Sourcing Uncommon Materials for Vacuum Tube Manufacture

[@veandreas]

Your search is very recognizable. I really learned how bad Google actually is if you are searching for things other than your general consumption products.

[@goodun2974]

The Internet is a million light years wide but is also about one atom thick.

[@clytle374]

It went bad a couple years ago. You used to be able to search a long error message inside quotes and find an exact hit in a forum. This is no longer the case. It is now worthless

[@riccaruso7791]

@@clytle374< Maybe ai will help us? ~ Ask John Connor & T1 ~ lol 😳

[@MAGATRON-DESTROY]

Google engineered the search engine to hide inconvenient facts that go along with the mainstream narrative. Try finding the video titled "American moon", I'm sure there are tricks to finding what you want buy I don't know them

[@DrewskisBrews]

The only work-around I've found is to try different search engines and duck duck go. Sometimes, it works.

[@MeatSim5]

As someone absolutely suffering over the last few years looking up information on vacuum tubes and sourcing their parts, this video has been very helpful. Its helpful knowing Im not alone in this search and all the keyword search methods are super useful. I feel i too quickly write off the option to contact companies with massive MOQs to retrieve samples.

[@HenryKlausEsq.]

This whole video was a beautiful example of humans being bros. You were reasonable in your expectations, did your research, and those who had capacity provided samples and useful information. And now hobbyists are blessed with more paths to success as a result of your efforts. I applaud everyone involved. This is how it should work.

[@Lily-gr1ct]

I work in vacuum industries as a glassblower in the UK! I work at a small company called Torr Scientific, and we have heard about Moores too. Real strange to find a video on a company mine knows quite well. We make very similar products, including pin bases. We've made ion tubes in the past, albeit I haven't personally, also with 8250 borosilicate and Kovar pins. Just as a warning, 8250 does not have the same thermal expansion as pyrex/commercial borosilicate. You would need a graded seal to be able to join it to pyrex if you were to do glasswork. We also sell just graded tubulations sometimes, no pin, no base, just a metal tube at a standard size, welded onto a flange and with a graded seal We often do 1 offs/small batches of parts. I can't say we never have minimum orders because I'm not in the sales departments, but we've definitely make only 10 of an item or only 1 of an item before, especially in the glass shop area.

[@SignalDitch]

Oh, that's awesome to hear! Yeah, I'm still having trouble sourcing 8250 tubing for my envelopes, so I haven't been able to test the Moore's stems. The one tube I've made so far utilized a tungsten/boro seal with commercial 33COE borosilicate.

[@ThrashyB]

@@SignalDitch EU Glass supply used to be the go to for pretty much all sci glass supply.. as the industry shrank the suppliers fizzled out or began supplying pipe and bead makers.. If I needed to find 8250 I would just hit up UST in PA ask for Frank and let him find it for you.. You can also get Schott Duran from them too..

[@kevinfortin2497]

Your videos are unbelievable. The amount of useful information and clarity of presentation is over the top. I have subscribed and I am looking forward to watching the rest of your videos. BTW: I have gotten my glass blowing skills up to the point that I have made a couple of simple tubes, but my vacuum system isn’t up to what it needs to be yet. I’m working on that now. For those who are having trouble with wire feeds through the glass, it SEEMS that the wires that are used in neon sign tube ends work in borosilicate. What I have done is purchased the neon sign tube ends (electrodes) from a local neon shop, broken the wires out, then crimped them into my boro. The tube ends cost me $2.50 each. No too bad,

[@SignalDitch]

Oh that's interesting, any idea what the wires are made from? I believe boro electrodes use tungsten wire but soft glass electrodes often use Dumet.

[@goodun2974]

​@@SignalDitch , I seem to remember reading in an old article that some vacuum tubes used a nickel ally called Monel for the pins or wires in order to have a good, airtight glass to metal seal.

