helped the LCDs to take over the market. They were crap, but most people only had the chance to compare crap LCDs with crap CRTs, so the arguments of power and size won. Unfortunately this killed the high-end CRT market as well, but there the LCD was no match as replacement, and still is not.
This might be overly specific, but I used to live somewhere that had a very active trash picking culture, Fairbanks AK. There were even little "give and take" recycling areas at many transfer sites with a concrete slab and a roof. Cutting off a power cord was a courtesy to dumpster divers that indicated that an appliance or whatever did not work. It would save someone the trouble of lugging something home only to have to bring it back again. I don't throw out many electric things but I'm still in the habit of cutting the cord before I do.
The last two numbers of a colour CRT model are the colorimetry, the actual temperature for the phosphors, P4 is grey monochrome, P22 is NTSC/Pal,modified standard, and P95 allows for a wider colour gamut with the correct matching demodulation vectors. P95 can be better than P22, but the correct demodulation matrix and a higher white point have to be used.
What can remove minor scratches from glass is optical rouge and a buffer wheel on a dremel. I've repaired scratched GLASS watch crystals that way. (don't try it on plastic watch crystals. Ask me how I know that won't end well!) If your doner CRT had the 'dag' coating flake off, you can still use it by putting a 500pf door knob capacitor across the HV lead to ground. It would have to have a voltage rating of at least 30KV. Transmitting capacitors of this kind can be found surplus. The last two digits in the CRT part number are usually for the type of screen phosphor. Maybe 'rare earth' vs something else? Or perhaps the resolution of the pixels?
You can just repaint the aquadag on the back of the tube, I did this with a Sanyo 20EZ arcade monitor and it worked out great. It's just graphic paint.
When it comes to CRT identification numbers, the last digits that come after the "X" denote the "ITC" or Integral Tube Component. This means that the CRT had the deflection yoke and convergence assembly installed at the tube factory, and it was supplied to the TV/monitor manufacturer as one complete unit. So the base tube (and mounting points) are actually 100% identical. It's just the deflection yokes which are different (but still electrically "close enough" in this case, as you found out). The tube number is actually A34AGT13X. It was made by Chunghwa, which was a big time tube manufacturer based in Taiwan. Manufactured in Malaysia, this is a super common tube found in many 13" consumer TVs and low-end security monitors from the 2000s. Also, nice to hear you got some advice from Sark on this! He's a legend in the CRT community. Great video! Cheers, Adrian.
That's very similar to the Philips TV I had in my bedroom! Not identical, the control panel under the CRT was a bit curvier so it was probably a few years later. But the back panel is very similar - mine had SCART of course, and no RCA inputs. Just the one SCART. It supported NTSC, PAL60, and PAL (no idea about NTSC50). Ooh, I always loved that quiet crackling sound on our family computer monitor and my dad's big TV. Sometimes I'd just hang around in the office after turning the computer off, feeling the static in the air (and on the metal venetian blinds). The little portable ones in the kitchen, etc, never did that to my recollection.
ah yeah rejuvenating color CRTs is always a gamble. Do it when you have no other options. That being said, some of the CRTs I gave this treatment still work 10 years after. Little hint : ramp up the filament voltage gently from cold condition until you see arcs between the cathode and G1 then let all cool again then repeat until there are no more shorts or you burn a hole through an electrode 😂
Been working on CRTs for a while now but I always learn something from your CRT videos! I appreciate how detailed you get into the specifics of the deflection, convergence, etc which I always find a bit fiddly but your videos give me more confidence to approach those repairs.
What a great move to have what seems like an extremely low time CRT going into a that very capable monitor from the security system. Very nice work, I think all the videos you make are really fun and educational and really bring me back to my youth.. thanks Adrian!!
12:53 Try to support the tubes only by the screen area. Don't stress the neck as you did here by placing some box under its deflection coil assembly. 16:10 Ground wire should be the last connection to unplug. Otherwise you risk a minor shock or damaging the electronics if the tube happens to be still charged (common with monochrome tubes even after years of lying around).
Great video! I did a similar swap on a Galaxian arcade machine that had severe burn in. My donor was a 19" TV with low hours. I believe the last numbers in the tube part number indicate the color of the phosphor. The TV tube I swapped in had a darker phosphor and it gave the game great contrast. When LCD TVs came out you could find CRT TVs in thrift stores almost for free.
@Adrian's Digital Basement Close but no cigar, remember there is vacuum inside, so whatever flyes flyes in a strait line until it hits something, the the brown area is not in a direct line of sight of the filament. The deposited metal you see there comes from the shadow mask the electron beam scans over, its powerful enough to sputter off small amounts of the the material the mask is made off these fly then backwards and get deposited on the area you noticed.
I heard that there is a company in the US that refurbishes CRTs, even replacing the phosphor on the screen if needed. Probably will be expensive, but should be interesting to investigate that possibility.
One of the best parts of your videos is, how "freakin'" happy you always are repairing all this stuff... That makes all of us surely happy repairing stuff, too.
