Slashdot Mirror
Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
djmoore writes "Over at Make Magazine, watch this video of a French amateur radio operator making and testing his own vacuum tubes. It looks like he built much of his own equipment as well. The Make poster notes: 'I love the ease with which he performs these rather high-end skills (like glass forming), the gestural flourishes (like it's hand magic), and the Zelig-esque soundtrack.'"
Over at Make Magazine, watch this video of a French amateur radio operator making and testing his own vacuum tubes.
This was covered in Make Magazine, primarily because Nature abhors a vacuum.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Make Magazine sucks? How dare you!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This guy isn't just a tinkerer, but an artist as well. This kind of thing is an art as much as it is a science.
While vacumn tubes are strictly in the realm of hobbyists and zealous audiophiles, nevertheless it is important for teens and young adults to understand where the electronics industry started from. They're already made to study what can argueably be considered useless information, so why not study something that is cool and informative as well? Think of it as shop class for nerds.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Wonder what type (or equivalent) they are. In any case, wondering if he does "guitar amp tubes" like 12ax7, el34/84 and 6L6.
Perhaps we can use these hand-made tubes to make a new hand-made internets! Think of the possibilities!
Neither Make nor Slashdot have the basic decency to name the man: Claude Paillard.
What is it with acting like foreign nationals are some sort of trained monkey? C'mon folks.
Anyway, here's a direct link to his site so you can skip the non-article at Make. Site includes much information (use the fish as needed), the streaming dailymotion vid, and a download link for those who can't see streams. Enjoy.
http://paillard.claude.free.fr/
Thanks Claude! That rocks.
for pointing out the man's website and giving him direct credit. Its sad to see something placed without naming the inventor.
Some of us use tube-based lab gear. And I believe the LCD you're using uses tubes for backlighting, unless you're on a CR tube?
Not Million Electron Volts, but
"Male Enhancer Volume System Product"
How much juice/oomph can YOUR tubes deliver?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
For better or not, you don't need to be a zealous audiophile to appreciate the sound of a tube guitar amp.
Oh, I think the answer is quite clear what happened here.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Why do you have to see everything through the category useful/useless? Is it so hard for you to imagine that one day, let's say in the next 1000's of years, we will need a guy who can make vacuum tubes? It's never good for any technologies to be lost, even if they seem too old to be useful now.
What is it with acting like foreign nationals are some sort of trained monkey? C'mon folks.
Wow, like I didn't realize people in other countries had personal names :o
did i see him transmitting CW on 14.524? in the USA i know the top limit on the 20 meter band is 14.350, not sure about France, someone with that much talent and skills can do whatver the they want (Kudos!) that is some remarkable craftsmanship...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
yes, tubes might make a slight improvement to the sound comming out of your guitar amp, but if you want your equiptment to really sing, you absolutly must go with a $500 wooden volume knob.
-I only code in BASIC.-
The only thing that would make this cooler is if he made his own Nixie tubes!
I thought there were issues not addressed clearly in the video. First, I thought I learned in college chemistry (now rummaging in decades-old longterm storage media) that one of the big problems was getting a good seal of glass around metal, which wasn't solved until they put together the right glass with the right metal.
Also, aren't the electrodes in a vacuum tube coated with something to prevent early breakdown? And isn't there some chemical you have to put inside the tube to absorb the gas given off when electrons smash into the electrodes? So while this is incredibly neat-looking, I don't think the tubes would last very long...
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
No end of projects if you want to go old school. If you get your glass blowing down, you can make a mercury arc rectifier! Its all good right up until the part about the 2kg of mercury needed to "make it happen". Also, the voltages and currents tend to be a bit high. Great to look at! Just don't breath the vapour that leeches out.
The person who modded you offtopic doesn't know that Vacuum Tubes are used as RECTIFIERS.
Well just to start it as a joke, but it was for a while post-Soviet Union was the only place to get new made Vacuum tubes. Thats for the Tube Stereo buffs out there.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
While vacumn tubes are strictly in the realm of hobbyists and zealous audiophiles, nevertheless it is important for teens and young adults to understand where the electronics industry started from.
I'm all in favor of broad knowledge, but really, what *possible* lesson does someone learn from knowing about vacuum tubes? Talk about an esoteric subject!
There really are a limited number of hours in the classroom, and too many subjects are given short shrift as it is. My pet peeve is that schools don't teach true drawing and art skills (ANYONE can learn to draw realistically). It makes me crazy that what they call "art" in class these days is kids slapping paint on a canvas in imitation of some masterwork. It's like having the kids copy down mathematical symbols with no understanding and making it "look like" they're doing math.
But I digress. Anyone that is interested in the history of electronics will naturally seek it out. Studying the historical influence of radios is important. Studying the history of what exactly made the radio work is not.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Imagine a Bae.... No! Please! not the spikes!!!
he also made all the necessary equipment, like vacuum pump. If you are interested in tubes, he says the "musée des arts et métiers" is a reference. This is an engeneering museum in Paris, which has an incredible collection. When I go there, I stay for hours. Do not mistake it with the science, the nature science, or the technology museum (which are also quite interesting).
