Chris Eddy wrote:
>
> Couldn't resist this topic, after all of the fun we had in college.
>
> I was the guy that showed up at college with all of my boxes of parts
> (considered to be bizare behavior ten years ago in engineering school).  We
> would sit around the apartment and blow up parts. We took a lamp cord,
> laced the wires onto the part, lay it on the floor (in a pan or something),
> and plug in.  Some parts are quite spectacular.  IC's blow apart with a
> shower of sparks 4 or 5 feet long sometimes, and when they calm down they
> reduce to a glowing blob of molten (??).  The electrolytics were not nearly
> as much fun, because when they did blow up, they just went 'crack' and the
> guts would shoot out somewhere.  No sparks to speak of.  The problem with
> them was that we kept blowing the fuse in the fuse box, and had to put in
> another.  It wasn't long on a student budget and limitted fuses to tire of
> that method.  Sometime I'll have to relate the difficulty you would have in
> throwing a cinder block through a 26" picture tube.  It is much harder than
> one would think.  We found that it was easier to toss them off of the third
> story.  It was faster.  The TV, not the cinder block.
>
> Chris Eddy
> Reformed unsafe person
> Pioneer Microsystems, Inc.

  The easy way to blow a TV tube up:

  Put it face down so the neck sticks straight up.  Hit it at the base
of the neck, right in the curve where the neck melds into the rest of
the tube.

  Did this in Jr. High School for a demo, I (of course!) volunteered for
the shop class (Teacher was in a wheelchair from a motorcycle accident
that left him disabled), I was wearing a full face shield & full body
apron, had a 20 foot long "T" shaped metal bar to hit it;  Some nice
sized pieces went past me, 25-30 feet or so from the tube.  Sort of an
implosion/explosion.  Not too hard to break the tube this way.  I
wouldn't want to hit it there without being far away & behind protective
gear (In a cabinet, probably less of a problem.)

  Someone else even got volunteered to clean up!  <G>

  Mark, mwillis@nwlink.com