4mm Gogglebox

[Neil]

On Christmas evening after lighting the fire upstairs in the sitting room I switched on the telly to warm it up for Downton Abbey; Mrs R's favourite you understand, I'm pretty ambivalent about posh Corrie. The TV is a big old cathode ray tube jobbie which normally takes a minute to get its shit together, this time it failed to do so, what picture it deigned to show was compressed into a narrow but vibrant horizontal strip one inch deep across the centre of the screen. Fortunately we have a spare small set which was pressed into service, though it has a rather wayward view of what is expected of it when it comes to true rendering of colours. The upshot of this is that for the first time in our married life we've actually paid money for a TV and bought a big new led set for the sitting room. However the important fact for our purposed here is that I had a big redundant telly to play with.



Five minutes work with screwdrivers and wire cutters got me the bit I wanted, the electronic giblets went to the tip. A bit more faffing about brought me to the 3-D doodling stage shown below.





Since taking these pictures I've had a walk on the beach which has led to a small yet significant tweak which should improve both the visual aspect and its play value.

 

[Heather Kay]

Proper "up-cycling". I approve.

 

[unklian]

Brilliant, were you able to save the 'glass' for the front. Looking forward to the flange wheeled 'fishes' swimming back and forth and round and round .......

 

[Neil]

If you've caught a glimpse of my 'After Morfa' thread you'll know that there's been a change of channels on the telly; it's no longer receiving BBC Wales as it's been retuned to BBC North. It's also proved not to be the simple start I had initially hoped for. So far I've hit two distinct areas of awkwardness, lining out the carcass and arranging illumination. Lining out is necessary as the interior has all sorts of lumps, bumps angles and ventilation grilles. Fiddly work with thick grey card sorted out the basic planes, to which were added coving strips of thin card backed with double sided tape to get rid of the gaps between sides and ceiling.



You should also be able to work out from the image above how I've tackled lighting the interior. I needed a low profile solution that wouldn't generate any heat. The only answer as far as I could tell was low voltage led lighting strips. I bought a 2m length and matched power supply from e-bay for less than a tenner. The strips can be cut and linked by wires; there's an instructional clip on you-tube here which tells you all you need to know apart from how fiddly it is to peel the encapsulating layer away from the terminals.



I've arranged three strips across the case, one across the top of the front face, one part way back and one to the rear. The mid way strip required a support strip to be solvent welded to the ribs which cross the top of the telly.


I'm reasonably happy with the result, it's not perfect but I cant think of any other system which would work given the constraints of the tv carcase.



However I'm not sure that I could recommend recycling an old telly as an easy way to a cased layout; I'm pretty sure that I could build a bespoke case in less time than it's taken me to make this particular tv.

 

[Yorkshire Dave]

The challenge would be to do this is a flat screen television.....

 

[Neil]

Summer means rain and without the distraction of a big layout I have made decisions about and progress on the layout in a telly. Another change of direction has occurred, the theme having switched from northern industrial to bucolic light railway. I think a couple of things eased me in this direction, a station building hacked from a Hornby platform shelter and the hopeful arrival of Dodo this autumn.


Here's an overview of progress so far. It's a bit awkward to take a good photograph at the moment; I need to experiment some more and to kill the stark white of the innards with some sky colour. Details will follow shortly.