Home made valves

I would love to know some of the properties of those remarkable tubes :)

--
Joe Leikhim K4SAT
"The RFI-EMI-GUY"©

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

"Follow The Money"  ;-P

Thanks for the post; very inspiring. For anyone wishing to learn more, the author's website is:

Also, you can access the video more simply here:

(just the flash player, no baggage).

If you wish to save the video, make sure your browser's cache has at least

60MB free space; when the video has concluded playing, look for a file of size 57,195,733 bytes. Copy this to 'filename.flv' and play it in VLC, or any flv player.

Regards,

Michael

Thats an amazing video. He must have buit them in the past at a factory to be so skilled. Thanks for the video. I really enjoyed it.

Fascinating. But I shudder to think of the unit cost. Viva mass production.

Charlie

Is that guy in Poland? There is a guy in Poland who builds some valves.Russia still uses vacuum tubes for some things.Perhaps China does too. cuhulin

What was the small hinged halved chamber , he used a few times? - for annealing the glass ?

I did not follow the getter process. Would someone have to be licensed to get hold of barium, caesium ?

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

N Cook wrote: --- why does everyone persist on quoting that absurd Italian URL when I posted the proper ones days ago?

Here is a repost of the reference:

You can download an amazing collection of pdf 'books' which thoroughly describe the process, equipment and also provide history, circuit diagrams, performance data, etc. This author has done a prodigious job and seems to have little recognition on the 'net.

You can also look up his callsign, F2FO, on callsign database sites such as 'qrz.com'

Regards,

Michael

Wow!

About two or three something years ago, somebody in the rec.antiques.radio+phono newsgroup posted a URL about a guy in Poland (I think it is Poland) who builds his own vacuum tubes. cuhulin

He's built some Nixie tubes as well, there's been some discussion on the yahoo group neonixie-l of which he's a member.

I took that to be an annealing chamber. As far as the 'gettering' process went, as far as I could see, he used induction heating to bring the anode up to white heat, whilst running the vacuum pump to evacuate the envelope. I would guess that this 'burns off' any remaining molecules of gas, or possibly chemically traps them in the surface of the anode, but will not leave a chemically active gettering 'splash' on the inside of the glass as you would normally see, so I suppose over a period of years, the valve will very slowly become soft, but maybe not enough to severely affect its characteristics. I know that such chemicals as barium and strontium in oxide form, are used to coat the cathodes of indirectly heated valves to enhance electron emission, but I thought that the contents of a 'traditional' gettering ring, were little more than magnesium ?

I wonder how much current the filament was drawing, to get it up to the point of sufficient emission ? Certainly, the valves lit up like torch bulbs, when in use. Did you notice the pair of fans on the QRP transmitter ? The spot welding machine was interesting too. Looked as though it may have started life as a small flypress.

Arfa

Please see my posts in this thread (author 'msg') and all will be answered ;-) (download the remarkably well-done pdf 'books' from the tube (valve) maker's website which provide copious detail and data).

Regards,

Michael

Its always been a mystery to me how they get a ring of pins through the envelope and remain gastight for decades. I see he got around it by going linear and just squashing a tube down to that line of pins and then wiring out to a conventional ring of pins base format.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on