The brownish stain on the inside of the glass is tungsten. The filament is constantly boiling off tungsten as long as the tube is on. This is the key factor in the lifespan of incandescent bulbs. Tubes tend to last a long time, because the tungsten is never heated to a bright incandescent level. But most tubes fail either because the filament goes bad (boils off) or the vacuum is compromised.
Vacuum tubes have envision problems from the coatings on the tungsten getting sputtered off. They don't use better tungsten. Only high power tubes might, and then they usually use a tungsten and thorium mix
The end of the CRT type code (after the X, which means RGB color phosphor) indicates the bonded yoke type. So yeah, that's the only difference between the two tubes.
I enjoyed this a lot and watched it from start to finish. One thing I noticed is that you explain every step which is great, but maybe when you make a cut, you can put a brief cutscreen+audio pause? Certainly viewers can pause whenever they want, but they won't know when. You know yourself when a new step of the refurb is starting, so you can put a pause there. This will also later let you find and put chapters more easily. (I've thought about this from my old videos, and it's something I want to do for my new ones.)
As the for the cut cord, it's made both to recover the copper by scalpers, both as a part of a myth that claims that if you leave a CRT on the curb and someone injures himself by tinkering you're still liable for that
Love your enthusiasm - thankfully you use your voice to emphasize things instead of your hand movements which infest too many other channels making their shows unwatchable. I love how you repurpose tech and fix it that would have otherwise been scrapped.
That video tape and their Video Production department has the Same teacher that was on Jeopardy and won the game. I forgot his name now, but he did the programs for both Jefferson & Portsmouth Middle School. Please keep that tape footage or Upload it if you get around to it.
Awesome Video I glad you got that video Monitor working. But at 32:20 I kept noticing a Black Line / Bar on top of the screen, it was also on that 90's VHS Tape you were playing too
I got a CRT TV for my birthday, I think when I was 14, which means it's over 25 years old now. I had to repair it once (Dry joint), but it's still going great. And yes, I use it every day! It's my alarm clock! It's probably on and running for an average as 3 or 4 hours a day currently.
By the time these CRTs were being produced I can't imagine it was very affordable to produce them anymore considering how much work was required to make them versus the newer LCD units that can be more easily manufactured in layers. It still amazes me the ingenuity of building such a complicated way to scan an electron beam over the phosphors of a screen deflected by a magnetic field to display a picture and then with colour screens to get even more specific and hit the correct color phosphor points on the screen. This is why bringing a magnet close to the screen or not using the degaussing coil results in color shifts and bending in the picture. Still 30 years later many LCDs are now long dead and these units are still working. They have amazing longevity as long as you don't leave the same picture on the screen forever.
thank god, I've never had to do any repairs on a CRT, although I do have a little portable monochrome unit where I've added a connector to the wires going to the deflection coils, more so I have some flexibility if I ever case mod the CRT or have to do any other repair work. as well as converting it from RF to Composite.
One thing we don't see often is testing of old CRTs for X-Rays and making sure that their protection circuits and components are still at spec. Any thoughts on this?
A point about degaussing. This works because it drives any magnetic material into saturation and the clipping of the magnetic flux then centers the polarization to the to the centre of the alternating magnetic flux at the specific point that the energy of the peak magnetic flux is just below the saturation point. That is why the degaussing coil has co many windings and uses a significant current - without saturation it would only marginally reduce and polarization and not cancel it.
Two minutes in and I'm not certain but I think the dot pitch of the phosphor on a TV is not as good as that of a computer monitor, so the image may be fuzzy by comparison. Now I'll watch the rest of this video to see if that becomes an issue... Edit:- 37 mins in and the dot pitch was mentioned but the image still looks good for old time home PCs & gaming at any rate. So looks like it's worth doing a tube swap in these situations. Great video! Have I done tube swaps? Well I was a TV engineer back in the 19080's so yes I've done a few hundred. A lot of the tubes we had were re-gunned so not always a great improvement. We had to deliberately neck the old tubes by clipping the nipple so we could safely dispose of them. I wouldn't recommend anybody doing that nowadays. We did used to rejuvenate the color tubes (not Trinitron) and it did work for a while on some, but they would usually come back with low emissions not very long after doing them, a very few did have great long term success though.
This was not a computer monitor, but a security surveillance monitor. And both crt’s are identical regarding dot pitch, so it is not changing by swapping anyway.
Your channel has come a long way! Much better video, sound quality, and ease of speaking. Perhaps you can upgrade the memory or video card in your intro!
i happen to see one of those exact monitors at a grocery store, but it was in really poor condition and had cracks all over the case, but was still mounted to the wall in the front entrance
Hi boss. Whenever I see soldering tutorials everything looks so nice. I get a lot of brown oxidizing crap when I solder and things don't seem to flow and settle where it's supposed to. I'm guessing just crap quality flux solder and equipment. Any tips for improving my microsoldering. Are those videos done in a nitrogen chamber or something like that. Btw you should bury that CRT in your backyard and hold a ceremony sending it on its way to electronics heaven.
You might be using too high of a temperature. Flux rarely is bad, but if you are trying to use lead free solder any remnant of the old flux might be incompatible with the new solder.
