18 Nov
2010
18 Nov
'10
9:22 p.m.
Back in the 70's I worked as a Radio/TV repairman and it was a known
thing to add a boost transformer into old TV's to get more life out of
the CRT. iirc there were 10,15, 20% taps, cost was not much better
than crt replacement iirc.
Another trick is to wind a couple of turns of insulated wire around the
flyback transfoirmer core and connect it in series with the CRT heater.
If you want to measure the resulting heater voltage, you need a goodRMS
meter that will correctly measure the very 'peaky' waveform that results.
Regeneration was to over run even more for a short
period and also
play with the voltages to knock a layer of oxide off. You need one of
the regenerator tools for that though.
There have been many designs for these published over the years. A lot
depend on transformers that were reasonably common when the device was
designed, but hard to find now...
Basically, you over-run the heater (try 8V or 10V for a 6.3V heater) and
then apply a high-sih DC voltage between the cathode (-ve) and first grid
(+ve). The idea is to get a high emission that will strip th etop layer
off the cathode, exposing new emissive oxide.
You need a few hundred volts. A 'butchers trick' was to use half-wave
rectified mains witha 15W pygmy bubl in series (!). I won't say any more,
if you can't work it out, you don't know how to do it safely, if you can,
then you probably will realise why it's not that good an idea :-)
The problem comes if you strip off too much oxide and leave a totally
non-emissive cathode. New CRT time :-(. Also modern CRTs have a much
thinner emissive coating than the ones of 40 or so yeara ago, and tend to
tkae much less rjuvenation.
-tony