, and only in their original European forms. Their US equivalents, 6CA7 and 6BQ5, are constructed as beam power tetrodes.
The 6L6 is also not a pentode, but the very first beam power tetrode.
The 12AX7 is a dual triode.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Nature's techno-science hacks are all Bohr-ing. However, shouldn't naked vaccuum tubes be in Pentode Magazine?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
there are places where vacuum tubes are still used, some radio stations use them in their transmitters, i was once inside the local AM radio station in my home town and the vacuum tube was as big in circumference as a dinner plate and about 18 inches tall, so there still is some commercial/professional demand for them...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
No kidding, it's like assembly language for hardware! Even if people were making transistors at home (are they? hmmmmm), there wouldn't be much to see, so tubes are cool because the magical theoretical guts that you read about in books are right there for you to see inside a glass bubble.
Well, except for the parts that are silvered over (in commercial tubes) that is -- huh, I wonder if that means the home-made tubes are leaking radiation all over the place. Still worth it though (but to be on the safe side we'd better not make M. Paillard angry). The plate (the little cylinder he made first) presumably catches almost everything, so just stay away from the top and bottom.
Anyway I'm totally blown away, this is SO cool! All those jigs and fixtures, it must have taken a huge amount of work to develop his method. I like how casting the plastic base was almost an afterthought. It would probably take me a year just to figure that part out. What a great guy!
Oh yeah? Well, I built a wheel out of popcicle sticks!
Table-ized A.I.
some of us old-timers actually did this as part of an EE course in the early 1960's - we had to put together a simple triade, getter it and then measure its characteristis
very cool
i have two old shortwaves that i'd love to get working again.
it would be nice if some kind soul would post a non-flash version of the video
My kids and I built a crystal set and made a cats whisker diode for it using some brass sheet, wire and a lump of galena (from the mineral & crystal shop). Also made a diode with a rusty razor blade and another with a lump of silicon. These didn't work as well as shop germanium diodes, but they still worked. Made our own variable capacitors using paper and tin foil too.
You can even build simple amplifiers etc using tunnel diodes: http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/ntype-nr.htm
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It will also serve to bring us back after the collapse of society and technology.
Id like to see you make semiconductor based transistors in your basement.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That would be Gershwin buddy. An American composer. "The Man I love", people just don't know the classics anymore do they. I mention Gershwin and people look at me blankly. I'm a young guy to. So sad.
http://www.gershwin.com/
yeah because solid state components that can handle the power and frequency involved in a big radio transmitter are even more expensive than vacuum tubes that can.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
If you look closely at the wires he is sealing into the glass "press", you will see a short reddish-brown section. This is most likely "dumet", or copper coated nickel/iron. This material is specially designed to have the same coefficient of thermal expansion as glass, and was used as the sealing material in most receiving tubes. The copper coating forms an oxide layer that dissolves into the glass, creating a vacuum-tight seal.
Before the development of dumet, kovar, and other specialized alloys, the seals in very early tubes were made using platinum wire. Cost considerations brought this to a quick end, as soon as cheaper suitable materials were developed.
The electrodes in later tubes were often coated with various materials to aid heat dissipation or reduce secondary electron emission. Early tubes that were similar in construction to what is being made here generally used plain metal grids and plates.
Most tubes contained a "getter" made of barium or other reactive metal, to adsorb any gas molecules which survived initial pumpdown, or which were liberated from the internal elements during operation.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
The silvering has nothing to do with radiation. It is a thin coating of reactive metal to take up any oxygen left in the tube after it has been sealed. If you ever find an old tube where the silver patch has gone white, it is gassy and will not work properly. (It may work to some degree but is also likely to have a strange glow from ionising the gas. Depends how much gas has leaked in.)
You do get X-rays from tubes working at high voltages, but they are of pretty low energy in typical applications and probably don't make it out through the glass. TV tubes use leaded glass to reduce the X-radiation.
If you wanted to build some part of an embedded device that absolutely had to take some really ugly conditions, you could do a whole lot worse than to build that specific module using valves. Let's say you wanted to build a new module for the IIS, for example. The internal circuits can largely be protected, so conventional radiation-proof chips would be fine. However, if you wanted reliable computing elements that could be strapped to the outside of the pod, you've harsh conditions indeed. Lead-smothered rad-hardened silicon chips that can handle space tolerances and have their own heating elements would probably work. Lots of things that can go wrong, though. Complexity-wise and weight-wise you're probably not significantly better off than using thermionic valves with none of the extras.