3:36 Yep SDTVs were plagued with penny pinching feature removals in hindsight, so many jungle chips could have done way more than they ever did. Even the VHS home video boon era didn't see a tremendous surge in Composite capable TVs, they made RF-coaxial only models way, way too long.😒 I think we're past the era of elitist scoffing at low end CRTs lol, going from side of the road picks, to picks from recycling centers only, to no picks at all eventually ijs. It's DIY projects but a lot of SDTVs could do so much more than we knew, like RGB capable ones alone that might have S-Video ports heh. Great job man, pretty nice finding matching donor parts.🙂 Truth is in NA most of us that lived through the SDTV era never actually experienced all they could offer. Personally I only used post Composite AV port types just a little after DVD started, where S-Video had been around for more than a decade already.
There are places that recondition CRT's they are amazing, and I am not sure how many are left but I have seen video's on TH-cam where they take the CRT's apart redo the necks, yea very skilled glass work people and they can change out the guns. Amazing to see. I only have one CRT left in the house a Commodore 1084 I think that's what it is. Anyway, I only use it for testing my retro systems on so I don't use it all that often. Last time I worked on anything CRT was back in the 1990's only because I had some injection molding machines that had CRT's and the originals were from Motorola the replacements were from Zenith and they used to be cheap but when they became hard to get, I had to repair them, and I hated the Zenith CRT's at the time the last American manufacturer of Tubes before Goldstar acquired them. Honestly CRT's have always scared the hell out of me I can work on them, but I chose not to. I do know for retro computing CRTs are special, but I am too old and it's not my most favorite thing the service. I can do it but chose not to.
34:19 It's from the music video to Weapon of Choice ft. Bootsy Collins by Fatboy Slim. Christopher Walken was asked to do the video by some roundabout way, and he, against all expectations, said yes. Amazing video.
At my local arcade museum, there's a Centipede with 19 inch CRT that's driven from a Commodore 1084 chassis (which is for 14 inch CRTs) and it just works (with minor vertical breakup at the top (left rotated) of the screen).
If you ever need to get rid of a crt larger than, and sharp as my 1084s (that has RGB) and want to trade... I can be there in 5 mins! 😀😁 Awesome vid Adrian!!
I think I said something about it being an interesting idea if the CRT from that other Magnavox television would work in this monitor, and now we get to find out, very handy that someone had a similar TV to donate... :D
To fix scratches you need a cement that is of the same refractive index as glass - optical cement, used for gluing compound lenses together. If done right such material will make the scratch disappear.
I've got two CRTs that need some scratch treatment. One is just a vanilla Mac Classic, of which there are plenty to go around. But the other is a beautiful 32" Sony Vega. Can't exactly just hop onto eBay and have one of those sent Priority Mail... :-) Glad to know this is an option. I was expecting to have to build an upright stand and sand / polish them by hand. Was not looking forward to that.
@@nickwallette6201 I am sure you have to thin the cement out and apply it very carefully in thin layers with a fine brush. Those windshield crack solutions depend on this idea.
Inductance is what matters. The DC resistance is really only relevant at DC, and deflection is not DC. Inductance is more like resistance vs. frequency, so you test at (approximately) the frequency of interest (for US, 60Hz vertical, 15.7kHz horizontal.)
The darkish line near the top of the CRT Adrian, is that from the 60Hz refresh messing with the camera image? How are you syncing the camera to the CRT? I think in the bad old days TV refresh would be synced with the mains frequency, but Id assume that wasnt the done thing after a while.
nice, you made a crt into a floppy, well you could write a floppy at very high resolution, above blu-ray, with a crt electron gun, it might be single-write only, like cd-r. the writing or restoring could be done by electron metal sputtering, to cover any holes dips written. but are your stuff not complete/whole if you need to harvest their parts.
Would the missing 30 cents components that Adrian mentions, be the PAL delay line by any chance? It’s basically a passive component made from a calibrated piece of glass inside a case, with a wire attached to each end.
It might just be the angle but it appears the horizontal linearity is a bit off: the squares on the right side look a little bit fatter than the ones on the left. You might need to play with the value of one of those capacitors in the horizontal output if you want it to be perfect.
In the tests around 35:00, there seems to be a single permanent red scanline. Is that a camera artefact, or the content being tested? It's not on the higher-quality test video.
It might be an idea for Adrian to include model numbers as a matter of habit (eg in video titles or description) in case people are looking for videos on these specific models
Correction: The capacitor formed by the CRT envelope is actually the filter capacitor for the high-voltage DC supply. Very early TVs (late 1940s era) actually had CRTs where the portion between the screen and the neck was metal (!!!) and in order to properly filter the CRT anode voltage, there were usually a couple high-voltage "doorknob" capacitors installed next to the rectifier tube. Thankfully some engineer was able to figure out how to eliminate that extreme safety hazard!
