/diy/ - Do It Yourself

[Anonymous No.122241]

Every week there are heaps of old CRT TV's on the side of the roads near my house waiting to be collected as rubbish.

Is it worth the effort to go and take stuff out of them?

Besides capacitors and resistors is there anything useful in them?

[Anonymous No.122245]

It would have steel, lead, tin, aluminum, gold, and copper parts but unless you have no job and nothing to do its not really worth harvesting.

[Anonymous No.122251]

>>122245
Oh wow..

Where is the gold?

[Anonymous No.122252]

>>122251
Oh boy, here we go...

There isn't just gold bars plopped inside them. It's such a miniscule amount that you couldn't collect it, it'd be like trying to take the gold out of pentium processors.

[Anonymous No.122254]

>>122251
its not used in all tv's but it would be on board somewhere in tiny tiny amounts. Cellphones are good for metal harvest also.

Really, if you can get ahold of a large amount of old electronics you can harvest them for metals which depends on where you live could be worth your time.

[Anonymous No.122257]

You can get really high voltage caps, and the whole reception stuff. If you're lucky, it still runs on tubes.

[Anonymous No.122266]

>>122254
Cellphones on a per ton basis have 280 grams of gold, about 140 grams of platinum and palladium, and 140 kilograms of copper

On the weight of the newest iphone you would have to dismantle 6 530 phones (at an estimated time of 5 minutes per phone is 544 hours)

you would earn
Gold: 14,530
Platinum: 6,580
Palladium: 2,800
Copper: 987
Total: 24,874

So 24,874/544 = 45$/hour
However thats if you have all those phones available and paid zero for them which is unlikely.
But there is money in harvesting.

[Anonymous No.122275]

>>122245
This. Hobos in my area have figured out how to extract the valuables. If I walk by an intact CRTs I'll see it in two pieces with some of the guts removed a few hours later.

For a while I've been thinking of collecting six working CRTs and building a giant clock with a digit in each screen. A microcontroller can generate that level of video output fairly easily.

[Mid-south Maker No.122277]

>>122241

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP8ddiFJOU0

Make some of these, people away's trying to pick them up from me. Cost me $10 per set to convert using Radio Shack parts. Next one I'm doing i'm just stripping the case and mounting in scrap plexie glass

[Anonymous No.122278]

>>122241
There's a ton of videos on disassembling CRT monitors/ TVs and they usually say it's about 6-8 dollars of copper/ aluminum/ motors (the parts that seem the best to recycle) per unit. If you've got a lot of spare time and access to a bunch of them, give it a go.

You'll have to check your local metal recyclers for prices.


Decent guide to regular CRT TVs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBTKJHa-W3I
Projection TVs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAhXxNqKewc


Read the notes on the first one, lots of people in these videos say things like "breaking open the TV will release poisonous gasses" when it's actually just air going into the vacuum.


Also, most gold you'd need to do a lot of work with chemicals to remove and there's instructions on Instructables on how to do it. Seems like more of a fun side project rather than something to make money out of.

[Anonymous No.122281]

>>122278 motors
In a CRT. Am I missing something?

[Anonymous No.122299]

>>122275
Thats one power hungry clock.

[Anonymous No.122302]

>>122281

More modern ones have a mechanical hand that comes out and jacks you off.

[Anonymous No.122306]

>>122241
take out the flyback transformers and make tesla coils.

[Anonymous No.122308]

transistors on this board as good for high voltage circuits

[Anonymous No.122311]

and good source of high voltage caps

[Anonymous No.122316]

the recneck scrapper is stupid, calls transformers and inductors motors, thinks there is gas inside the crt, and shit like that. he would earn more by selling the flyback on the internet. tv cost 5 dollar and he gains 4-6 dollar, oh why are rednecks poor again?

strip them for transistors, caps, transformers, heatsinks and other components

[Anonymous No.122359]

You can build a transceiver for the 80m (3.5Mhz) amateur band from TV parts.
I scavenge all the RF parts, all the caps and some select chips from TV's.
The flybacks can be used for making electric arcs, a zvs driver can be built with parts from the tv, use the original driver transistor.

[Anonymous No.122366]

>>122241
Yes, if you are into electronics and making things then it is worth it. The flyback is a prized item. Google it's applications. Then get your soldering iron out and take off everything you can from the PCB. Make sure to do it in a well ventilated area, because the fumes are toxic.

