Anyway, the more I learn about CRTs, the more magical they seem to me. It's incredible what very smart engineers were able to accomplish decades ago with only analog technology!
The closest thing that springs to mind: A friend of mine once drilled a hole into an empty Vodka bottle, stuck two wires in it (one at each end), a hose adapter for a vacuum pump, "sealed" the whole thing with a hot glue gun and hooked it up to several scavenged microwave oven transformers in series. Yes, the output was rectified and capacitors were also involved.
Here are some pictures:
https://chaos.social/@itsyndikat/107846783094589995
IIRC what he wanted to do was plasma etching.
I suppose rearranging the electrodes (using a piece of sheet metal with a hole in it; both fed through the neck of the bottle) and wrapping the sides of the bottle with 4 strips of aluminium foil could get you a beam and some crude deflection control. Not sure tough what you would coat the end of the bottle with, but I guess vacuum coating would be applicable.
If that sounds absolutely insane to you, I'd wholeheartedly agree.
At least to my ears, trying to build a CRT from first principles, combined with learning-by-doing and learning-EE-from-youtube-tutorials, sounds like a fast path to end up either dead or in a permanent care facility. Not exactly something I'd hand out in beginner-friendly kit form.
From the site: "The cathode ray tubes that I am describing here are crude and they are relatively easy to make at home. They are in fact, much easier to build than most technically minded people would ever imagine."
i also like how they use a through-hole transistor as a scale for their miniature CRTs section
be sure to check out another more modern labor of love for CRTs: crtdatabase.com
It's not supposed to look like that.
Also, yeah. The site was ugly, you're not missing or misunderstanding anything. It's pure nostalgia to those who experienced the web back then, a reminder of a simpler, more ideal time in the internet's life.
[1]https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...
Kids, this is what the original web was like. Dedicated (maybe obsessive) site creators that (by hand) put together a site as a tribute to their passion—perhaps hoping to find other like-minded souls out there.
No ads. Wild, I know.
I wish there was a way to find these sites more easily... I know they're out there. I miss the original idea of The World Wide Web from my childhood :/