Where else could valves be used? Easy. If the cathode and anode are deliberately mis-aligned, then one or more grids must be set to a value such that the directed power completes the circuit. If something goes wrong (too much power, something fails, whatever), then the beam is either not pushed at all or pushed far too far. In either case, you've an all-electronic circuit-breaker - ideal if you want to get rid of fuseboxes and mechanical trip-switches.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The purpose of using vacuum tubes in a guitar amp is for the overdrive characteristics. When overdriven, solid state amplification circuitry clips the waveform to the voltage rails, resulting in a harsh sounding distortion due to the dissonant overtones.
A tube amp driven to distortion compresses the waveform rather than hard clipping. This results in a waveform rich in harmonic overtones - the classic distorted guitar sound.
Any person who is not tone deaf can tell the difference between solid state distortion and tube distortion. Please don't compare the basic principles of rock guitar with overpriced audiophile folly.
I do have to say this is one of the most impressive projects of its type I've ever seen; it's clearly a labor of both love and skill.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
vacuum tubes.
Once you get beyond the crude PN junction diode (like a galena crystal), making transistors and such requires ridiculously pure germanium and/or silicon. These materials are purified by a process called "zone refining" which uses induction heating to melt the semiconductor materials at incredibly high temperatures. Induction heating in turn requires many kilowatts of radio frequency power, which is exactly the type of application where vacuum tubes are still widely used even today.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Especially when it's one of these played through one of these.
... a homemade triggered spark gap.
Have gnu, will travel.
The 'silvering' in most tubes isn't a screen but is caused by a process called 'gettering' where a small amount of a magnesium or calcium-based compound is burnt off (evaporated) by an external induction coil as part of the final manufacturing process. As the valve is 'gettered', the magnesium/calcium 'cleans out' any small traces of gas left in the envelope.
AT&ROFLMAO
take that homebrew computer club! i'll bet none of those guys ever made their own transistors!
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
maybe now I can make my own interwebs!
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
You can learn a hell of a lot from vacuum tubes! They are far easier to understand than transistors.
There's a reason why they're called "valves" in the UK. It's like a valve controlling a powerful stream of water; a small change on the valve leads to a very large change of current. That change in current can, in turn, control a much bigger valve that controls an even larger current.
In this case, the "valve" is a control grid (that spiral thing) surrounding the cathode (the thin hot wire in the middle). The big cylinder is the "plate". The cathode itself has a cloud of electrons around it (because it's hot), and a small signal on the grid controls how much of that can scoot across to the plate (which is positively charged due to a power supply putting a strong positive voltage on it). So a weak sine wave signal on the plate will lead to a big sine wave current from the plate.
There, now you know the basics of amplification (although I skipped some details). I couldn't have done it by describing a BJT (transistor), because they're far weirder.
My grandmother in Massachusetts tells stories about working in a vacuum tube factory during World War II (Raytheon maybe?). At the time, vacuum tubes did require some manual assembly. The process was not fully automated.
"While vacumn tubes are strictly in the realm of hobbyists and zealous audiophiles"...
Right...like all professional musicians who use an electric guitar are "zealous audiophiles".
remember, vacuum tubes are used in modern appliances, like your microwave ( yes, your magnetron is technically a vacuum tube ), CRT anything ( TV, monitor etc ), high power radio transmitters, guitar amps ( the good ones ).....Claude makes much more than just triodes, see the end section of his video.
Hey, I'm by all accounts a nerd and I loved shop class. I took shop because it was one of the few classes in school where I actually learned something. I took shop every single year starting in elementary school on till I graduated.
I now have a computer science degree (didn't learn anything new in college either and no shop classes went towards my degree, pffft) and I own two software companies today.
No doubt, that should the world ever go through a post-apocalyptic phase, the French will emerge as the new superpower thanks to their ability to recreate lost technology and their military prowess. Oh, wait..
I'm pretty sure it was a joke. That's the obsessive hobby of many a slashdotter.
Please mod up comment by the parent. It is right on.
As an addition...
When vacuum tubes were used in computers the defective tubes would often have a blue glow indicating a gassy condition and those were changed out first.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
The company I work for makes an RF power delivery system that uses them, and they are still used in broadcast amplifiers. There's still a need to teach about vacuum tube circuits for other than hobbyist applications.
...about the vacuum part.
There's got to a gas of some kind in there right?
I mean there's got to be some pressure in the tubes otherwise they'd snap due to atmospheric pressure.
So my question is this, what's in them?
The last time (about 10 years ago) I had to take a big radio frequency amplifier apart (1 kW continuous wave, 2 kW in pulsed mode, so not really hobbyist stuff but in a physics lab, too expensive for all but the very wealthy hobbyists) it had lots of vaccum tubes inside and I don't think that has changed too much since then, the next one we bought (for higher RF powers) also had tubes... Admittedly, it weren't those nice looking (low power) ones with glass covers but in ceramic casings (but then the voltages required also were a bit higher, some kV were needed - and, yes, I accidentally touched something in there with a screw driver - it flew somehwere in the lab and we never found it;-).