Nothing is worth reselling that much unless you have a shit load of CRTs and are stacking up the scrap metals until you have a big truck load of metal, but that will only be like $200 in metal and like 100 hours of work ($2/hour). Though, hobbyists may buy the flybacks off you if you eBay them and they work.

[Anonymous No.122554]

sell the flybacks for 5 euro or dollar a piece on ebay.

that redneck on the vid will never get rich but a tv for 5, extract for 4-6 in 15 minutes. the flyback which he calls "motor" (rednecks, sigh) is worth that alone if he sells it to hobbyists

[Anonymous No.122571]

>>122554

why do you keep using using stupid as prerogative of redneck.

I'm a redneck. The redest of rednecks with maybe one chromosome and I understand a transformer isn't an electric motor.

This guy is simply stupid.

[Anonymous No.122718]

>>122571
you obviously arent a redneck since you are smart enough to use a computer.

plus your sentence structure is not very redneck.

[Anonymous No.122803]

>>122241

Since you know what a capacitor is, you propbably already know that the high voltage capacitors most likely need to be disharged even if the monitor was disconnected from the power source for some time. The rate at which capacitors lose charge is small, and unless you were born with a high value resistor on the path to your heart, it can be fatal. The function of your heat is significantly altered with much less than 1A (ampere) "through" it.

[Anonymous No.122921]

>>122803
we're talking about milliampere's here

[Anonymous No.122934]

You can collect the rugged HOTs (power transistors). Those things can cost $15 or more to buy new. Also the flyback transformers are good for making low current ~20kV supplies depending on tube size. HV caps, heatsinks, HV cable, IR receivers, degaussing coils (though not used anymore you can use the enamel copper wire for winding inductors etc), Chopper transistors, high wattage resistors in some cases. The only thing is you are left with quite a lot of rubbish.

[Anonymous No.122935]

>>122251

Most TVs do have some gold components in them, but unless this is a WWII-era TV (in which case you should be selling it off to an antiques shop) it'll have gold-plated components, not solid gold, and most people don't understand just how thin modern gold plating really is. The techniques and machinery to make a gold plating as thin as several atoms thick is widely available and used, and barely anything produced with modern machinery and techniques has a gold plating thicker than several nanometers at best. I remember Tom's Hardware did a project a while back where they stripped the gold off of 30 or so Intel CPUs, and in the end they ended up with a ball a couple millimeters in diameter that was worth exactly... 4 dollars. Just the chemicals you'd require to extract the gold from the TV would cost you a good twenty or thirty times what you'd earn from selling off all the gold inside it.

[Anonymous No.122941]

Quick step guide to discharge the tube on a CRT. The tube itself stores a charge for a long time and is at a very high voltage. Please note trade school was a long time ago and I will be using laymans terms.

You need
x2 long screwdrivers (non insulated) 30-40cm
courage
Healthy respect for electricity

1. Place screwdriver number 1 under the little suction cup looking thing on the back of the tube (mind your hands on the gun sub board protruding out the back)

2. Place screw driver number two crisscross accros screwdriver number one

3. Maneuver number two as to short out on the rear of the tube

4. Push down firmly, it may spark or crack

Tube successfully discharged.

[Anonymous No.122996]

>>122921
1-2 amps kill. Higher than 3 or lower than 1 do not kill, but can cause burns and contact tissue damage. If you are grounded and you touch the components of a flyback that have electric still left you can end up with a fucking wicked nasty ass burn that dives deep into your tissue. The thing is you don't feel it right away. It's weird.

Discharging electronics is Step 1 in electronic repair and salvaging 101.

>>122941
I prefer using one screwdriver attached to a ground wire going to the ground of a wall outlet.

[Anonymous No.123096]

CRT TVs have lots of good stuff in them. The flyback transformer, for one. You can get thousands of volts from that, making for some fun projects. There are also some nice capacitors (be careful, they bite) as well as lots of other components.
Make sure you discharge the CRT tube which can hold an electric charge.

[Anonymous No.123113]

>>122996
sorry but the other guy is right, a few milli amps through the heart causes fibrillation --> you die

[Anonymous No.123147]

>>123113

Right. So, the rule back when I got my BS was that 0.025A through the heart was enough to cause fibrillation. However, no system is perfect, and I'm sure that number can vary a tiny bit.

[Anonymous No.124011]

>>122996
so many stupidity in a single post.

