re: #71 wheat-dogghazi-mailgate

My dad was a TV repair guy way back when. His preferred technique of shattering the CRT for disposal was:

1. Put it face down inside a cardboard box large enough to have the neck sticking up an inch or so.
2. Take a long broom handle.
3. Hunker down so your eyes are below the level of the top of the box.
4. Whack the neck with the broom handle until the seal is broken or the neck breaks.

I watched him do this from a safe distance once as a kid. That big old 27” tube made one hell of a noise when it imploded. CORRECTION: Now that I think about it, the tube did not shatter impressively, though the sound of the air rushing into the busted neck was pretty loud and sudden. The point of this method was to limit the chances of implosion.

The real danger is the recoil of the glass pieces after the implosion. Plus the insides were coated with lead and the screen with phosphors, none too healthy to breath in.

The old black-and-white ones you could just reach in with a pair of needlenose and break the little glass teat in the middle of the pins that they originally drew the vacuum through. You’d hear the air whistle in but it was perfectly safe.

The three-gun color tubes had a much wider neck and a plastic cover over the whole end, so it made it more difficult. The later one-gun inline tubes I don’t know about.