I'd disagree. See the computer science article below! Schools have fallen into the rut of teaching technology by rote.. and not by experience. Heck if CS students brushed up on their binary, they could MAKE a computer from what he's doing!!! True, it's not useful by itself by today's standard, but the Experience of doing it all from scratch would be fantastic!!!
Freedom amateur radio operator...
There, fixed it for you.
trained cheese eating surrender monkeys
Its just a series of these "tube" things... Makes a lot more sense now.
not because you need wheels, but because you need inventors." Not sure who first said that.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
But since he is a Frenchman in France, he is just a regular old foreigner. Or, as one might say in my local dialect, a 'furriner'.
All the HDTV people on Slashdot keep on telling me the days of analog broadcast are over. I mean, what could possibly be the advantage of analog? User-serviceable? Psh. We should consume and throw away!
Haven't read it but this book claims to show you how to make your own vacuum tubes AND transistors!
"What is it with acting like foreign nationals are some sort of trained monkey?"
It comes from not wanting to admit that in comparison to Monsieur Paillard, we are the monkeys. And untrained to boot.
Most tubes contained a "getter" made of barium or other reactive metal, to adsorb any gas molecules which survived initial pumpdown, or which were liberated from the internal elements during operation.
I wondered why he seemed to power up the filament until it glowed white hot like an incendescent lamp, while pumping the air out. I guess he must have been trying to sacrifice a little of the filament's metal to help burn off the last remaining oxygen that the pumpdown can't get out.
You can learn a hell of a lot from vacuum tubes! They are far easier to understand than transistors.
For someone studying electronics, I agree. But as a general subject? Why not teach the theory on how they used to slop pigs 100 years ago? Or the techniques for cutting hair? Or pick your esoteric piece of knowledge that is utterly useless to 99% of students.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Large medium wave radio transmitters still use thermionic valves in their output stages. Solid state electronics have trouble handling megawatt power levels.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
check out some of the lathe-enthusiast videos on youtube, ie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt5tthfk59U
this fella has a bunch of interesting stuff, check out his other videos as well
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=gmark1953&p=r
Note that this is the centennial year of the invention of the humble triode. Actually, next month if this article's mention of US Patent 879,532 is correct.
In the UK this is due to league tables. Why teach kids how to do something for the rest of their lives if they might end up messing up in a known-format test? Bad results in that test result in the school being shunned by parents, even as far as moving their kids to other schools, sending the schools into "special measures" and ultimately affecting salaries and teacher motivation.
No, it's much better to teach the kids how to pass the tests and only the tests. That way the parents are happy because little Johnny got 98% in his tests! As parents don't need to invest time with their kids - that's what schools, nanny's and the xbox360 are for as everyone seems to know these days - they'll never find out how little their children know until too late.
And what, pray tell, would be "useful" to 99% of students? I'm trying to think of something that you'd consider useful, and I'm failing.
In electronics, how transistors work is pretty fundamental. In agriculture, understanding the differences in how pigs (well, cows) were fed 100 years ago versus today is pretty fundamental to understanding prion diseases, as is the "useless, esoteric" story about the disease of "kuru" among the cannibals of New Zealand. Teach geology without the "trivia" that earthquakes and plate tectonics are inextricably linked to the shape of the continents on either side of the Atlantic ocean, and that the guy who came up with the idea was laughed at until they found the ridge in the middle of the Atlantic ocean? Teach hairdressing without talking about the greasers of the 50s, the afros of the 60s, the perms of the 70s, and the mohawks of the 80s?
Useless is in the mind of the beholden.
you wouldn't have asked. that glow is vacuum. good old vacuum.
gas-filled tubes typically flash over as the gas starts conducting, typically violet for argon, bright yellow for hydrogen. because of the flashover point at some voltage, gas tubes are generally trigger tubes or voltage regulators.
glass in CRTs typically is thick enough to withstand tons and tons of atmospheric pressure. sometimes, they don't. that is rather spectacular, unless you are touching the glass, in which case is is amputational.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"refining" a tube typically meant heating it up in an inductive system to burn out impurities and gas in the tube elements, and filaments may or may not also be heated up at that time. typically were. getters are often "flashed" with a high voltage impressed on them during this period to be sure the impurities are fully absorbed and can't get back into the tube metals and glass spacers.
many getters at the period in which that tube type he's duplicating used phosphorus. not as efficient as aluminum and barium, but easier to flash over. WWI, remember, you couldn't pull much vacuum. the getter had to do the job. so old tubes had funny colors inside from the getter flashover.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
thanks kdawson . this is more a tutorial. this guy is amazing. i learned a lot.
If someone told me that it would take around 300 million tubes to make an Intel Core2Duo CPU, I would appreciate the vast complexity that goes into making microchips.
No, I'll never make scoff at vacuum tube technology. After all, you must realize you have to get from "there" before you can get to "here".
