Useful parts in a junk TV?

[Boy Howdy]

Neighbors put a TV out for pickup. Is there anything in there worth the trouble to retrieve for amp building?

[Rob Mercure]

Depends on the TV and how experimental. If the TV is mid-60s on there are probably no common audio tubes within - before that you could find the 6_N7 serier and ofteh the 12A_7 series as well as 6BQ5 and 6GK5s. Also most used power trannies which may have strange voltages but can provide useful, if oversize, trannies - also losta resistors, non-electro caps, etc. and even tube sockets if you don't mine drilling them out (this was my first source of electronics parts). Now if you are willing to work less familiar, non-boring, tubes there are scads that are useful. Any output tube - horizontal, vertical, video - can be used to drive audio you just might have trouble finding a tranny. And there are usually lots of triode/pentode combination tubes.

Just depends

Rob

[Boy Howdy]

Thanks Rob, but....

I don't think it's old enough to be tube based. I may be wrong though.

[Enzo]

For tubes it would have to be over 40 years old. A clue would be the tuner. TVs then had two knobs, one for regular VHF (Ch2-13) and one for UHF (Ch14-83). And the tuner knobs were switches with many positions, so turning them is click click click.

If I found a regular TV, I might clip the power cord off it, they are useful. I might take it apart for the screws, screws are useful. For the most part nothing on the circuit board is of value to me. Maybe some interesting power resistor lives there. You might find something interesting to do with the little speaker. If you need some relatively short lengths of various colored wire, you might find that of value. I sometimes save the wire harness out of something just to have a selection of wire colors for here and there. Solid state TVs don;t generally have power transformers.

I love taking apart older VCRs - a zillion screws. I have built up a pretty good collection of metric screws just from breaking down old consumer audio and video stuff.