Happy New Year to you too, Jerome, and thank you for providing the updated information.

Good day Guys,

I had promised an update this week, sorry! it will be next week.

Very briefly talked to RACS 3 days ago, aged mother was in hospital with her two sons at here side, obviously not the sort of place for lenghthy CRT discussions.

For those of you that have tubes under rebuild, (Don) i had also asked for a recent status update.

The two brothers lost their father last year, so health is a very sensitive issue with them right now, hope that you will undrestand ...

Best Regards

jhalphen
Paris/France

Good day Gentlemen,

I have just come back from spending 2 days at the RACS factory in
southern France.

Day one was spent with UK collector Panrock (Steve O.) accompanied by
one of his customers. Day two was an all day Q & A with the two brothers
who own RACS.

VK USA and UK Vintage being public forums i will remain evasive on
certain private issues, but will be happy to answer personal inquiries
by PM.

Yes, the closing rumors are founded. The reasons are multiple, let me
briefly explain them here.

One) The demand is tapering off fast. After the huge french railway
order, 4000 CRTs over 4 years, the contract has been delivered. The
perspectives of another big order like this one are slim.

Two) supply of parts is getting downright impossible: for 1000 of the
SNCF CRTs, RACS had to locate 30 container's worth of raw glass shells
and screens found in Syria! and bring them to France. These were unused
leftovers of when Corning Glass ruled the roost and set up factories all
over the Middle East. For this batch alone, supplies came from 12
countries and the CRTs were built as brand-new from the raw spares.

Actually the french railway and some other customers would like them to
continue operations but where do you locate today raw inventory of this
volume?

Three) Just to break even, the factory needs to produce 1200 CRTs/year
over 10 months, counting in 1 month of summer holidays + 1 month of
assorted legal/religious holidays. That's 120 tubes/month.

Four) When you regun CRTs, there is a step where the process fundamentally differ: in the case of the fairly recent railway CRTs, NOS complete gun assemblies were in stock or purchaseable, allowing for very fast regunning in volume quantities. However for vintage/collector jobs the gun has to be rebuilt by hand. In some unlucky cases where the gun's cathode, filament and G1 grid are impossible to reach because other electrodes are in the way, or because of sheer fragility, the entire gun must be carefully disassembled then reconstructed. Believe it or not, this can up to two full days and only François does it.

Don't think that simple triode guns are fast & easy, this 2 day job was on a pre-war CRT used in a mirror set Telefunken. More recent color CRTs can be rebuilt a profit providing you have a NOS gun assembly. Any 1950s tri-color will require 3x hand rebuilding of all guns.

Which also explains BTW why no one gets rich in this business today, 4 to 6 days of skilled labor for one kinescope if billed at true cost, is already way over the price quoted for 15G rebuilds.

Five) François R. the CTO is attained by the "Scotty" (Hawkeye) factor. Now in his ealy 60s, he wants to paint, go fishing and enjoy life a bit inasmuch as you can while having to care for a severely invalid family member.

Six) The future.
Parts are being purchased to ensure continued rebuilding in spite of suppliers closing down production lines.

At the end of Q2 2012 RACS will assess it's financial situation and make decisions. They are a variety of options such as part time operation, reduction of workforce to a bare-bones crew, etc. François is a highly active fully trained engineer and actually enjoys the variety and challenges of collector tube rebuilds, finds it much less boring than a dull batch of 1000 19" or 21" 110° monochrome CRTS all of the same type.

The factory being in a floodable area, it happened 5 times over the last 35 years, the building and land have very low resale value. The machinery is worthless and will end up in the tip or sold at scrap metal prices. The huge inventory of chemicals and new parts is sellable.
Salvaging and moving some of the production gear to the US or UK is a possibility but aside from the cost/where/when questions it's an industrial project requiring a leader, dedication and a lot of energy.
François quoted it took one year to train a person to be a competent glass worker...

Interesting to complete Scotty's ETF donation is a 3x station screen coating line which Hawkeye did not have and all-electric ovens which offer much better control ability and less risk of contamination and fire than gas-heated ovens.

7) Conclusion
This is i believe a fair and transparent assessment of the current situation. I will endeavor to keep you all updated on a timely basis to avoid any bad surprise short notice of closure and give time for all to get wanted/needed jobs taken care of but do bear in mind that time is getting short and the Western World being in a recession does make operation of a small co. in a receding market increasingly difficult.