0.02 A kills you and i don't even understand why >3 A suddenly won't kill you as you just said, i think i'm going to bang my head against the concrete after reading this.

[Anonymous No.124022]

>>124011
>>123147
>>123113
Actually, I was thinking 1-2 amps, but it's 0.1 - 0.2 amps that kill and higher than 0.2 causes burns and problems but is survivable. Chalk that up to bad memory and decimal points.

It's funny, because I get shocked all the time with car batteries, boards, house current, etc. In fact, when I was in my 20s my friends and I would take a metal bucket of water, hook it up to a car battery, and drop coin money into the water. Then who ever could reach in and take the money could have it. I always won all the money. No one else could keep their hands open to grab it. It was fucking strong current too. I couldn't do that later on when I got metal tooth fillings because I'd see light flashes in my eyes, same as putting a 9v battery to your braces.

The only time I ever got shocked where it harmed me was when I was walking bare foot in a field after having come out of the river from swimming and fishing. I had a metal stringer of fish and I needed to go between an electric fence and the river back edge. Evidently, I made it past the fence and rounded the corner, but the metal stringer must have touched the fence. Then next thing I know I was looking up at the blue azure sky while laying in soft grass. It was literally, walking along then looking up from a prone position, not even blackness between. It'd knocked me out completely.

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~p616/safety/fatal_current.html

[Anonymous No.124023]

>>124022
continued

1-10 Milliampers
Person will feel little or no electrical shock effects or sensation.

10-20 Milliampers
Painful shock will occur like a jolt, but muscle control will not be lost at this amperage.

20-75 Milliampers
This shock is more serious. You'll receive a a painful jolt and mustle control will be lost resulting in the inability to let go of something you may have grabbed that is shocking you.

75-100 Milliamperage
As the current approaches 100 milliamperes, ventricular fibrillation of the heart occurs and damage is done.

100-200 Milliamperes
Ventricular fibrillation occurs and death can occur if medical attention is not administered quickly.

Over 200 Milliamperes
Severe burns and severe muscle contractions occur. Your heart can stop during a shock because the chest mustles put pressure on the heart. Internal organs can be damaged at this stage and in you survive, a painful recovery can be expected. What may surprise you about this level of shock is that through this clamping effect on the heart, ventricular fibrillation is avoided and the chances of a person's survival is good if the victim is removed from the electrical circuit.

[Anonymous No.124486]

>>124023
That's pretty cool to know. I've known of one person working on a high voltage line to be severly burned everywhere, but he still survived. He used to tell me that if they ever touched a transmission line, they tested it by using the back of their hand when first touching it so that in the event there was a voltage the contractions wouldn't cause them to grab the line. I don't know if what he said was true or not, and I don't know why they would ever be in a situation to touch something potentially hot. I've been an EE for a long time, and never seen that type of situation.

>>123147
So, I think what they told us back then was a scare-tactic to make sure we didn't do anything stupid. It's not always common to be shocked so that the path travels through your heart. I've been shocked quite a few times because I did stupid stuff, and I'm sure I will again. However, I didn't experience any pain, but I can tell you that sudden, specific feeling always scared the shit out of me.

[Anonymous No.124490]

>Is it worth the effort to go and take stuff out of them?

"Not even the homeless will touch this--- Better send in the /diy/ dumpster divers!"

"Why not /b/?"

"They'll just fuck it."

"At least they'd get something out of it."

"Hmmm, true."

[Anonymous No.124507]

The video showed $5 of scrap in 15 minutes. Add to that the time and gas to go around and find these things, and take the scrap in, I imagine that a minimum wage job might pay more.

[Anonymous No.124516]

>2012
>not converting TV into fish tank

[Anonymous No.124566]

>>124486
>He used to tell me that if they ever touched a transmission line, they tested it by using the back of their hand when first touching it so that in the event there was a voltage the contractions wouldn't cause them to grab the line. I don't know if what he said was true or not,

This is still true. My cousin has been working as a pole man for a year now and told me about that.

>I don't know why they would ever be in a situation to touch something potentially hot.

lol You'd be surprised.

>>124507
> I imagine that a minimum wage job might pay more.

I know some scrappers. They are usually the type of people that can't hold a normal job. So, they scrap and do other things too. They don't scrap 100% of their money making time, but they have sharp eyes for scrap and it supplements their way of life. Some of them are good people and some not, but they are all different in a way that they can't hold a regular steady job.