I believe it was only larger round CRTs which had metal cones. AFAIK normal sized ones were always glass envelope. I think there were yield problems producing larger pieces of glass without defects. A side benefit of metal cone CRTs is they weigh much less than all-glass ones. 16 and 19 inch monochrome from the late 40s and 21 inch color from the late 1950s are probably the most common metal cone CRTs used in American TVs. Types 16GP4, 19AP4, and 21AXP22.
with the smaller tubes like 14inch the only thing i can see thatll ruin your tube swap days are narrow neck and non narrow neck tubes dont mix unless someone has found some tube socket thatll allow the changeover ( if your new tubes deflection yoke is useable impedance wise ) im trying to find a tube for a mtc900e arcade monitor and its a nightmare all i can find are pesky 1990,s narrow neck. i think i have to hunt much rarer 1980,s vintage
Nice monitor, Adrian :) But if you really want something that rocks, from the 80's, then consider getting a Sony HDM-3830 Trinitron monitor, from 1983, with 1080i resolution, and RGB input.
As much as I love all the computer content, I will not ever skip a CRT episode! Great, as always!
I picked a smashed vape pen from sidewalk, and used the USB-C socket to replace charging port on my BT headphones. I can always come here to feel slightly less crazy.
I'm having a lot of nostalgia for how I taught myself electronics in the 1960s. When my father would take me with to the local city dump I would collect all the radios and portable televisions that looked either reparable or like good for parts and take them home. There was a public use tube tester in the front area of a grocery store and a couple of the local repair shops would sell me parts and occasionally offer troubleshooting advice. I could check out Sam's Photofacts from the public library, which was mostly to see what voltages were expected and on color TVs to get the convergence procedure.
By selling the repaired items I could afford to buy what I needed from Radio Shack to experiment.
Good memories.
The CRT videos are my absolute favorites. I remember being so curious about how our tv worked as a kid, so this scratches that itch.
i grew up working for TV shops, and became an expert in CRT TV and monitor repair. i've done many CRT swaps, and even done "the hard part" of swapping yoke and convergence assemblies, and doing the full alignment process, usually a 2 or 3 hour process. i even wrote my own test pattern software because the company i worked for couldn't afford the $10,000 for a test pattern generator for Mono, CGA,EGA,VGA, and SVGA. i wrote test patterns for general monitor testing, as well as specialized test patterns for the convergence adjustments.
What are the 80s-90s tv called the smaller portable ones that have a clear square lens that goes over the crt screen that gives it’s a kinda futuristic look? I’m trying to find some more of those but don’t know what they are actually called…?
@@thatdude4000 portable, or miniature.
@@petergunn551 19” range. For example I have a 84 jcpenny model 685-2073. The ones that look just like this. I was surprised to see a 84 model with rca on the back it’s pretty top of the line model for that year. I have a wood grain trinitron that doesn’t even have rca I was like wth..!
It annoyed me that you didn't manage to clean off a spot on the CRT ...until I realized it was a spot on my own monitor. Great video.
Same
Would've been nice for him to get that too, while he had the wet rag out and everything . . .
So awesome that you used your CRT tester. I don't know why you didn't just desolder the yoke wires directly froim the yoke then you don't have to cut any wires. This is what I have done then I did a tube swap in the past.
Yeah, with the yokes being identical I'd have just desoldered and re-soldered the deflection wires, bonus is that then the loom is exactly the right length too.
This kind of video brings me memories. I am (2 weeks shy of) 55 and from 14 to 16 I did electronics apprenticeship and one of the things we did quite a bit during the last semester was to repair TVs and at that time, of course, it was always CRTs.
Happy 55th Anniversary tomorrow (?) All the best, Per (Denmark)
That discoloration on the old tube you see, might actually be the glass itself turning brown due the electron bombardment and soft x-rays that are stopped when hitting the glass.
The lines separated at the very top of the picture indicates worn-out capacitors around the vertical power amp IC. You adjusted the vertical position so the issue is out of sight, but it's clear that the picture centering is wrong, it needs to be pulled down a bit, but then the bad vertical linearity on the very top will be visible. You should do a vertical output recap, and I would also replace all the capacitors on the primary of the PSU (except the mains filter). If you do the RGB mod, I hope you will address this, too. I suggest to put a blob of silicone on the end of that convergence fine tuning strip, because there's a good chance the glue under it will dry up and the strip falls off at some point.
I remain amazed that CRTs were as cheap as they were. They're so tweaky and fiddly to manufacture and set up
It's amazing how cheap something can get once the economy of scale gets going. It's also why once that great machinery stops, there's really no getting that stuff back.
@@Nukle0n Indeed. When the demand was hundred of thousands per year, you could make CRT's relatively cheaply. Now, it's forgotten tech. Nobody can make these anymore. While we still have the knowledge, the infrastructure is long gone.
There are new vacuum tubes being made, but they are expensive, since they tend to be hand made. But nobody, as far as i know, is making CRT's.
I have a couple of new in box CRT based monitors, and i am holding on to them for dear life. ^-^
They were only cheap because of slave labor in China.
TBH the cheap stuff was pretty much crap. Those small TV screens were really low-end. Low resolution, produced whine, no good antiglare surface, nothing. Similar could have been said about the cheap monitors (by monitors I mean VGA). The high-end Trinitrons that produced really great image and handled resolutions like 1600x1200 or 2048x1536 at 85hz were pretty expensive. Did I also mention they did not whine? Pretty much monitors never did, I noticed that only on TVs I wonder why. Anyway, the quality was there. This ironically greatly helped the LCDs to take over the market. They were crap, but most people only had the chance to compare crap LCDs with crap CRTs, so the arguments of power and size won. Unfortunately this killed the high-end CRT market as well, but there the LCD was no match as replacement, and still is not.