Best Regards

jhalphen
Paris/France

Thanks for that detailed report, Jerome. It gives a clear explanation of why CRT rebuilding has been abandoned as a money-making operation. Lack of demand + lack of raw materials = zero profit.

120 tubes per month seems like more than the collector community would ever demand on an ongoing basis. There simply aren't that many TV collectors in the world, and not every CRT needs rebuilding.

Another barrier to entry is the required skill level. One year's apprenticeship in glassworking is not trivial.

Perhaps the ETF rebuilding project is the only hope long-term. As a non-profit organization, ETF would not have pressure to generate profits for employees or shareholders. The human factors and economics still matter, however. You need people (or at least one!) who can commit to a high level of training. Materials are not free and their cost will only go up, as existing stocks are depleted.

Unless new people are trained now, this art may be lost forever after the few remaining "master rebuilders" are gone. This is not something one can learn by watching a 3-minute Youtube video.

Phil Nelson

If that ain't the truth!

If things go according to my master plan, I will retire from active duty in around 8 years. If things are still in stasis as they are now, I will make every effort to land myself in Hilliard and devote my time to the rebuilding project. Being retired from the military I would only have to work part time to support myself, so I would be able to spend large amounts of time at the museum. So if no one else steps up in the meantime, by 2020 you will have your man. Hopefully Scotty is still available then to train me. :yes:

Once again, I would like to see whether people are willing to pool together a shipment to RACS. I have a 20BP4 which I am willing to pay RACS to rebuild, but I'm not too excited to pay even more than the rebuild cost for shipping the CRT there and back. Pooling a shipment will split the shipping cost and make things far more reasonable.

Otherwise, I suspect my 20BP4 will be crunched sometime in the next couple or years, since it takes up a lot of space.

I've been ready for several years to pay RACS to rebuild; the shipping cost has been the impediment. Finding the money is not the issue; it just simply seems wasteful to pay $2000+ for one tube rebuild, over half of which is shipping cost.

Tom,

John Folsom and myself contracted a local box maker to construct special heavy duty tri-wall corregated boxes with special inserts to hold the 15GP22 tubes. We are quite certain that they will be strong enough to make a round trip via FedEx air freight to RACS and back. We are figuring about $300 each way. We do not feel that is to much considering the value of the tube.

Your 20bp4 is almost as rare and valuable. If I were you I would contract a local box maker to work with you to create a strong shipping container with the correct types of inserts to hold your tube and send it off.

Update on the 15GP22 project
 

Well gang it is now crunch time.

John Folsom and I have been formulating a game plan for our project.

As has been discussed previously, through our experiments with our Helium mass spectrometer leak detector, John and I have be able to determine that the pesky leaks that send most all the 15GP22 tubes to air, occur in the weld that joins the 2 halves of the ultor ring. John and I have discussed several approaches to "healing" the leaks, and the three approaches that seem to hold the most promise are:

1. Nickel plating
2. Frit Glass
3. Vac Seal

For the past several weeks I have been working with a local electroplater to try and devise a method to nickel plate the weld on the ultor ring. Today I got samples back from the plater and they "look" good, but we need to do a couple more experiments to see if this will actually accomplish what we want. So the first test will be to place the plated samples of the ultor ring in an oven at 650F for several hours to see if the nickel plating will hold up to the temperature of the rebuilding oven at RACS. We need to test the Nickel plating to see if it will have a tendency to flake off when we heat it in the rebuilding oven. I will be performing this test on Sunday afternoon. If the plating passes the test, then on Wednesday Feb 8th, I will be taking a 15Gp22 dud which as been tested for leaks and is marked where the leaks are located, to the plater to be nickel plated.

That nickel plated tube, and a second tube which has also been leak tested and found to have leaks on the weld, will then be packed up and air freighted off to RACS. The second tube that was NOT nickel plated will be a guinea pig for the VacSeal experiment. In this experiment, we will have RACS use VacSeal to coat the weld on the ultor ring and then cure the VacSeal in their oven for 1 hour at 500F. Then Racs will apply frit glass to both the nickel plated and the VacSeal tubes just as they did for the tube that RACS and Jerome Halpern successfully rebuilt 2 years ago and shipped to ETF convention. We have 2 rebuilt gun assemblies ready to ship along with these two tubes.