[@FullModernAlchemist]

I’m currently toying with the idea of making my own X-ray tube. I’ve watched only three videos in this series so far and it’s a WEALTH of information. I’m actually feeling semi confident I could pull it off. Thank you so much for these!

[@Ray_of_Light62]

Yeah. As one replacement light bulb for a CAT scan machine costs £250K, that would be an excellent side business. They need to operate on average at 120 KV at 200 mA (w/o iodine contrast), so they need a very robust filament and a spinning tungsten anode, hence the cost...

[@tommyCO2BK]

Some legit tenacious google work there on the stems!

[@arfink]

Getters are brutal to source. The place I work lost our getter supplier and actually built an in-house getter fab because we are a high volume consumer. We might have to look at selling getters if enough of you guys need them.

[@SignalDitch]

I have enough now to get me through a lot of experiments, but it was such a pain that I looked into building a little vacuum induction furnace for alloying my own getter material. I might play with that one day.

[@simonkormendy849]

I'm currently in the process of working on two build projects that use vacuum tubes, one is a guitar amp I'm calling the Sloclone 50, basically a 50W Soldano SLO that will be using 5 JJECC83 tubes and two JJ KT77 tubes, the other is an OTL (Output Transformerless) Headphone Amplifier that uses three Svetlana 6N1P dual triode tubes, I just need to finish getting all the needed parts together before I can do more work on the two projects.

[@CoronaSunrise]

I’m really enjoying this series and the steps you are explaining. For years off an on I’ve been gaining the skills and equipment to try to building my own tubes. Thank for the resources.

[@robertg2129]

I sourced stems from Richland and Fredericks for crt rebuilding. Our stems were made from leaded glass and were 20 pin. We were attempting to rebuild 15GP22 color crt's (the first tri-color mass produced color crt) invented by RCA back in 1953. Richland was our preferred vendor and they had a large ready to use tooling inventory. I have photos of the stem making process done at Richland, but I do not know how to contact you to send them. Unfortunately we were working with Hawkeye (last crt rebuilder that closed 10 years ago) and the project reached a dead end when he closed his shop. There are a couple other fellows that were involved, one of which is going to set up a crt rebuilding shop, and he has already acquired the equipment needed. The most difficult issue (as you already know) is obtaining materials such as electron guns. Since Southwest Vacuum Products In Stone Mtn Georgia closed (they were our source for rebuilding our guns) we are at a loss for a company that can rebuild crt electron guns. Before Southwest closed, we had them rebuild 10 guns for us and they are in a dry keeper waiting for the project to resume (I probably will be in my grave before that happens) The fellow who is going to set up a crt rebuilding shop might be interested in any sources you may have discovered that can produce crt electron gun assemblies.

[@stumpydog87]

Fascinating. You need to ask the right questions to get the right answer. Thinking laterally.

[@Testing_Zone]

Hello. Very interesting. I have been looking for getters for a long period without much success. Your information helps me a lot. I have the same goals (I want tp make nixies and vacuum tubes at home)

[@Radio478]

Fantastic thanks from England 🇬🇧

[@sto2779]

18:20 - I think a more modern approach could be implemented for which anyone can build button stems at home for low cost but would need a mini precision CNC (which expensive but useful for all hobby applications, a one time investment). Basically custom make "meta-to-glass feedtroughs" as the button stems. There are many ways to make them, one of which is to use Epoxy. Kovar wire is used to do the hermetic seal between glass and metal. I'm planning to make some custom large nixie tubes and never liked the glass button stems due to it being impossible to source, limited in custom designs, need to play with a torch to seal ends and check for stress strains. The MOQ to buy these glass button stems could be spent to buy a precision CNC. Also I never seen anyone using this modern way to make button stems for Nixie Tubes/Discharge tubes/Vacuum tubes at the hobby or consumer level, it's only used in high end space equipment and voodoo scientific research. I agree, the open source/hobby community needs a better, easier and cheaper way to make button stems.

[@johnrehwinkel7241]

I have a few cases of button stems, not sure how to get them to people who need them.

