DI
Y
CIRCUITS
TV SET SALVAGE
Nothing good on TV? Well, there’s plenty of
good stuff in a TV. By Thomas Arey
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, electronics
hobbyists found a wealth of parts for projects
inside discarded television sets. It was considered a point of pride in amateur radio circles to
homebrew a transmitter out of a broken “boob
tube.” Of course, those were the days of 6146B
sweep tubes, big 1-watt resistors, and transformers that would break your foot if they fell off your
workbench. Occasionally, if you were really lucky,
that scrounged set would turn up a couple of those
new transistor thingies.
Technology marches on, and the insides of
more modern TVs turn up a very different parts
complement, lacking in any “hollow state” components except the picture tube. As a radio hobbyist, I wondered: Is it still possible these days
to take a discarded TV and salvage the stuff that
radios (and many other projects) are made of?
138 Make: Volume 09
Thanks to a 10-year-old General Electric portable
I found on a dumpster dive, I happily found out
that the answer is yes.
First, a few words of warning. Do not take
a television apart unless you are comfortable
handling both high voltages and potentially
exploding glass. The power supply in a traditional
TV presents 30,000 volts when energized. Even
unplugged, the capacitors in the power circuit can
hold a charge for months. Also, the picture tube
is a large glass vacuum container. If it is dropped
or cracked it can shatter into thousands of nasty
shards. Wear eye protection and gloves when
handling the tube. That said, if you are still ready
to own your TV like a true maker, let’s go!
Removing the back of my GE set revealed one
large circuit board at the base and a smaller one
on the back of the picture tube. A thick red high-
Photography by Thomas Arey