We also have a crate of 4 more 15GP22 duds ready to ship by ocean freight, and that crate will be leaving for France before very long.

Also in anticipation of Southwest Vacuum closing(the company that rebuilds the electron gun assemblies), John and I have sent a shipment of 12, 15GP22 guns and glass stems to Southwest for rebuilding, with instruction to rebuild as many guns as can be rebuilt within our limited budget of $3000.

We are hopeful that we can seal the leaks on the weld of the ultor ring, and that we will now be able to successfully rebuild the 15GP22 leakers. Only time and lot of money will be able to determine if we will be successful.

The one thing we know for sure is this, All along the entire tv restoration community had no idea that it was the weld on the ultor ring that was causing the tubes to go gassy. These defective welds are why, even before John and I made our attempts at rebuilding, the previous attempts 20 or 30 years ago failed.

Now that we know the leaky welds need to be addressed in order to get the tube to hold a vacuum for the long haul, we have a chance of finally solving the problem of the 15GP22's that will not hold a good vacuum.

A photo of the nickel plated ultor ring sample is displayed below for your eyes to gaze upon. Very shiny and smooooooth along the weld. Because of the way plating works, the nickel wants to plate onto the area that is closest to the nickel anodes that hang on the sides of the plating tank. That just happens to be the weld on the edge of the ultor ring. So the nickel builds up nice and thick and shiny and very smooth on the weld. Hopefully the nickel plating will seal the leaks in the weld.

We think we are finally very close to solving the problem and successfully rebuilding these tubes. Think good thoughts that the nickel plating passes the oven test on Sunday afternoon.

Bob and John

Hi Bob,

No problem to create a suitable shipping box (I actually have one already). The issue is that for one tube, I will pay $1000+ shipping. You're shipping four tubes, that's why each is $300 apiece. I would be OK to pay $300 shipping, but I need others with whom to split the shipping cost.

I looked into this a while back, and basically the unit size for shipping is one pallet. A pallet can hold a lot of CRTs, and the cost will be similar, whether for one or many.

Tom,

The $300 one way was for one tube via air freight. Yours is probably more due to "dimensional weight" because your shipping carton is no doubt larger than the ones we had made for the 15G.

We don't have quotes on the crate of 4 tubes, but we are hoping between $400 and $700 door to door one way by truck and boat.

Bob,

The boxes you had built for the tubes is without the new guns installed, right? I hope they will still be tall enough to hold the rebuilt tubes, which will be taller once rebuilt. Just something to think about, in case you hadn't already.

Yes Nick,

The boxes are made so there is about a 4" space between the end of the neck of the rebuilt tube and the inside top of the carton. I have a good 15G packed in one of the boxes sitting in my living room. If you plan to take your proto tube to convention you might want to pack it in one of our boxes for safe transport when we go down there.

I'm in. Let me know what is the best way to get the CRT to plating/shipping central. Can I add a 10AP4?

Dave A

We aren't that far along yet Dave. We still have bugs to work out of the system and then there is the issue of Southwest Vacuum closing their doors. If we get the bugs out of the process, and if we are able to seal the leaks by one method or another, and successfully rebuild 15GP22's, then John and I are going to send all of our dud tube inventory to France to rebuild our tubes first.

The biggest hurdle will be gun rebuilding after SW vacuum closes their doors. It is already too late for anyone to send guns in for rebuilding. John and I got our stash of guns into SW VAcuum just in the nick of time; 3 days before the deadline. The window of opportunity ended on January 31st. There is a small possibility that RACS may be open to rebuilding gun assemblies, because they have the skill to do this but we have been informed that it is VERY labor intensive. If RACS rebuilds a gun it may be very costly if they are even willing to do it.

But everything is speculation at this point. We need to prove we can successfully fix the leaky bulbs and make the tubes hold a good solid vacuum. If we can't do that, then all bets are off. Just give us a little more time to test the process. We will report our success or failures to the group as soon as we have any information either positive or negative.

I am going to test the nickel plating in an oven tomorrow to see if the plating is going to flake off of the ultor ring in the oven at 650F for several hours. I will report on that test tomorrow.