@@Lady_Zenith Only with OLED, LCDs were going to come ever so close to the contrast of a CRT
This might be overly specific, but I used to live somewhere that had a very active trash picking culture, Fairbanks AK. There were even little "give and take" recycling areas at many transfer sites with a concrete slab and a roof. Cutting off a power cord was a courtesy to dumpster divers that indicated that an appliance or whatever did not work. It would save someone the trouble of lugging something home only to have to bring it back again. I don't throw out many electric things but I'm still in the habit of cutting the cord before I do.
The last two numbers of a colour CRT model are the colorimetry, the actual temperature for the phosphors, P4 is grey monochrome, P22 is NTSC/Pal,modified standard, and P95 allows for a wider colour gamut with the correct matching demodulation vectors. P95 can be better than P22, but the correct demodulation matrix and a higher white point have to be used.
What can remove minor scratches from glass is optical rouge and a buffer wheel on a dremel. I've repaired scratched GLASS watch crystals that way. (don't try it on plastic watch crystals. Ask me how I know that won't end well!) If your doner CRT had the 'dag' coating flake off, you can still use it by putting a 500pf door knob capacitor across the HV lead to ground. It would have to have a voltage rating of at least 30KV. Transmitting capacitors of this kind can be found surplus. The last two digits in the CRT part number are usually for the type of screen phosphor. Maybe 'rare earth' vs something else? Or perhaps the resolution of the pixels?
Tempered glass usually shatters when polished you have to have it constantly cooled with water and even then it's likely to shatter.
You can just repaint the aquadag on the back of the tube, I did this with a Sanyo 20EZ arcade monitor and it worked out great. It's just graphic paint.
Your boombox shirt cracks me up. A JVC M70 with the meters and tweeters from a GE 3-5259 Blockbuster inserted between the woofers and radio dial.
When it comes to CRT identification numbers, the last digits that come after the "X" denote the "ITC" or Integral Tube Component. This means that the CRT had the deflection yoke and convergence assembly installed at the tube factory, and it was supplied to the TV/monitor manufacturer as one complete unit. So the base tube (and mounting points) are actually 100% identical. It's just the deflection yokes which are different (but still electrically "close enough" in this case, as you found out).
The tube number is actually A34AGT13X. It was made by Chunghwa, which was a big time tube manufacturer based in Taiwan. Manufactured in Malaysia, this is a super common tube found in many 13" consumer TVs and low-end security monitors from the 2000s.
Also, nice to hear you got some advice from Sark on this! He's a legend in the CRT community.
Great video! Cheers, Adrian.
That's very similar to the Philips TV I had in my bedroom! Not identical, the control panel under the CRT was a bit curvier so it was probably a few years later. But the back panel is very similar - mine had SCART of course, and no RCA inputs. Just the one SCART. It supported NTSC, PAL60, and PAL (no idea about NTSC50).
Ooh, I always loved that quiet crackling sound on our family computer monitor and my dad's big TV. Sometimes I'd just hang around in the office after turning the computer off, feeling the static in the air (and on the metal venetian blinds). The little portable ones in the kitchen, etc, never did that to my recollection.
Fantastic swap, easily equivalent to a heart swap in a person. Congratulations Doctor Adrian.
ah yeah rejuvenating color CRTs is always a gamble. Do it when you have no other options. That being said, some of the CRTs I gave this treatment still work 10 years after. Little hint : ramp up the filament voltage gently from cold condition until you see arcs between the cathode and G1 then let all cool again then repeat until there are no more shorts or you burn a hole through an electrode 😂
Been working on CRTs for a while now but I always learn something from your CRT videos! I appreciate how detailed you get into the specifics of the deflection, convergence, etc which I always find a bit fiddly but your videos give me more confidence to approach those repairs.
The cases used for a lot of security camera monitors are nice and utilitarian 100% convenient.
What a great move to have what seems like an extremely low time CRT going into a that very capable monitor from the security system. Very nice work, I think all the videos you make are really fun and educational and really bring me back to my youth.. thanks Adrian!!
12:53 Try to support the tubes only by the screen area. Don't stress the neck as you did here by placing some box under its deflection coil assembly.
16:10 Ground wire should be the last connection to unplug. Otherwise you risk a minor shock or damaging the electronics if the tube happens to be still charged (common with monochrome tubes even after years of lying around).
Great video!
I did a similar swap on a Galaxian arcade machine that had severe burn in. My donor was a 19" TV with low hours.
I believe the last numbers in the tube part number indicate the color of the phosphor. The TV tube I swapped in had a darker phosphor and it gave the game great contrast.
When LCD TVs came out you could find CRT TVs in thrift stores almost for free.
@Adrian's Digital Basement
Close but no cigar, remember there is vacuum inside, so whatever flyes flyes in a strait line until it hits something, the the brown area is not in a direct line of sight of the filament.
