How Do You Best Learn About Mechanical Stuff?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

What you are calling an"electromagnet" did you take that off the neck of the CRT? If you did that is the "deflection yoke" and it has windings that sweep the electron beam left to right and top to bottom. The yoke is optimized for particular frequencies (vertical and horizontal sweep). If you took the coil off the shield that wraps around the back of the CRT that is the "degaussing coil" and it works for 60Hz with the shield steel running through it. If you have managed to get all that apart and did not get shocked, consider yourself very lucky!
For those of you just catching up on this thread, I want to remind everyone of the classic frog leg and electricity experiment. This experiment demonstrated that a frog's leg would react (by contracting) when connected to an electrical circuit. Your arm, hand, or even chest contain muscles that will react by contracting when subjected to electrical impulse. To carry this one step further, your heart is a muscle. As such it will also contract in the presence of electrical stimulus. Your heart may take a while before it begins to react to the millivolt signal being supplied by your brain following a kilovolt pulse. If you don't know what you are doing, you can be seriously hurt or worse. Don't fool around inside a TV without an advisor who knows how to handle these lethal potentials.