BTW, the cheapest Core2Duo lists for $124.99 new. How many tubes will that buy me?
Life is not for the lazy.
yeah because solid state components that can handle the power and frequency involved in a big radio transmitter are even more expensive than vacuum tubes that can.
There's also high-power applications with short-duty cycles. These use tubes because tubes must be rated for the average power, while solid-state components must be rated for the peak power. In some applications the ratio of the two can exceed 10,000 to 1.
Some of us audiophiles are a bit more sensible than that. I appreciate a good pair of headphones, and vaccum tubes in the signal chain add a certain distortion that just can't be reproduced using solid state stuff.
622677120
Just about every serious guitarist still uses tube amps. They're not esoteric or ancient at all for this purpose, because they're the best tool for the job. Although digital models of tube amps have improved, nothing sounds quite like the real thing.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
Scientific American Amateur Scientist column
Transistors. how to make thin film,
1970 Jun, pg 141
http://ed-thelen.org/sage-tubes.jpg
, as sophisticated robotics didn't yet exist. The most sophisticated part of tube making, the assembly of the internal components or "mount" was done largely by hand, usually by rows and rows of women (smaller fingers) hunched over microscopes in dust-free rooms.
Once the mounts were assembled and welded onto the stems, the sealing into bulb and pumping down was somewhat automated. Done on a machine called a "sealex", the mounts would be inserted into bulbs, sealed in place, evacuated, heated to activate the cathodes, sealed off, and getters flashed, with each operation taking place at a different "station" on the sealex.
An interesting photo essay on the construction of the famous 300B audio triode is available here:
http://www.westernelectric.com/history/tour01.html
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
While vacumn tubes are strictly in the realm of hobbyists and zealous audiophiles...
Almost all modern guitar amplifiers are valve-powered.
He actually found a use for those tiny scissors that come with a Swiss Army Knife.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpaillard.claude.free.fr%2F&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
As DeathElk notes, there are well characterized reasons well founded in Electrical Engineering for why tube amplifiers sound better overdriven. The reason is that while transistors and ICs go non-linear in their amplification very suddenly, tubes go non-linear gradually over a range. Thus instead of the harsh clipping behavior solid state equipment exhibit, tubes produce distortion that is often considered very musical.
Note that while there do exist amplifiers that use DSP simulations to attempt to provide the same effect without tubes, these simulations are widely considered very poor, or at best inadequate.
i was kidding. and i forgot to type 'hand-made $500 volume knob"
:(
i should have clicked preview
I know that tubes give a different sound. I used to work in a small recording studio, (well, specializing in making demo tapes, rather than professional recordings) One of the bass amps (can't remember brand/model, sorry) had a switch for either solid state or vacuum tube distortion (and it's no simulation or filter, there are real vacuum tubes in there)
A lot of analogue gear gives much better distortion than any new solid state stuff. a lot of old people find that digital clipping sounds terrible. (while I like it)
When i'm recording drums, I often put the mics just a little too close, record things just a little too hot, and record to tape. I move the analogue recording to my hard drive later. It makes them sound so much bigger/fuller.
With guitar, i find i could get away with recording clean electric guitar, then throw on some VST filters later to make it sound just like an effects pedal, but if they wanted that warm tube sound, no filter came close enough, I had to actually use real, physical gear.
vintage vacuum tubes are so hard to fund when they burn out, who would have though a DIY approach would be a viable option. cool!
-I only code in BASIC.-
Well, that and they "go to 11".
THL phish sticks
You aren't going to make [useful] vacuum tubes in your basement without considerable technological support either.
Any person who is not tone deaf can tell the difference between solid state distortion and tube distortion. Please don't compare the basic principles of rock guitar with overpriced audiophile folly.
Much of the overpriced is going away along with tube microphonics, gassy tubes, high voltage resistors, capacitors and high power consumption. With Digital Signal Processing DSP is rapidly providing 24 bit 40KHZ or higher modeling of the classic sounds without the problems and high cost. The overdrive curve of tubes can easly be modeled in a DSP.
http://emusician.com/dsp/studio_devil_virtual_guitar_amp/
http://www.analog.com/processors/tigersharc/overview/customerstories/fractalAudio/fractalAudioIndex.html
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/FM15DSP/
The truth shall set you free!
We did it in 1993 in a junior level physics lab class at the University of New Mexico.
John Panitz was the prof teaching it, and I was his TA for the class. We took them through basic metal forming, vacuum technology, glass blowing, molding a plastic, etc.
The tubes were a bit different, as the students modified them during the semester and they needed to be opened repeatedly. We used Torr Seal to mold a base for them and used an o-ring seal between it and the glass envelope (we kept them attached to a running rough pump to keep them evacuated out enough to work). They started out as diodes, they added a grid to make them triodes. We had them do I-V curves on them and then they built amplifiers with them. They weren't nearly as elegant as the ones shown in the video, but they worked. The forming techniques we used were pretty similar, though we didn't use all the custom jigs.
