Blur Busters Forums

Hello. I've "new" CRT monitor 21" Sony E530! But...

How do we remove any scratch (cracks...) on glass of CRT monitor? What the the product brand?

I recommend contacting The CRT Collective Facebook group for this type of advice.

Be VERY careful, some CRTs have an antiglare coating. Once you buff that out, you will have a very odd "shinier spot" where the scratch used to be -- and that's much worse than the original scratch. Not all CRT tubes have this, and thus there are solutions for filling/buffing out minor scratches.

With certain types of CRT glass, sometimes you can do a temp "hide" fix by rubbing super clean Vaseline (buy fresh petroleum jelly, and put then a bit into a brand new lintfree cloth that has never been used to wipe dirt, then rub the scratch). That "wets" the scratch in a way that doesn't dry out, and turns the scratch "invisible". Sort of like those windshield crack/scratch hiding solutions. Others have resorted to toothpaste as a glass polish (or other ultrafine abrasives, in increasingly finer grit steps). But on some types of antiglare-treated CRT glass it makes things worse, while on others it makes things better. Polishing antiglare films require completely different substances than polishing direct glass. You MUST choose the right solution for the right CRT and right antiglare coating, or you are going to make it look worse.

Close seconds are "Vintage Television Collectors"

Post a photo of the CRT (whole CRT, plus close up of scratch), and the model.

Some expert may chime in with model/type-specific instructions for your scratch, if there's a possibility.

Risk on glass

How do I remove any risk in glass (see my photo at up)? Fresh petroleum jelly (Vaseline)?

@Chief Blur Buster or any guy:
Bump for almost 1 month still without any response...

I see there's no responses even tho the post's pretty old so:
Seems like a deep scratch, so you probably need to use very coarse sanding paper on just the scratch itself (preferably get good paper for wet sanding). Then you're gonna need to go up through finer and finer paper until finally from like 1500 grit you use 3000 on the entire screen, then increase gradually up to 3000 grit. Warning - this will remove the antistatic and, more importantly, anti-glare coating which means your monitor's gonna look way worse in direct light, but most people nowadays are using CRTs in very dark environment anyway so I figure that's not much of an issue. At this point the screen is gonna look a little milky like privacy glass, to remove that layer you'll need cerium oxide and a drill, cerium oxide is a powder that usually comes with a disk drill attachment. Make a very runny paste with 1 part water and a little bit more than 1 part cerium oxide, polish with the disk at 2-3k rpm (don't worry the rpm doesn't need to be very accurate). On a screen the tolerance for how even the surface has to be is way higher than on a car window or smth, so you usually need to do this for 2-3 hours. It's pretty simple, just spray lightly every once in a while and keep reapplying the paste to stop everything from drying out, don't do one spot too long and touch the surface from time to time cuz you don't want it to overheat expand and explode on you, it's not an issue as long as you keep it below burn on touch kinda hot and keep reapplying water. Now wash and you're done.
I'd say i hope this helps someone, but tbh I just hope no one has scratches on a CRT valuable enough to go through this tedious bs instead of getting a new one