The deposited metal you see there comes from the shadow mask the electron beam scans over, its powerful enough to sputter off small amounts of the the material the mask is made off these fly then backwards and get deposited on the area you noticed.
I heard that there is a company in the US that refurbishes CRTs, even replacing the phosphor on the screen if needed. Probably will be expensive, but should be interesting to investigate that possibility.
if it's the mob I'm thinking of I think they only do mono CRTs.
@@SomeMorganSomewhere I believe you are right, but even that would already be useful (if not for that specific CRT, at least to others).
One of the best parts of your videos is, how "freakin'" happy you always are repairing all this stuff... That makes all of us surely happy repairing stuff, too.
The brownish stain on the inside of the glass is tungsten. The filament is constantly boiling off tungsten as long as the tube is on. This is the key factor in the lifespan of incandescent bulbs. Tubes tend to last a long time, because the tungsten is never heated to a bright incandescent level. But most tubes fail either because the filament goes bad (boils off) or the vacuum is compromised.
Vacuum tubes have envision problems from the coatings on the tungsten getting sputtered off. They don't use better tungsten. Only high power tubes might, and then they usually use a tungsten and thorium mix
Adrian's analog attic. Never going to give up that. Adrian, you are missing out on a great channel name.
The end of the CRT type code (after the X, which means RGB color phosphor) indicates the bonded yoke type. So yeah, that's the only difference between the two tubes.
sometimes it is important to have the "Weapon of Choice" to fix things.
Walk without rhythm...
Great job Adrian!! You look so proud of the set! Proud of you man! You lift the curtains on what makes this strange magic of CRT work! ❤
I enjoyed this a lot and watched it from start to finish. One thing I noticed is that you explain every step which is great, but maybe when you make a cut, you can put a brief cutscreen+audio pause? Certainly viewers can pause whenever they want, but they won't know when. You know yourself when a new step of the refurb is starting, so you can put a pause there. This will also later let you find and put chapters more easily. (I've thought about this from my old videos, and it's something I want to do for my new ones.)
Sweet! Done this myself many times. Always a good feeling.
working in a tv repair shop i've rejuvenated 100's of tv's and have be successful! but you have to know what your doing to get good results!
As the for the cut cord, it's made both to recover the copper by scalpers, both as a part of a myth that claims that if you leave a CRT on the curb and someone injures himself by tinkering you're still liable for that
Shocked with how easy this went! Awesome!!
Love your enthusiasm - thankfully you use your voice to emphasize things instead of your hand movements which infest too many other channels making their shows unwatchable. I love how you repurpose tech and fix it that would have otherwise been scrapped.
That video tape and their Video Production department has the Same teacher that was on Jeopardy and won the game. I forgot his name now, but he did the programs for both Jefferson & Portsmouth Middle School. Please keep that tape footage or Upload it if you get around to it.
Thanks for the support!
Awesome Video I glad you got that video Monitor working. But at 32:20 I kept noticing a Black Line / Bar on top of the screen, it was also on that 90's VHS Tape you were playing too
I got a CRT TV for my birthday, I think when I was 14, which means it's over 25 years old now.
I had to repair it once (Dry joint), but it's still going great.
And yes, I use it every day! It's my alarm clock! It's probably on and running for an average as 3 or 4 hours a day currently.
I immediately recognized Weapon Of Choice. Love that music video.
By the time these CRTs were being produced I can't imagine it was very affordable to produce them anymore considering how much work was required to make them versus the newer LCD units that can be more easily manufactured in layers.
It still amazes me the ingenuity of building such a complicated way to scan an electron beam over the phosphors of a screen deflected by a magnetic field to display a picture and then with colour screens to get even more specific and hit the correct color phosphor points on the screen. This is why bringing a magnet close to the screen or not using the degaussing coil results in color shifts and bending in the picture.
Still 30 years later many LCDs are now long dead and these units are still working. They have amazing longevity as long as you don't leave the same picture on the screen forever.
I'm a big fan of using a softmodded Wii with the 240p test suite for test patterns and color. This is amazing and glad to see it!
Nice work on the tube swap Adrian! I was also able to catch my name at 39:24!
Love it, nice work Adrian. I am dreading the day my PET's CRT fails...when it does I will be revisiting your channel for help!
If you want beautiful CRTs, I would check out the old JVC CRT tubes. The colors are absolutely stunning! It's puts even the best OLEDs to shame.
thank god, I've never had to do any repairs on a CRT, although I do have a little portable monochrome unit where I've added a connector to the wires going to the deflection coils, more so I have some flexibility if I ever case mod the CRT or have to do any other repair work. as well as converting it from RF to Composite.
Glad to see that awesome monitor finally having a good display.
One thing we don't see often is testing of old CRTs for X-Rays and making sure that their protection circuits and components are still at spec.
Any thoughts on this?
That turned out to be a sweet little monitor
Super long videos are always great👍 I love the long videos, today most videos are very fast and minimal.
Yes, the longer the better!
Longer are the best, it usually explains slow and detailed. Don't miss small details of amazing repairs like this one.
