emac 700 disassembly and CRT discharge tool

Hello. I have read about people taking apart their iMacs and eMacs all the time to upgrade the hard drive and the optical drive. I have both an iMac 233 and an eMac 700. I would love to take them apart and upgrade the hard drives and optical drives. But when I read the disassembly instructions for both the iMacs and eMacs, apple always references a "CRT Discharge tool". How did you guys go about obtaining this tool? I have also seen posts where people have used an insulated probe (with pointed tip) and aligator clips to dischage the CRT, does that really work? And also, is it necessary to first dischange the CRT in order to upgrade the hard drives and optical drives? I've never taken apart a mac before, so I don't know if you ever come in contact with the CRT at all while upgrading the HDD and superdrives. I am a pc repair technician so I have taken apart quite a few PC's in my day. The PC's that I've worked on never had a built-in CRT on them either. Can some of you please shed some light on how to takle this project? I have all the other tools the disassembly instructions call for, except the CRT discharge tool.

The CRT is something to be aware of but under normal circumstances you can access the internal components of both these models without discharging the CRT. The tray-load (original iMacs) were built in two main sections, the CRT in the upper case and the other components in a removable chassis. In these models the CRT is not exposed unless you deliberately remove the upper case. With the eMac you must remove the case to access components but you should be able access to the HD, CD etc without contacting the CRT. There are a couple of sites that have good tutorials. For the original iMac series: http://www.djonmac.com/index.html; for the eMac: http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/eMac/eMac-upgrade.html (look in the section about the hard disk for a link about opening the case). The eMac site also has a link to download the Apple service manual in PDF at the bottom of the page.

Badger, thanks for your response to my question. I was wondering if you knew where one could get a CRT Discharge tool. I don't plan to mess with the CRT but if I could get a CRT discharge tool I would definately buy it and play it safe by discharging the CRT.

I've never had to buy one but I would start at Google or local electronics supply stores. Maybe a TV repair shop would have an old one they'd be willing to sell.