Homemade Degaussing Coil
DESCRIPTION
Warning, if you are not familiar with how to safely deal with electrical components then just spend the $40 to buy one of these. Not worth risking you life to save a few bucks. CRT's can have thousands of volts ready to be unleashed if you touch the wrong thing or work in them with both hands they can send a shock through one arm, through your heart to the other arm and stop your heart. I'm not responsible for your safety so please don't consider doing this if you don't know what your doing.
Things needed:
Black electrical tape
Soldering iron
Light bulb socket
100 watt light bulb
Some type of switch (mine taken from broken black and decker jigsaw)
CRT degaussing coil (taken from old computer monitor in my case)
Wall out plug with cord (need at least 6 feet of cord to give you plenty of slack to move the coil during degaussing process)
knife
Nylon ties (needed to hold switch housing firmly to coil)
First I remove the degaussing coil from the old 15" monitor I had from 1997. I then made it in a figure 8 & folding it over doubling it up. I used a small circular trash can to get the circle size I needed taping it up & sliding it firmly over the can bottom & leaving it there for a few minutes. I then removed it & wrapped electrical tape around the entire coil to ensure it stayed round & as extra protection.
Once I had my coil round I gathered all other materials needed & figured out how I was going to wire it all up. I put the bulb as close to the plug as possible so it could simply hang against the wall when plugged in & be out of the way of the degaussing process. I wired the trigger switch to where I could mount it directly against the coil using nylon ties & electrical tape to firmly hold it in place. This way I could squeeze the trigger switch with the same hand I am holding the coil with which makes it much easier. I used a 100 watt bulb as a resistor but if you want a stronger electromagnetic field you can use a lower wattage bulb but the 100 watt worked perfect for me. This thing is powerful.
Here's some basic images showing how I degaussed my old CRT.
I was really kind of amazed at how well this worked. I did a few hours of online research to figure out how I wanted to do my homemade degausser & I couldn't be happier with the results.