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Old 07-05-2016, 12:19 PM
Eric H's Avatar
Eric H Eric H is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: So. Calif
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That's not paint, it's called a Getter and it help maintain a good vacuum inside the tube.

See this Wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getter

There are some tubes that have some type of coating on the inside, like the 6V6 often has a gray coating over most of the inside surface, I don't know what the purpose of that was.
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