Wire and Glass is something well known to the Wholigans as it actually is a part of the Whos' latest CD "Endless Wire" or to be more specific, the songs related to Townshends' story "The Boy Who Heard Music". Wire and Glass is also relevant to my picture of today. Old Guitar Heroes and Ham-Radio operators can immediately identify the stuff as "Thermionic Tubes" (or "Valves" in the UK) that were used in receivers, transmitters and amplifiers in the good old days of electronics. Tubes are litterally built of small metal sheets, wire and glass, hence the header of this blog.
Hold on a minute, these guys in the picture doesn't seem ancient or even used? No, this stuff is mostly brand new except for the big guy with two "horns" at the left who is a QQE 06/40, maybe some 30 years old but never used. The small guys are two 12AX7 and one 12AU7. The stuff in the background are sockets for the tubes.
So, what am i really going to do with this stuff? The experienced reader maybe has the answer already, Hans is going to build an amplifier. Yes that's true, a while ago my son Lukas asked me about tube amplifiers because his guitar-playing friends had brought this matter up to discussion. You know, there is a never ending discussion going on in the guitar-player community as well as in the Hi-Fi enthusiasts community about tube-sound v.s. transistor-sound.
Sparked off by that discussion I started to dig into my boxes of junk and found this old but never used twin-power tetrode for transmitter use but also OK as audio power amplifier with the same capacity as four pieces of EL34:s or 6L6:s, a good power transformer and some other hardware. The other tubes I bought from a web-shop. There are several factories producing new tubes nowadays in Russia, Slovakia and China to name a few. The tube aint' dead for sure.
One problem in this upcoming project is the output transformer to match the speakers to the power tube. One can find them in web-shops as well but they are scaringly expensive. So I went to the scrap-yard and dug into a container filled with small electrical motors and transformers of all sizes and found one with a core of suitable size for about 100W output power and the price was one (1) Euro.
This is now to be dismantled and rewound. Piece of cake... :)
Maybe we will be able to test "Tube-sound by Hans" before the next Christmas.
5 comments:
eländes elände. jag får väl söka uppmärksamhet någon annanstans till du rott ditt projekt i land..
excuse moi?
This is far down my priority list.
Haha, I really like this post Hans, especially the reference to Wire and glass. very good indeed!
Just to let you know Arie has made a small step forwards in his development ;-)
Well thanks for the lesson thermionic tubes, Hans!
So do you know which sound Pete prefers?
I admire your chutzpa! Digging in scrap yards - wow!
It's good to have passions/hobbies like this.
Take care and good luck!
(are you still working on it?)
~Sue
Thanks Val for the info, I will go and see what Arie is up to nowadays :)
Sue, Pete does prefer tube-sound, in Helsinki last summer he used a set of stacked Fender Vibro King amps with extension speaker cabinets and they are tubes all through. He has been co-operating with amp-builders all through his career.
Old electronics, radio and computer scrap seems to pile up in cupboards, under my bed and in the garage, I don't have the slightest clue from where it comes, it just seems to materialize there in some mysterious way...
The project continues yes, I've just tweaked and changed the schematics for the umpteenth time.
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