I have a 15G too , we must see if someone at SW can do more guns so that every tube can be saved and we can get more Economy-of-Scale (at RACS) - and thus lower prices on rebuilding all remaining stock.

Results of the oven test for the nickel plating went fairly well. The heavy plating on the actual weld did not flake off or blister at 650F in an electric furnace. I held the dwell temperature at 650F for 2 hours and used a slow cool down of 30 minutes to room temp. I am relatively happy with the results.

The next step is to prepare an actual tube for nickel plating on Wednesday. AFter that is accomplished I will have to test the tube to see if we have cured the vacuum leaks. If we have cured the weld leaks then the tube will be sent to RACS to be rebuilt.

Great news, does the Glass have to be covered to do the plating or since it's non conductive does it matter?

Do you think these techniques will also work to cure the leaks on the 21AXP22 CRTs ?

The glass does not have to be covered, but part of the ultor ring, where RACS will deposit frit glass in the "trough" behind the bulge on the ultor ring, must be masked off so it will not get nickel plated. That area must stay as unplated Kovar so the frit will bond nicely with the ultor ring.

RE: 21AXP22, there is no reason that this method of nickel plating the weld on a 21AX shouldn't also work on the 21" tube. However a lot more masking will be needed, and the weld flange will also have to be sand blasted prior to plating so it will plate properly.

MInd you this is still speculative. We still have to plate the ultor ring on a 15G tube and then use our helium leak detector to see if we have fixed the weld leaks. If the tube is still leaking, then we are back to square one and nickel plating is not the solution to the problem if the tube still leaks.

So lets not count our chickens before they hatch. I know everyone is hopeful, but John and I have been here before, only to have our high hopes dashed and crashed into a million pieces. This is not a sure thing at this point and even if we find that the nickel plating sealed the leaks, we still have to do a successful rebuild at RACS to actually prove that the nickel plating solves our problems.

At this point all I know for sure is that the nickel plating seems like it will be able to endure the 650F temperature of the evacuation oven if we get to the point of rebuilding a tube.

More posts will follow as soon as I have more to report.

Nickel Plating Today
 

As promised, I am reporting on the nickel plating of the 15G. Monday and Tuesday I spent time preparing the ultor ring for todays plating attempt. The area behind the bump on the ultor ring needed to be "masked" with a special material that prevents plating. We need to prevent the plating of the Kovar where RACS will be applying frit glass on the glass to metal interface area.

So I obtained a gallon of a material that is something like contact cement. It is orange in color and you paint it on with a small paint brush to the areas that will not be plated. It took 3 coats to get good coverage. Each coat needs to dry a minimum of 3 to 4 hours before re-coating. You can see the orange masking material on the ultor ring in the attached photos.

AFter the masking was completed I sealed off the end of the neck of the crt and made up a special cable with a couple heavy allegator clamps and a battery clamp from a set of automobile jumper cables. I used 2 strands of #10 stranded wire for a total capability of at least 60 amps.

At noon today I took the tube over to Exclusive Metal Finishing and Steve and I proceeded to plate the 15G ultor ring.

Step one was a short soak in hot alkaline cleaner, then a clear water rinse. Then we went into an acid electro clean tank with reverse polarity current at about 5 amps. Then rinse and into the sulfamate nickel electroplating tank. This solution is heated to about 130F and it is air agitated as you can see in the photo. Notice the beautiful emerald green of the plating solution. We plated at about 50 amps for 40 minutes. Plating looks rather nice so far and appears to be quite heavily plated.

We are scheduled to do the leak testing with the Helium mass spectrometer leak detector this weekend to see if the plating has sealed the leaks. This tube was previously leak tested and was found to have 3 leaks and we marked the location of the leaks so we know where to look for them.

I will report back with the results of the leak testing as soon as it is completed.

Wow, fascinating! I sure hope this works. You're doing a great service to the vintage TV community.

Best of luck!

-Clark

Lookin good Bob, my hopes are high!

Amazing exciting Research in finding the elusive source of these leaks & potential cures.

See you Saturday in Whitefish Bay!

I spent the afternoon with Nick and Colin testing the 15G that we nickel plated. It took most of the afternoon to get the Varian leak detector to stabilize because we just brought it in from COLD storage (it was about 20F here today) and it took several hours to get the darn thing up to room temp and for the machine to stabilize.

