Thread: RACS France
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Old 06-11-2015, 07:01 PM
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Bob Galanter
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Whitefish Bay, Wi (Milwaukee)
Posts: 1,053
Just saw this thread and have further information after reclaiming our broken 15GP22's at the ETF convention:

6 tubes that were shipped over to RACS by customer #4 came back without being opened by RACS and were undamaged.

Customer #1 John Folsom and Bob Galanter each sent a tube over. Both tubes had the guns removed prior to shipping and each tube was sent with a new base and an expensive gun which was rebuilt by Southwest Vacuum. Upon return from France, we discovered that both of the tubes were damaged by RACS beyond further use. Neither of the 22 pin bases were returned (very hard to find 22 pin bi-decal bases). One tube had the front cover glass severed from the tube and RACS broke the phosphor dot plate on the other tube in the evacuation oven. The glass, phosphor dot plates can crack of the evacuation oven is heated or cooled too rapidly. I have since learned that the ovens at RACS did not have automated ramp controllers and the ovens temperatures were being controlled by the operator turning the power to the oven off and on manually. Even Scotty had a more sophisticated oven controller than RACS.

Customer #2 & #3 is the same person. One of his tubes came back with a broken phosphor dot plate and is now beyond any further use. I can't remember the condition of his second tube.

John and I lost two perfectly good candidates for rebuilding and so did customer 2/3. In addition we all took a sizable financial loss in shipping and loss of priceless rebuilt 15GP22 guns.

All in all, we never should have sent any of our 15GP22's to RACS. RACS did not have the technical or scientific expertise to solve the 15G leaks, and what's more they didn't even have a Helium Leak detector to determine where the leaks were. They had assured us that they had a capability to seal the leaks using frit glass. But in the actual attempts to seal the tubes they had nothing but problems with their frit formulations. Each attempt to seal the leaks with their frit became one disastrous failure after another and in the end they ruined a total of 3 15GP22's which will never be able to be used again.

It takes a real scientist using scientific principals and sophisticated scientific equipment to rebuild a 15GP22. We have a person with those qualifications on our team. He is Dr. John Yurkon and he is close to completing his first attempt at making an ALL GLASS 15GP22. You can follow his effort at the ETF web site if you follow this link.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/yurkon_15g_project.html
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