Finally, they each deposited a phosphor screen on a metal disk that they had machined. They gutted the triodes and put the disk into the envelope along with some of the remaining electrodes to act as emission points. They then put a high voltage between the phosphor disk and the electrodes and demonstrated field emission.
I still think it was one of the best undergrad physics lab courses I've ever seen. The students had enough skills to be immediately useful in real lab work after it was done.
No, tube manufacture was mechanized by the 1950s. You're looking at an outfit that makes tubes that sell for $600 each, for sale to audio nuts. Here's a 1952 article on a CRT assembly line. Vacuum tubes were made on machinery similar to that used to make light bulbs.
I couldn't have done it by describing a BJT (transistor), because they're far weirder.
To make bipolar simpler, they are simply a current amplifier, not a voltage amplifier. Think power steering. You push some, the force is boosted in proportion to the push you provide. The low voltage current needed to drive them instead of a high impedance voltage is why much bi-polar stuff is low impedance.
The truth shall set you free!
This guy is one (admittedly massive) schematic diagram and a little bit of chemical electrical cell technology short of saving the world, iff certain apocalyptic events occur within his lifetime and he survives without any brain damage. He's one up on me.
it may be so at this particular point. however, vacuum tubes are, contrarily to transistors, impervious to the effects of EMP generated by an atomic weapon.
if some dumbass ever decides to fsck the world up, you can say goodbye to that core 2 duo...
the vacuum tube radio set will continue to chug along fine however
http://www.hpfriedrichs.com/bks-votc.htm
Also check "Instruments of Amplication"
http://www.hpfriedrichs.com/bks-ioa.htm
He builds tubes out of stuff you would find in a garbage can. Cool beans.
As an electrical engineer - hell yes, they should be taught. Probably not in-depth like transistors, but as a technology, the basics should at least be covered. I also happen to be somewhat of an amateur historian of electrical power systems, and there's a lot many of my fellow EE students could have learned from some amazingly old stuff. Simple and elegant are two concepts often lost on them, but not on the clever EEs of the late 1800s / early 1900s. I'm not saying that we should go back to using rotary converters and all manner of other cantankerous electromechanical contraptions, but there's a way of thinking to be learned from them.
Well that's only your theory. I however believe in "intelligent distortion" (ID) and that's what I teach my kids thank you very much.
$META_SIG_JOKE
I recently visited the telegraphy museum at Porthcurno, in Cornwall, UK, where some of the earliest transatlantic cables came ashore. These would be thousands of miles long, driven by kilovolts at one end, but with only millivolts appearing at the other.
Relays were used literally to relay signals between two stretches of cable. The small voltage available at the end of one cable was used to switch a much bigger voltage at the start of the next stretch. (An amplifier for binary signals, if you will.) Hence the name relay.
The thorium was what I was wondering about too....
When I took an interest in tube audio some years back, I asked why people didn't make their own tubes, and the problem of obtaining {or of home-manufacturing} thoriated tungsten filaments was the reason given. Without Thorium, the filaments don't last very long at typical power levels--and Thorium (at least, of the type needed) was pretty toxic, and quite radioactive besides.
Lots of people (online) had built their own transformers--but I didn't hear from any who had really attempted to make a tube, that they were willing to actually wire into a project and expect to work very long.
~
Thanks for this, AC.
[You find the most useful information in some of the strangest, most unexpected Slashdot threads...]
Gah! I invented solid-state tube emulation so long ago, if I'd thought to get a patent, it would have run out by today! Lowpass filter, A-to-D converter, data latch, bank of EPROMs, D-to-A converter. A-D provides low-order address bits for memory (which contains digitised transfer functions), data lines drive D-to-A converter. High-order address bits come from manually-operated switches allowing selection of different transfer characteristics.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This is nice to watch and all, but how exactly do people think vacuum tubes were made back in medieval times?
A: Just like this...with people sat at machines.
Most other manufactured goods were made the same way. The glass in old windows isn't distorted at the bottom because it flowed, it's distorted because it was made by somebody blowing down a metal pipe and swinging it around.
Go back earlier and you'll find that glassblowing was an essential skill for all chemists and early electronics engineers had to make their own wire.
Ten out of ten for style but he's not performing some miracle, he's just using the original methods.
No sig today...
The article talks at great length about the manufacture of the CRT bulbs, and the exhaust process, both of which were easily automated, even back then. I talked about the automated "sealex" machines in my last post.
But the heart of the CRT, the electron gun, with it's tiny metal components, was still hand assembled, by operators using microscopes and tiny resistance spot welders. Just the same as standard receiving tubes. The final assembly and evacuation lent itself to automation, but the intricate assembly of the "guts" did not.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Thoriated filaments were generally only used in early receiving tubes, and high-power transmitting tubes. They would probably be the easiest way to manufacture a usable tube in your basement, but they weren't general industry practice for audio tubes.
