Johnny 007
Active Member
Sounds like a VW Jetta I had one time. The engine and transmission worked fine, but I think the rest of the car was make of plastic, and that plastic didn't last too long in the desert heat.
largest i can find mentioned for sanyo was 39.I know i had a 32 rca that i actually rolled out to the truck end over end on its way to the dump.My friend tried to give away a 32 or 36 wega but nobody would bite as it was in the basement,lol.Now i carried my 65 inch samsung plasma in by myself with moderate effort due to its size.And it was actually cheaper than my 32 rca!!!!!Funny, there's a 44" Sanyo in the Free section of my CL right now.
UV radiation is also a killer of plastics, if this tv sat near a window I'd be inclined to think that is what caused it's brittleness.
This just happened to my 27 inch kv27s15. Definetly the most brittle plastic I have ever seen in my life! I can break a half inch piece of it in half....its that weak! Ill post pictures of the guts later for proof!My brother calls me to say his Sony TV has finally died. It just stopped playing in the middle of a show last evening. He asks me to come to his place to help him move it out and install the new one. It is a huge 32" CRT about 22 years old.
I went over to his place and checked all the usual suspects, power, power strip, outlet etc. Yep, dead as a door nail.
We unplugged all the connections and lifted the set off its matching base, and we heard a bunch of cracking sounds. We set the TV on the carpeted floor to get a better grip as this is a beast of a set, and proceeded to lift it again. About a foot or two off the ground, another crack or two was heard and all of a sudden, it just disintegrated and the tube and chassis fell out of the cabinet, fell to the ground and shattered other parts of the plastic case. It was pretty dangerous as the plastic shardes were sharp, and instinctively we held on to the tube the best we could so it would not fall and implode. We had the tune and small plastic sections left to hold onto.
The plastic cabinet was so brittle, it just broke apart as we further pulled and tugged on it. In the end we had three piles, a tube, the chassis and a waste basket of plastic parts and two speakers.
I guess 20 years is the life expectancy of the type of plastic Sony used.
Here we go guys! Sorry about the delay I had to work and getting these files down to 1mb was kinda tough but here we go! Ignore the two Sony tv pieces up top on the first picture they are unrelated and just part of my Trinitron collection lol. The entire tv minus the tube is in the box! Amazing as 24 hours ago this was a complete set!This just happened to my 27 inch kv27s15. Definetly the most brittle plastic I have ever seen in my life! I can break a half inch piece of it in half....its that weak! Ill post pictures of the guts later for proof!
Probably mostly heat, but those things did generate a bit of ozone as well. Ozone is not kind to plastic, heat also makes it very brittle.
The light weight is a nice bonus to modern flat TV sets. Our 53" plasma isn't exactly a featherweight, but its far less than the old 32" Trinitron that it replaced. The plasma is over 10 years old at this point, I expect a new equivalent set would be a fair bit lighter. I just hope the case on that thing doesn't fail before the guts do. it hangs on the wall, and it would really suck to have it crash into the glass AV rack sitting below it. Plasma sets get pretty toasty. I can walk by it and feel the heat radiating out of it.
The set never saw direct sunlight, was in a section of the living room that was shaded.
I think it was the combination of age, heat and poor additives used in the plastic manufacturing process.
I did think about bad plastics this week as I am a bigger guy and sat on plastic chairs that were probably 20 years old during some meetings, and hoped they did not explode under my weight like the tv did...