CRTs imploding [was Re: crt with fungus]

In my misspent youth, my folks lived in a small village that had a town dump for garbage disposal. It was not uncommon to see TVs discarded there, and I not too infrequently stood back as far as I could throw and threw rocks to make the CRTs shatter. (This would have been back in the '70s, most likely the early '70s.) It's likely that some of them had had all the vacuum leak out, but at least some of them hadn't (shiny getter patches are a telltale), and the image some writings I have seen paint of an imploding CRT being much like an antipersonnel grenade loaded with glass shards for shrapnel is, at the very least, not universal. As far as I could tell, none of the resulting shards of glass came anywhere close to moving fast enough to reach me, and I wasn't a strong enough thrower to be all _that_ far away. Not that this should be taken as reason to be careless. I wouldn't've wanted to be within a few feet of one, and it's entirely possible that, while that image I mentioned above is not universal, it's not universally false either. And, as tony pointed out, manufacturers consistently spent money on implosion shields in a significantly less safety-conscious time, so there almost certainly _are_ real risks. As for how common it is, well, I've never had a CRT implode on me in any other setting, but I haven't worked on CRT-using devices enough for that to mean all that much. (I _used_ such devices, in the form of terminals, through most of the '80s, but very rarely opened the cases up enough for implosion to be a significant risk.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B