The elusive Indextron

[jr_tech]

Originally Posted by crtfool

"Reason: add "(the housing)", I am not taking the tube apart!" - When I was young, I used to literally "take apart" picture tubes to see what was inside, and how the gun worked. I never did find the lens and prism that they always showed in the diagrams of how the picture tubes worked - very disappointing, but then I had no clue that they meant "ELECTRONIC" lenses and prisms - not physical ones - what did I know - I was STUPID enough to bust open picture tubes then! I even handed in an electron gun from a very old B&W CRT with my report on CCTV for my Mass Media class in high school - got an A because of it.

Have fun with your toy!

Indeed, I did not want to give the impression that I was going to take the CRT apart... although I would love to find out what sort of design they used for the heater... low power Sony CRTs use a directly heated cathode which consumes only 1/4 watt (180mW on some models). I suspect that the engineers at Hitachi might have come up with a similar low power heater/cathode assembly, since the whole idea of using the beam index CRT in the first place, was to save power.

You handed in an electron gun? man, I am surprised that you did not get kicked out of school for bringing in a gun.

I am indeed having fun with this little monitor assembly... tonight I may rig it up as a crude projector, to project a dim image on the bedroom ceiling! Years ago, I used the Panasonic TR-1010 and a 50mm F1.4 Nikkor lens to produce a fairly respectable image for late night viewing*.

* I had to reverse the yoke leads to get the picture correct...I was concerned about doing this with the beam index tube (bet that would really mess up the color), but since it is normally viewed through a mirror, the scan is already reversed.
jr