[@clytle374]

Awesome, subscribed. I knew the getters would be a trick to come up with. I saw an opened can sell recently, but had probably been open for decades. I'm a big fan a glassslinger's channel. Now I just need to win one of the billion dollar lotteries and I'll be in business.

[@clytle374]

I forgot to ask, where are you at in the world?

[@SignalDitch]

I'm in Virginia, USA

[@clytle374]

@@SignalDitch me too, I'm a ham KO4SWI

[@AudriusZujus]

This is so awesome!

[@ohmyadventure61]

Excellent video.

[@robertklouman1321]

Would there be a problem with cutting or melting the pin bases off of unusable tubes ?

[@KeritechElectronics]

You're getting there, I'm damn impressed!

[@johnhilton7048]

The algorithm recommend your channel!! I was thinking about making tubes just a few month ago! I’m a boro pipe maker by trade, I think it would be fun to make my own hifi tube amp or something along those lines!

[@Nephilim-81]

Absolutely incredible! Very interesting. Thank you. Keep it going. :)

[@imajeenyus42]

One whiff of that bottle and I could tell you immediately if it's methyl methacrylate 🤣 Used to work with it a lot for making acrylic samples.

[@l_shaun_bunds_l]

:(

[@radaraacf]

Love to hear if a methheads ever mistook it for double strength meth

[@metiks111]

man, this video is so in depth, im shocked

[@ItisImarko]

We do have special hobby :) .. Good work

[@Karebear9001]

Cool! Have you seen glasslingers channel? They’ve been around a long long time and may have some connections for odd things or be looking for a future steward

[@SignalDitch]

I love Ron's channel. Mindblowing work, I reckon I'll get more attention from the old-school tube makers when I actually build something.

[@Karebear9001]

@@SignalDitch omg I commented before watching all of it… 🤦🏻‍♀️just saw where you have them in your video lolll

[@jimcatanzaro7808]

What type of tube are you interested in making? I just came across your video I build tube amplifiers from scratch very simple designs and lots of iron I also build alum chassis as well

[@thesciencefurry]

Very cool to find videos like this. I'm also very interested in making vacuum tubes. But I have my difficulties using borosilicate glass and tungsten to make glas to metal seals.

[@Spirit532]

I see you also ended up in the same button stem rabbit hole. I didn't find Moores on my search, but I got similar results - prohibitive MOQs or shipping.

[@l_shaun_bunds_l]

I had gotten a huge supply from the liquidation of one of the only electrical glass scientific companies left in San Diego

[@matthewridgeway9250]

It would be interesting if the stem manufacturers could make stems that use DB9 or DB15 style connectors.

[@ConcreteBombDeep]

Can we see you make some x-ray tubes?

[@SignalDitch]

I'd like to do exactly that very soon. I'm finishing up the evacuation system right now (video coming soon) and then we can concentrate on the glassworking tools and start making tubes

[@weazeldark3983]

The phosphorus can be gotten from rear view projection TVs since they run 3x separate different color tubes Instead of buying tube bases u definitely should recycle old blown tubes Instead

[@goodun2974]

