ampage Tube Amps / Music Electronics	For current discussions, please visit Music Electronics Forum.

ampage archive

Vintage threads from the first ten years

Old Tube TV--Salvage oppurtunities

:

7/7/1999 4:01 AM
BWilliamson	Old Tube TV--Salvage oppurtunities I stripped a TV for a gal for a Fish Tank holder--anything worth anything in there worth a git amp? bw

7/7/1999 1:11 PM
R.G.	For old tube sets, the power transformer is usually beefy and useful, sometimes a choke. The tubes are generally not the types usually employed in guitar amps. Lotsa sockets, high voltage capacitors, maybe some resistors. Get the iron.

7/7/1999 4:28 PM
Mark Buckingham	Just out of curiosity, is an old tv more dangerous than other tube equipment? (For example, the picture tube itself?)

7/7/1999 5:06 PM
marrk	I believe picture tubes are designed to implode not explode. Just properly drain the larger caps like you do in an amp. Mark

7/7/1999 5:45 PM
Don Symes	Even so, they do spray quite a bit of glass when they pop. Wear safety goggles until the picture tube is safely disposed of - like high-tossed into a nearly empty dumpster to make sure it breaks in an enclosed space.

7/7/1999 5:36 PM

IMHO they are.. the HV section generates something on teh order of 1kV per diagonal inch of screen, and the caps hold that a while.. 19" set = 19kV. The HV PSU (in the sheilded box) holds a charge for a while too.. be careful!

I used to fix our old set when I was a kid (when fixing meant testing the tubes at RS!), and once I woke up at the wrong end of the garage in a ball.. lucky to be here frankly! Most of the TV parts are cut for PCB's.. the sockets are PCB mount and the caps etc have short leads.. The tubes are not typical audio numbers.. Not much for salvaging IMHO.

7/8/1999 3:34 AM

bw:

According to Dan Torres' book(s), the PT's from old B&W sets can often be used for guitar amps. When you look at all of the ways you can hook up a tranny (fw rect, fw bridge rect, voltage doubler... or with a power zener) you could get quite a range of voltages from those heavy chunks of iron. To determine the currents you could expect them to handle, look at the tubes they are powering in the TV...

Steve Ahola

P.S. I guess he specified B&W because they go back to the days when TV's used tubes rather than transistors and ic's. (Did anybody else get irked when they'd advertise tv's being 100% solid state? Back then they did not have 19" LCD displays so there was always a picture tube. Just one of my pet peeves...)

Page 1 of 2