TV harvest

CRT TV's are great sources for bunches of electronic components. We recently had one die from a lightening strike, so I thought I'd take it apart.

Our dead 27" CRT TV.

I wasn't sure what fried on it, and still don't know even after taking it apart. It would only show a single horizontal line in the middle of the screen, as if the entire picture had been compressed into that line, so maybe the vertical deflector coil went bad (it looked ok though...). The sound worked fine, despite the picture, but I thought that having a 75 pound, 6W stereo was pretty useless, so I started disassembling/breaking apart.

I read this instructable before proceeding. It was pretty useful, especially the safety stuff. The CRT acts as a capacitor and needs to be discharged. So I put the TV on my skateboard and rolled it outside:

The clip on the screwdriver shoved in the ground was part of my grounding rig. I attached the other end of the red wire to another screwdriver and shoved it under the suction-cup like thing on the top of the TV to discharge the CRT (I heard a tiny "pop").  The shiny thing in bottom center is one of the 3W speakers. You can see the circuit board (and the flyback transformer!) to the left of it. 

Close up of the CRT.

Some people salvage the CRT for stuff. I have no idea what I'd use it for, so I didn't mess with it. I was after the flyback transformer ( ;) watch for a plasma speaker future project). Here are a bunch of pics (click them to enlarge):

Close up of circuit board.

Close up of flyback transformer. Sorry about the bad picture quality- I should be getting a real camera, i.e. not a cell phone camera, sometime soon.

I always wondered what was inside of an S-video thingy. Turns out there are a lot of tiny coils.

Circuit board post-harvesting. I basically took everything that wasn't a tiny resistor, possibly fried, or generally useless.

Here are some pics of all the stuff that came out of this TV:

Transformers, crystals, relay, semiconductors, multi-watt resistors.

Capacitors.

I don't know what these are. Some seem to be inductors of some type.

Moral of the story: Never throw out your TV, and before you go recycle it, steal all the useful components.