Okay, 'fess up: Tom Waits wrote "What's He Building In There?" about *YOU* ! 😂 In all seriousness, this is quite a journey you have embarked upon. A few thoughts sparked by your videos: 1st of all, from what I could see of your vacuum tube stash, it seems you have a large collection of what could be charitably called "weeds". There's an old saying that a weed is a plant that nobody has found use for yet; but when it comes to vacuum tubes, a weed is a vacuum tube that is still common or ubiquitous because nobody has a use for it any more. Oddball TV tubes with weird heater/filament voltages being a case in point: You can still find vintage TV serviceman's caddies full of those "weed" tubes because virtually no one restores those TV sets anymore, so perhaps you could actually cut the bases off of all those nearly useless tubes and reuse them? This presumes that the glass you would be using to manufacture new tube bottles (technically I believe "envelopes" is the correct term) would be the same type of glass as was used in those tube stems originally, presumably borosilicate glass. It may interest you to know that JJ has been having a lot of problems over the past year or so with glass envelopes that crack, fail, and lose their vacuum. This is well known in the guitar amp repair-tech world. Nobody seems to know if JJ has switched suppliers and is using glass from a different manufacturer or if they're skipping steps in the annealing process. You mentioned thoriated tungsten filmments in a previous video. Thorium does have the advantage that tubes made with thoriated tungsten filaments can actually be rejuvenated when the become weak, by briefly applying a higher than normal voltage to the filament, which causes fresh thorium to diffuse to the surface of the tungsten filament. I've actually done this with some old antique radio types, I can't remember if it was the WD11 or the UV 199 tubes but one of those types has thoriated tungsten filaments and actually can indeed be rejuvenated! The disadvantage to thorium, of course, is that it is radioactive.

[@greenerell484]

hm fascinating

[@Danthecrazyman]

Great informative video good job. I’m still working on make better videos on what I’m into. I’ve alway wanted to make a vacuum tube. Keep up the work.

[@raythompson2936]

You should lookup Glasslinger on KZbin. He makes vacuum tubes in the USA. I have a project that I want to build but requires Quartz tubes that have to be mouth blown like in the old days.

[@SignalDitch]

I love glasslinger, he's credited in one of my earlier videos!

[@GTS00000]

Is KZbin Shadow banning you? This video is not showing on my feed! I only saw that you posted through Twitter.

[@SignalDitch]

It might be because I soft-launched it by making it unlisted for my Patrons and then switched it to public later? But I know that the subscription feed doesn't work right either, I see people complaining about this on almost every channel.

[@MrEarbuckets]

brah, yer face!

[@user-scienceislove]

لماذا تضع حلقات معدنية في أنفك وشفتك

[@SignalDitch]

أنا أحب كيف يبدو.

[@l_shaun_bunds_l]

Huh… my comments are disappearing as well. Again, let me know if you would like some free kovar and such to play with. I am willing to give you a pretty nice range of 12x16 sheet

[@theaeecs8004]

Awesome info regarding these systems, it's a shame vacuum tech has been decaying off. The tube supply has been cutoff with the whole Russo-Ukrainian conflict, to the point where I have had hardly any ability to find replacements at a reasonable price. One of my friends in grad school at UCD is currently doing her PhD on a radiodetector vacuum tube for LLNL's NIF. I'm more focused in photonics/non-linear optics/2-D materials and was hoping to develop a lab while I work on my PhD. Not sure if you already have a Discord, but if not (and if you're interested), I would be more than happy to help if need be. Glad to see/help more queer leftie folks getting involved and experimenting with some of this old wild tech!

[@Tonetwisters]

Western Electric claimed they were going to jump back into the essentials tube building process back at the start of the Russian/Ukranian war. But they were all hot air. I have written them a few times over time to ask how that was coming and I get the same PR corporate drivel. They are as worthless. They had a chance to corner a market both for hi-fi enthusiasts and guitar amp users, and literally did nothing.

[@jeromevaneersel8491]

weird...posted something and dissappeared as well...

[@simonkormendy849]

I'm currently in the process of working on two build projects that use vacuum tubes, one is a guitar amp I'm calling the Sloclone 50, basically a 50W Soldano SLO that will be using 5 JJECC83 tubes and two JJ KT77 tubes, the other is an OTL (Output Transformerless) Headphone Amplifier that uses three Svetlana 6N1P dual triode tubes, I just need to finish getting all the needed parts together before I can do more work on the two projects.

[@Ray_of_Light62]

The 6V6 pentodes work best for audio amplifiers. They have a peculiar transconductance curve so when the 6V6 saturates, the entire gain function shifts downward so the output is never brutally clipped. To achieve this you must work out the screen grid current depending on the specific tube, and match it among both push and pull tubes...