Most audio/receiving types used either an oxide coated filament, or a separate, indirectly heated cathode. The filament/cathode was coated with a mixture of barium/strontium/calcium carbonates, which converted to the corresponding oxides during the heating and pumpdown process. The oxide layer emitted electrons at an even lower temperature than thoriated tungsten.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Excatly, even if it's just from an academic perspective. For example, a lot of people are interested how they built such big pyramids. I imagine in the future there might be some interest in exactly how electronics worked without transistors. It's already interesting now.
What is it with acting like foreign nationals are some sort of trained monkey? C'mon folks.
C'mon? He's French! Fill in the rest of this phrase: Cheese-eating surrender _________ .
To be fair, the French are fantastic at sinking Greenpeace boats- can't really fault them for that.
(No, I'm not serious, and no, I didn't RTFA)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Don't forget that it's got even worse with the privatisation of the matriculation boards. Examinations are now set by competing private companies, who earn money depending on how many pupils are entered for examinations. Schools choose a matriculation board based on pass rates, so boards set examinations that are easy to pass.
In the "bad" old days, you sent your kids to the school you were told to send them to (so you couldn't get social climbers skewing the statistics for the worse by withdrawing their little darlings from schools perceived as "bad"), and the matriculation boards were answerable to the universities (so passing grades really did mean you were able to go to uni). The abolition of the eleven-plus could never possibly have led to the stated aim of grammar school education for all. Instead, it has led to secondary-modern education for all. The chronic underinvestment {which was the real reason for the problems with the tripartite system: not enough money was spent on technical and sec.mod. schools} has not gone away. And it's even worse today with school buildings nearing the ends of their designed lifetimes and nobody wanting to become a teacher for fear of being branded a paedophile.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
He is basically just doing what professional vacuum tube makers were doing, with lots of equipment and skill. It's nice to keep that craft alive, but it's not particularly amazing to me that with lots of skill and lots of equipment, you can make a vacuum tube. I'd find it impressive if someone came up with a way of making a vacuum tube with hardly any equipment or skill, some combination of glass, wire, and glue that doesn't require glass blowing or shaping.
I am old enough to remember when television sets were all tube, even the high voltage rectifier was a tube. I DO remember seeing HVR (and some horizontal output) tubes enclosed in heavy sheet-metal boxes with either hinged or removable lids so as to shield down the resulting X-rays.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
They do, they are called history lessons. We had to do the Industrial Revolution at school (history was a compulsory subject until we were around 14, IIRC). This isn't really any different from learning about the Industrial Revolution. I'm sure some schools taught agricultural history.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
that's nothing, I do semiconductor transistors at 45nm for fun during lunchbreak
\u262D = \u5350
The guy is a genius and nut-case!
That little movie is really one of the best things I've ever seen on the net.
The dedication, the craft. The art of it all.
I'd hate to think how much one of these would cost. Probably their not for sale anyway, which is cool. They look fairly low-power devices so unsuitable for audio power amps where valves (tubes) are king. The application shown is as a detector/demodulator in a very retro TRF radio (I think) radio. Brilliant!
These valves/tubes stand alone as sublime little works of art.
I think that every teenage case-modder who thinks they are "leet" should watch this and cry into their Cheetos.
Strictly the realm of hobbyists and zealous audiophiles? Do you listen to blues, jazz, rock, metal, pop, or alternative music? Then you're listening to the work of tubes. Serious guitarists, pro and amateur alike only use tube amps to get the best possible sound. The day that tubes cease to exist will be a sad day, because no combination of zeros and ones or some crappy solid state circuit can reproduce the sound of a good tube amp.
French amateur radio operator
Freedom amateur radio operator...
There, fixed it for you.
France, freedom, whatever, same words anyway
Anyone who fires glass with a torch and operates heavy machinery while wearing a sports jacket is cool in my books as well. Gotta love the French.
Awesome video. It certainly didn't seem like it was 17 minutes long.
I guess I'm so cynical now that my first thought as I watched the vid was this kind of gear would get him arrested in America. The bomb squad would be called in, they'd break stuff, they'd confiscate stuff, eventually they'd release him and return his equipment - but not before they'd charged him with a few frivolous things. Lord help him if he were living in Boston...
But anyway, DOUBLE DAYUM AND A PUDDLE OF DROOL!
God what a fucking stupid comment.
Ok, I know this is Slashdot and stupid comments abound, but there's a limit, really!
Vacuum tubes are a perfect illustration of electronic amplification. Far simpler to grasp and observe in action than semiconductor devices. They have unique and subtle characteristics which can't be replicated by transistors.
This is equivalent to slopping out pigs a hundred years ago and useless to "99% of students" ?
This isn't really any different from learning about the Industrial Revolution.