A point about degaussing. This works because it drives any magnetic material into saturation and the clipping of the magnetic flux then centers the polarization to the to the centre of the alternating magnetic flux at the specific point that the energy of the peak magnetic flux is just below the saturation point. That is why the degaussing coil has co many windings and uses a significant current - without saturation it would only marginally reduce and polarization and not cancel it.
Always awesome to watch crt videos, you could say it’s a Weapon of Choice 😊
so many options - you could go with this, or you could go with that..
Make a fat boy seem slim! 😮
Two minutes in and I'm not certain but I think the dot pitch of the phosphor on a TV is not as good as that of a computer monitor, so the image may be fuzzy by comparison. Now I'll watch the rest of this video to see if that becomes an issue... Edit:- 37 mins in and the dot pitch was mentioned but the image still looks good for old time home PCs & gaming at any rate. So looks like it's worth doing a tube swap in these situations. Great video! Have I done tube swaps? Well I was a TV engineer back in the 19080's so yes I've done a few hundred. A lot of the tubes we had were re-gunned so not always a great improvement. We had to deliberately neck the old tubes by clipping the nipple so we could safely dispose of them. I wouldn't recommend anybody doing that nowadays. We did used to rejuvenate the color tubes (not Trinitron) and it did work for a while on some, but they would usually come back with low emissions not very long after doing them, a very few did have great long term success though.
This was not a computer monitor, but a security surveillance monitor. And both crt’s are identical regarding dot pitch, so it is not changing by swapping anyway.
@@telocho Fair comment.
Wow, what an improvement!
Good job!
I just wish I could find a suitable tube to swap into my EGA monitor!!! Found a couple tubes, but the pinouts are different!
i can't get tired of crt episodes!
Your channel has come a long way! Much better video, sound quality, and ease of speaking.
Perhaps you can upgrade the memory or video card in your intro!
the intro is a demo of the low res tech of the early home computers
i happen to see one of those exact monitors at a grocery store, but it was in really poor condition and had cracks all over the case, but was still mounted to the wall in the front entrance
Hi boss. Whenever I see soldering tutorials everything looks so nice. I get a lot of brown oxidizing crap when I solder and things don't seem to flow and settle where it's supposed to. I'm guessing just crap quality flux solder and equipment. Any tips for improving my microsoldering. Are those videos done in a nitrogen chamber or something like that. Btw you should bury that CRT in your backyard and hold a ceremony sending it on its way to electronics heaven.
You might be using too high of a temperature. Flux rarely is bad, but if you are trying to use lead free solder any remnant of the old flux might be incompatible with the new solder.
3:36 Yep SDTVs were plagued with penny pinching feature removals in hindsight, so many jungle chips could have done way more than they ever did. Even the VHS home video boon era didn't see a tremendous surge in Composite capable TVs, they made RF-coaxial only models way, way too long.😒
I think we're past the era of elitist scoffing at low end CRTs lol, going from side of the road picks, to picks from recycling centers only, to no picks at all eventually ijs. It's DIY projects but a lot of SDTVs could do so much more than we knew, like RGB capable ones alone that might have S-Video ports heh.
Great job man, pretty nice finding matching donor parts.🙂 Truth is in NA most of us that lived through the SDTV era never actually experienced all they could offer. Personally I only used post Composite AV port types just a little after DVD started, where S-Video had been around for more than a decade already.
There are places that recondition CRT's they are amazing, and I am not sure how many are left but I have seen video's on TH-cam where they take the CRT's apart redo the necks, yea very skilled glass work people and they can change out the guns. Amazing to see. I only have one CRT left in the house a Commodore 1084 I think that's what it is. Anyway, I only use it for testing my retro systems on so I don't use it all that often. Last time I worked on anything CRT was back in the 1990's only because I had some injection molding machines that had CRT's and the originals were from Motorola the replacements were from Zenith and they used to be cheap but when they became hard to get, I had to repair them, and I hated the Zenith CRT's at the time the last American manufacturer of Tubes before Goldstar acquired them. Honestly CRT's have always scared the hell out of me I can work on them, but I chose not to. I do know for retro computing CRTs are special, but I am too old and it's not my most favorite thing the service. I can do it but chose not to.
34:19
It's from the music video to Weapon of Choice ft. Bootsy Collins by Fatboy Slim. Christopher Walken was asked to do the video by some roundabout way, and he, against all expectations, said yes.
Amazing video.
Great job, Adrian!!
At my local arcade museum, there's a Centipede with 19 inch CRT that's driven from a Commodore 1084 chassis (which is for 14 inch CRTs) and it just works (with minor vertical breakup at the top (left rotated) of the screen).
Very nice video and great success! BTW I like the more concise vids.
the carbide ball of a ballpoint pen will damage a crt too. learned that the hard way as a kid
nice replacement of crt. i would have desoldered the harness from old crt to new one so that dont have to splice wires.
34:18 You're Walken close to the edge, risking a content match on that
That monitor will look great with a curtain super cool pc that you maybe working on soon ..
If you ever need to get rid of a crt larger than, and sharp as my 1084s (that has RGB) and want to trade... I can be there in 5 mins! 😀😁 Awesome vid Adrian!!