After we got things running, we hooked the subject tube up to the leak detector and began looking for leaks. We did not find any. So we took another tube that we had found leaks on during a previous leak detecting session and sure enough we were able to re-locate the leaks on that tube. So we went back to the tube which we plated with nickel and we still did not detect any leaks.

WE therefore must conclude that the tube we nickel plated, has been sealed of any detectable leaks, at least leaks of a detectable size that our leak detector can find.

Here are some photos and a small video whereby I do an empiracle test to see that we actually are using helium and not some other type of gas.


Click this link to view the "empriacle helium test"
http://miniman82.4t.com/video/helium.mp4

Bob, That has me all excited again. Can't wait to send a couple of tubes to RACS! Way to go. And a BIG thank you the John Yurkon, whose generous support and mentoring gave Bob and I the inspiration and courage to undertake the whole leak detecting aspect of the grand adventure. Still some hurdles ahead, but it once again looks promising.

Excellent news, Bob.

This is excellent news! :banana::yippy::thmbsp:

Fascinating research you guys are doing. I'm wondering if a leak could potentially migrate under the nickel plate and eventually find a new exit/entrance point? But I don't really understand the forces at work. It sure seems like the tubes vacuum would actually pull outside air in, instead of anything leaking out.

I spent the day preparing for shipping. Two 15GP22 tubes, 2 rebuilt electron gun assemblies, and 2 salvaged 20 pin bases will be taking a trip via FedEx to RACS in France this week. So it won't be too much longer before we find out if our efforts here in the US, will end up in rebuilt and functioning 15GP22's after RACS does their work.

We have more guns being rebuilt at Southwest Vacuum and we have 6 more tubes to prepare before shipping them to RACS provided that these first 2 rebuilds at RACS are successful.

The next shipment will be via boat to reduce the shipping costs. We have a special wooden crate that will accomodate four 15GP22 tubes in special shipping cartons that we had made up specially for this project.

FedEX air freight round trip for one tube will be close to $800 alone. Then add the cost of the rebuilding the guns and whatever RACS charges us and we are probably looking at north of $2K/tube.

Back to work now preping guns for shipment to Southhwest Vacuum.

So no more 15G guns can be rebuilt? I have one long-term open-to-air dud and a dark-gettered one with a 1959 date code (pictures posted on Pete's site).

John and I were fortunate to get our guns into Southwest Vacuum just before they stopped accepting orders for work. They are no longer accepting any orders for guns. When the current orders in house at Southwest Vacuum are completed, Southwest is closing their doors for ever.

There is a SMALL possibility that John and I may each have a rebuilt gun or two left over after our tubes are rebuilt. If I have a gun or two left over I will sell the rebuilt guns that I have left over to someone who wants to have a 15G rebuilt. I can not speak for John as to what he may do with any extra guns he might have after all of our 15G tubes are rebuilt at RACS.

Otherwise, if you need to have RACS rebuild a 15GP22, you will need to have RACS rebuild the gun for you. They have the ability to do gun rebuilds, but it is very time consuming and may be quite costly.

We will be better able to make recomendations to those collectors who want to have a 15G rebuilt, after these first two tubes that John and I are shipping to RACS, have been rebuilt.

RACS is going to try and seal the weld leaks on one of our tubes with frit glass. If that process seals the leaks, then RACS can do it all in house for other collectors. If it turns out that the frit glass method is not viable for sealing the weld leaks, and if the nickel plating does work, then some sort of arrangements will need to be made to have your leaky welds nickel plated.

Perhaps my nickel plater will be willing to get involved. I just don't know about that at this point. All I can tell you is what John and I are doing for ourselves.

Please understand that John and I have been working on this for a number of years now. We have invested many thousands of dollars and a huge amount of time. We are now in the final hours of being able to have RACS do this work on our tubes and at this point there is still no assurance we will be successful. And even if we are successful, there is very little time for other collectors to get a tube rebuilt this late in the game. John and I are commited to this endeavour no mater what the cost is. What ever we have to spend, we will spend it. If you are truely serious about having a 15G rebuilt, you won't think about the price either.

So my suggestion to everyone is to wait a couple more weeks to see how things go with our first two tubes which are being shipped to RACS this week. I will report back as soon as we know if RACS was successful with the rebuilds. And if the rebuilds are successful, be prepared to plunk down several thousand dollars per tube to ship your tube to France in order to get your 15G rebuilt.

