Ok, so today I worked on my 2 tube swaps. It was definitely a learning process. I started with a CR31 tube to replace the broken tube from earlier last month, and a CR23 tube to swap out my Pac Man burned K4900 monitor. In the end, I had one sucess, and one failure. Unfortunately, my failure involved rendering my ONLY CR31 tube useless, so now I'm on the hunt for another CR31 tube.

First, I'll document some pics of the 'failed' attempt.

My Westinghouse TV, with the back off.

TV chassis removed.

Here's the tube, removed from the TV case. At this point, I needed to make a choice to try and use the TV's yoke, or keep the old yoke from the broken tube. I should have swapped yokes.

Bolting the TV's tube into the monitor frame.

Here we go, the monitor is ready for my waiting chassis.

Chassis mounted and ready to go. Shortly after this picture was taken, we tested the monitor on my Neo Geo cab, and after mistakenly crossing 2 wires, the neck flashed bright white for a 1/2 second, and then nothing. The tube blew. Damn.
After that, we tried moving the original yoke over to the tube, but to no avail. The guns inside the tube were blown. Since I do not have another donor TV with a CR31 neck socket, I'll have to wait before I try this again.
the 2nd swap went much better. I already knew that my K4900's yoke readings were much different than the donor TV's yoke, so I was planning on swapping yokes up front.

Here's my 19K4906, with really bad pac burn. Perfect candidate for a tube swap.

The yoke from my K4900, removed.

working on removing the degaussing coil and grounding strap. I ended up keeping the original degaussing cable, but I had to use the TV's grounding strap.

The burned tube, completely extricated


My donor TV, an Orion TV1929.

The TV's yoke, removed.

The donor tube, completely free from it's TV surroundings.

The new tube, bolted into the frame. I've already reinstalled the K4900 yoke, and here I'm ensuring the purity ring assembly is aligned to the marks I made before removing them. Remember, the purity rings stay with the tube, so these are the rings from the TV.

The chassis is installed, ready to go.

Done! Let's fire it up and see what happens!

Not too bad! A little bit of color adjustment is needed, but I should be able to tweak the color pots to get a nice picture.
So, with that, I'm able to button up the Neo Geo cab, since I now have a fully functional, burn-free monitor in it.
I wish my first swap attempt would have gone better, since I now have 3 K7000 chassis with CR31 neckboards, and no tubes to go with them.
As a side note, does anyone know whether or not I can use the flyback transformers from the TV chassis I have? Seems to me that since they drove the same tube, they should work. Anyone ever reclaim one?