I think I said something about it being an interesting idea if the CRT from that other Magnavox television would work in this monitor, and now we get to find out, very handy that someone had a similar TV to donate... :D
To fix scratches you need a cement that is of the same refractive index as glass - optical cement, used for gluing compound lenses together. If done right such material will make the scratch disappear.
I've got two CRTs that need some scratch treatment. One is just a vanilla Mac Classic, of which there are plenty to go around. But the other is a beautiful 32" Sony Vega. Can't exactly just hop onto eBay and have one of those sent Priority Mail... :-)
Glad to know this is an option. I was expecting to have to build an upright stand and sand / polish them by hand. Was not looking forward to that.
@@nickwallette6201 I am sure you have to thin the cement out and apply it very carefully in thin layers with a fine brush. Those windshield crack solutions depend on this idea.
Any reason why you did not check the resistance of the deflection coils versus the inductance?
Inductance is what matters. The DC resistance is really only relevant at DC, and deflection is not DC. Inductance is more like resistance vs. frequency, so you test at (approximately) the frequency of interest (for US, 60Hz vertical, 15.7kHz horizontal.)
Nice another CRT saved from landfill 😄
You were extremely lucky to get the exaxt same tube ansd ab almost identical deflection yoke ! replacing a tube in 2023 is like playing lottery
Fabulous work as always!
@32:30 ish (the dot pattern) definitely worth checking the focus adjustment as that will vary from CRT to CRT. I suspect you can improve upon that.
The darkish line near the top of the CRT Adrian, is that from the 60Hz refresh messing with the camera image? How are you syncing the camera to the CRT?
I think in the bad old days TV refresh would be synced with the mains frequency, but Id assume that wasnt the done thing after a while.
nice, you made a crt into a floppy, well you could write a floppy at very high resolution, above blu-ray, with a crt electron gun, it might be single-write only, like cd-r. the writing or restoring could be done by electron metal sputtering, to cover any holes dips written. but are your stuff not complete/whole if you need to harvest their parts.
I spy kimtech wipes in the background!! I'm working in a molecular bio lab for grad school and those things are fantastic!
Those were received in a recent mailbag.
ok 1 great swap and 2 that ghostbusters cart brought back memories as i used to play the floppy version on my cousins C64 growing up :)
The plastic case could be re use to do a all in one retro PC using an LCD panel.
Fairly common for US Philips sets to sync to 50z.
Also many of the later mod Philips/Magnavox can often be modded for YPbPr intput.
Would the missing 30 cents components that Adrian mentions, be the PAL delay line by any chance? It’s basically a passive component made from a calibrated piece of glass inside a case, with a wire attached to each end.
@@telocho That, and a 4.43 MHz crystal I guess.
It might just be the angle but it appears the horizontal linearity is a bit off: the squares on the right side look a little bit fatter than the ones on the left. You might need to play with the value of one of those capacitors in the horizontal output if you want it to be perfect.
Hello Basement
In the tests around 35:00, there seems to be a single permanent red scanline. Is that a camera artefact, or the content being tested? It's not on the higher-quality test video.
Great work!
BTW - those rubber gloves won't stop high voltage.
It might be an idea for Adrian to include model numbers as a matter of habit (eg in video titles or description) in case people are looking for videos on these specific models
36:06 Looks like all you need to do is move the screen down a tad. It's shifted up too high. Vert centering.
Correction: The capacitor formed by the CRT envelope is actually the filter capacitor for the high-voltage DC supply. Very early TVs (late 1940s era) actually had CRTs where the portion between the screen and the neck was metal (!!!) and in order to properly filter the CRT anode voltage, there were usually a couple high-voltage "doorknob" capacitors installed next to the rectifier tube. Thankfully some engineer was able to figure out how to eliminate that extreme safety hazard!
I believe it was only larger round CRTs which had metal cones. AFAIK normal sized ones were always glass envelope. I think there were yield problems producing larger pieces of glass without defects. A side benefit of metal cone CRTs is they weigh much less than all-glass ones.
16 and 19 inch monochrome from the late 40s and 21 inch color from the late 1950s are probably the most common metal cone CRTs used in American TVs. Types 16GP4, 19AP4, and 21AXP22.
with the smaller tubes like 14inch the only thing i can see thatll ruin your tube swap days are narrow neck and non narrow neck tubes dont mix unless someone has found some tube socket thatll allow the changeover ( if your new tubes deflection yoke is useable impedance wise ) im trying to find a tube for a mtc900e arcade monitor and its a nightmare all i can find are pesky 1990,s narrow neck. i think i have to hunt much rarer 1980,s vintage
I enjoy watching your videos, you´re always possituve and laid back, and you save CTRs, what is not to like about your videos bro? :D
Not once did Adrian do a Rod Serling. We control the horizontal......... :)
flyback failure ls a real problem. i been reading of a lot of people talking about it.
Dangerous definitely. Not just mains voltage, the anode cap can have 10s of thousands of volts! Can easily seriously hurt or kill you.
2:29 Where is that blue and yellow-green towel gone? I hope it's allright!
Nice monitor, Adrian :)
But if you really want something that rocks, from the 80's, then consider getting a Sony HDM-3830 Trinitron monitor, from 1983, with 1080i resolution, and RGB input.