Post Your Cool Pic Here! / General Chatting / Forums

Forums

4hv.org :: Forums :: General Chatting

« Previous topic | Next topic »

Post Your Cool Pic Here!

first previous 187 188 189 190 next last

Move Thread

LAN_403

Steve Conner

Mon Oct 12 2009, 10:10AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Scott,

Yay, lucky guess here! :^)

You're right, the 4CX250B just don't look as nice as glass tubes. But they can put out fiendish amounts of power, and I like them for that in a kind of "Pretty is what works" way. The ceramic seal sometimes glows cool colours, too, but too bad it's buried in the socket and you can't see it.

If you do part it out, would you consider selling me two tubes together with the chimneys and sockets? I've always wanted to try an audio power amp with these, and I recently got a huge output transformer from an old Fender bass amp, and a power transformer from a Yaesu FT-560.

Dennis: Nice Nixie clock I see peeking into the picture...

Scott Fusare

Mon Oct 12 2009, 10:51AM

Registered Member #531 Joined: Sat Feb 17 2007, 10:51AM
Location: Burlington, Vermont
Posts: 125

Steve,

Agreed, they are pretty from a design perspective. I just have a soft spot for the warm glow and the smell of hot dust that emanated from the back of the TV when I was a kid...

Sure, I'll save a pair for you. I will put them up for sale here prior to hitting Ebay anyway, best to keep it in the family

I need to come up with a test circuit so I can have some confidence that I am not selling junk. Checking filaments and for shorted elements is OK, but not great.

Scott

klugesmith

Mon Oct 12 2009, 09:42PM

Registered Member #2099 Joined: Wed Apr 29 2009, 12:22AM
Location: Los Altos, California
Posts: 1716

Last month we took a day trip to Columbia, a 19th century boom town.
It has many preserved or restored buildings from the 1850's California gold rush.

Along the highway, we saw a tanker truck loaded with the -other- yellow element dug from the earth:

Hon1nbo

Mon Oct 12 2009, 10:46PM

Registered Member #902 Joined: Sun Jul 15 2007, 08:17PM
Location: Pacific Northwest USA
Posts: 1042

scott fusare wrote ...

Steve,

Agreed, they are pretty from a design perspective. I just have a soft spot for the warm glow and the smell of hot dust that emanated from the back of the TV when I was a kid...

Sure, I'll save a pair for you. I will put them up for sale here prior to hitting Ebay anyway, best to keep it in the family

I need to come up with a test circuit so I can have some confidence that I am not selling junk. Checking filaments and for shorted elements is OK, but not great.

Scott

I ha ve to agree, nothing beats the nice warm glow - I got my first tube device that worked at a hamfest for free, it is a General Electric Sweep Generator and it has plenty of tubes, and it still works beautifully. The first time I saw those tubes light up I immediately started looking for parts to build an Amp... I still haven't built that amp, but that is because I want to custom design the best one I can!

also, here is a photo of my latest Radioisotope for my collection/experiments: one microCurie of Cesium-137

EDIT: I noticed that the auto-image-resizer is finally working - I noticed only because I forgot to resize the image before uploading it!

Steve Conner

Tue Oct 13 2009, 10:12AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I love that warm glow too! But I also love the idea of a bass amp with enough power to shatter windows and loosen teeth, that doesn't need six expensive glass tubes.

You could argue that if I used 4CX250Bs, I might as well use transistors, and you may be right.

1255428747 30 FT6000 Imgp1241 Glowing 6l6s

Scott Fusare

Tue Oct 13 2009, 11:16AM

Registered Member #531 Joined: Sat Feb 17 2007, 10:51AM
Location: Burlington, Vermont
Posts: 125

I could make that argument but, having "been there" and "done that" with the guitar playing EEs here at work I won't bother.

You'll have to post a video of the thing when you get it rolling. Better yet I need to arrange a trip to one of our UK plants that coincides with a Teslathon and see it for my self.

Steve Conner

Tue Oct 13 2009, 11:24AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Well, I accept that argument completely. A big part of Hendrix's live sound came from germanium transistors. And there's an effects pedal called a "Tube Screamer" that most guitarists think has something to do with tubes, even though it contains a transistor, two diodes and an op-amp. When you try and explain that a Tube Screamer has no tubes in it, it's like the "Up to 11" scene in Spinal Tap.

But I still love tube amps for non-scientific reasons. (They give off a warm glow, smell good, and impress the layman

) I've built three already.

Arcstarter

Tue Oct 13 2009, 07:10PM

Registered Member #1225 Joined: Sat Jan 12 2008, 01:24AM
Location: Beaumont, Texas, USA
Posts: 2253

Either way, tubes are very cool to work with. It is hard to kill one, especially if you have a clear view of the grid(s)! I actually made a 'Tube Screamer' effects pedal for my little brother. It went ok. I was going to make a single board with a some 10 position rotary switch to choose between stuff like treble boosters (A perfect name for that would be 'Little Bitch'), Wah pedals, and differential fuzz and all kinds of fuzz, but then he got a new amp that did tremolo and a few different amp effects -.-. Oh well.

I have made a semi-successful tube amp and semi-successful semiconductor amp, and i would say the tubes where the funnest to work with. No op amps to hook the inverter/non inverting inputs up wrong

Proud Mary

Tue Oct 13 2009, 07:16PM

Registered Member #543 Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992

Klugesmith wrote ...

Last month we took a day trip to Columbia, a 19th century boom town.
It has many preserved or restored buildings from the 1850's California gold rush.

I've had some great times exploring ghost towns and abandoned mine workings in So. Cal. I guess the finest ghost town I've seen is Bodie, in Bodie State Historical Park, where the buildings are subject to continuous archaeological conservation. It hasn't been ruined like Calico, a few miles from Barstow-Dagget MCLB, where the original Swedish miners whose first impulse was to build a church and a school have been usurped by fantasy gunslingers who never lived there, and the original collapsed adobe structures have been built over with Wild West film set frontage, a children's entertainment now disconnected from history.

It's good to go out into the Mojave on an ATV and look at all thel Indian rock art, abandoned mining equipment of a hundred years ago and more, and the mines themselves, which are great places to see bats roosting at very close quarters.

Dennis Rogers

Tue Oct 13 2009, 11:03PM

Registered Member #1837 Joined: Tue Dec 02 2008, 02:20PM
Location: NYC
Posts: 65

Steve McConner wrote ...

it's like the "Up to 11" scene in Spinal Tap.

You need to see "Anvil" if you haven't already.

first previous 187 188 189 190 next last

Moderator(s): Chris Russell, Noelle, Alex, Tesladownunder, Dave Marshall, Dave Billington, Bjørn, Steve Conner, Wolfram, Kizmo, Mads Barnkob