Studying the industrial revolution is about studying the *effects* on society from it. They don't waste time teaching exactly what the first steam engine looked like, and then looking how it changed and was improved over time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
God what a fucking stupid comment. [...] Ok, I know this is Slashdot and stupid comments abound, but there's a limit, really!
Those who live in glass houses...
Vacuum tubes are a perfect illustration of electronic amplification. Far simpler to grasp and observe in action than semiconductor devices. They have unique and subtle characteristics which can't be replicated by transistors. This is equivalent to slopping out pigs a hundred years ago and useless to "99% of students" ?
Apparently you missed the part where the original poster wanted this taught to every teenager as core curriculum, alongside Abe Lincoln. It's interesting to someone interested in the subject, but utterly useless mind-filler to anyone else.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
EXAMPLE: FIRE
And what, pray tell, would be "useful" to 99% of students? I'm trying to think of something that you'd consider useful, and I'm failing.
Sheesh, I gave you one example: Art skills. But how about reading, writing, math, history, science (principles! F=MA, not things like this), geography, music, philosophy, literature, grammar... Hell, I'm not a fan of teaching computer skills, but that's more useful than teaching the workings of vacuum tubes.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Boris fan much? :)
errm, sorry - was that a rebuff of some kind?
Completely went over my head if it was?
I wasn't commenting on what the OP said, but what you said.
I can't see him being an amateur. That was amazing.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
errm, sorry - was that a rebuff of some kind? Completely went over my head if it was?
I did my best -- sorry, bro. Keep workin' on it.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It is also useful for understanding more about what is going on physically with electronic devices (since tubes work differently than transistors), and where the terms for modern (or at least more modern) electronics come from. E.g "thyristor" comes from "thryatron" + "transistor". Understanding how we got to where we are today is always a good thing, and so is understanding what's going on at a low level in the systems one builds.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
At least the article didn't link to a blog which linked to a news aggregator that linked to another blog that linked to youtube. This trend of just reposting crap without ANYTHING going back to the source if fucking terrible. But hey, I guess bullshit like this is what's keeping all these web two point oh sites afloat.
Video was absolutely amazing...I'm not sure if "amateur" is the right word for this guy! Thanks for posting the source!
Inadequate they may be, but the emulation of relatively recent DSP amps isn't all that poor. I'm amazed by the modelling in the Roland MicroCube. I use it with a '64 SG Jr. and the emulated overdrive and the overtones produced sound bright, organic and when set at a high volume, really FAT and oomphy. It can almost keep up with a full Tama Rockstar kit volume-wise, if the drummer's not playing too hard. Excellent little backstage / practice / studio amp.
:)
Not that good of a reverb on it though. But that's why one has the Holy Grail
But I don't know. I haven't used it with that many guitars, it might be the good ol' P-90 that works most of the magic. I do feel that a real TSL-60 with a 4x12 cab sounds better.
Dang, though, wouldn't history class be a hell of a lot more interesting if they did? Why should social changes be the only things covered in history classes?
I agree. I asked a friend about manipulating magnetic fields for an idea i have. He directed me to a page that talks about securing terminals and their monitors/hardware from espionage. I was like WTF does that have to do with what i want.
Well, i learned from that that you can steal a monitors output and slap it right on your own monitor using the radiation it puts out! That is also where i learned that OLD TV sets at home had lead in their glass to protect viewers from the constant radiation. Although it's debatable, the idea is that as long as you are in front of the tv, you'll be ok. But if you're working next to it, not so much!
As a guitarist i also find value in knowing about tubes and their differences against solid state. I also agree that it's important to understand how we got to where we are at. Imagine in 500 years the music they consider pop is nothing like we have today. And when they want to play some "classical" music, they'll need to have the instruments and equipment necessary. If we just move on with the new and discard/forget the old that won't be possible! boo
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
I dunno, I didn't think that transistors were very hard to understand. I have some background in chemistry, which helped, but the valve analogy works fine for lay people. I could probably explain the actual working concepts to most of my friends, but I want to keep them.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Tell that to the people a generation ago that was doing it without any modern technology as it WAS modern tech at the time. They got by just fine.
Things like this would be the stepping stones to get back on track because of their lack of reliance on todays 21st century tech.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just it because it isn't modern high tech doesn't mean it doesn't have a significant technological infrastructure in it's own right behind it.
In really bad science fiction novels, sure. In reality it takes a lot of effort to support even 18th century technology.
Did you mean Angus? He usually plays an SG through a Marshall.
Wait for it....
...
Hee hee... it's gonna be good...!
umm... uhh..
In Soviet Science lab,
Glass vacuum tubes blow YOU!
.
- aqk
F U
Wata... in Boris... LP with Orange amps, at least at Roskilde'07
Ah, no, don't know him, but he sounds like a sensible dude if he uses that set up.
He called "CQ DE" in the video, but seemingly intentionally left off his callsign in the video. Maybe he wants his privacy. In any event, I'd love to contact him and actually hear his QRP radio with the homemade tubes on the air.
Her :)