For those of you that have a 15G and are sitting on the fence about whether or not to invest the money, I can only say this. The price of a good 10BP4 is already going through the roof, and 10BP4 tubes are quite common. I saw an untested Rauland 10BP4 that was in a Rauland box sell for $227.50 plus shipping just yesterday on ebay. A good 15G will probably be worth $3000-$4000 or more before very long. I paid $2250 for a good used 15G just 3 years ago. And at that time we still had Hawkeye helping us on the rebuilding project. Now there is only one tube rebuilder left, RACS in France and they are most likely going to close their company around June. Think long and hard about the fact that if you don't act soon, your chances of ever having a good 15GP22 for your set may be gone FOREVER.

There is an old saying "he who hesitates is lost" Think about it!

Let us hope they will have the same good parts used in the rebuild!

Currently, there are only two 15GP22 tube being being rebuilt by RACS in France. One is nickel plated (on the ultor flange weld), and the other is going to be treated wit frit glass (on the ultor flange weld) to seal the vacuum leaks. We will see.....

We got word from Jerome Halpern yesterday that RACS has started the rebuild of one of our 15G tubes. We do not know which one of the two is in process. I will update as soon as we hear more.

Jerome lives in an appartment building in France, directly across the street from the Inconesian Embasy (a predominantly Muslem nation) and on Monday a bomb was exploded in front of the embasy. Lots of broken windows in Jerome's building but thankfully nobody was hurt.

Whatever is going on at RACS gets to us through Jerome, so with this bomb incident Jerome will be busy taking care of damages from the explosion.

OMG, that's ridiculous! I suspect this means my talks with Jerome concerning a possible trip to RACS cannot continue now, since I would never be approved for leave to a geographical area that was recently attacked. Such a shame, I was looking forward to going over there. :(

I am glad to hear that nobody was hurt.

Hi Guys,

Nope, they didn't get me! - Thanks! for support & to all who inquired privately.

Some photos below from french media during the last two days. Last pix i took of the punctured steel shutter shows the "device" was no joke - ball-bearing caused punctures used as improvised bullets said Police Explosion expert from scientific police.

Miniman, no change in what i'm trying to plan for you, just trying to get a £$!'# set of possible dates from RACS is taking longer than i thought.

To come back on topic, 15G USA #1 has undergone first frit glass cooking this week. Trying to learn more this afternoon.

Best Regards to All

jhalphen
Paris/France

No worries Jerome, I just hope that the folks over on my end don't condemn what happened as a terrorist attack as that would interfere with our plans.

Hi Guys,,

General update - I just talked to RACS this PM and here is the latest info.

Concerned, please read carefully:
NEW B&W CRT inquiry rebuilds USA & UK
NEW Color CRT inquiry rebuilds.

NOT concerned:
CRTs & guns already at RACS - 2 x 15G's Bob & John
Guns already at Western Vacuum co. USA, undergoing USA labor Work (Bob & John) - many.

B&W CRTs, Euro (all countries) & USA already at RACS.
For these, unless a specific component is missing, and all parts are already at RACS, any delay is due to hand labor time to rebuild, can be up to 2 day/gun for really vintage "toughies".

For these cases i am in most cases already in frequent contact with CRT owners to ensure follow up and the fastest possible processing.

Your case not covered above? - PM me.

What's happening behind the scene:
RACS is expecting delivery within the next 2 weeks of a massive order of supplies from Western Vacuum USA of Cathodes, Filaments, Getters, 150X Filaments & Cathodes for 15GP22 US color CRTs and the last rebuilt guns, basically they are cleaning out Southwest's entire inventory.

RACS also informed me that some Southwest resold raw parts come from Puerto-Rico so Southwest itself is tributary from a third party. They usually group together into one consolidated shipment, so everything "waits" until the last element completes the order - Sorry! out of my reach, but be assured it will be done.

So target date looks around mid-april at the latest to have all parts in France.

Best Regards to all,

jhalphen
Paris/France

To Miniman82,

Just an awesome display of TVs! - what can i say - so much work, so many awesome results and (incidentally) so much display floorspace (jealous me).

Big congratulations!

Cheers

JH/Paris