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CRT Rebuilding - The Road Ahead
Good Day Gentlemen,
I've just come back from spending 3 days at the RACS plant with Nick & the Raedersdorff brothers, owners of the company.
The plant is located 500 miles from Paris (where i live) and in southern France near the town of Nimes.
Some thoughts after my visit as to the future of CRT rebuilding:
RACS has agreed to publish an official statement in the near future concerning the continuation of CRT rebuild activities. The two brothers must decide this together, it is their prerogative and theirs alone so i will make no speculations.
In the meantime, the CRT rebuild process is being documented in every way possible, notes, written report, photographs and now HD video.
An HD camcorder will be used starting this upcoming monday to shoot everything live - continuously running camera on a tripod. The video footage will go back to the US under the form of the raw files on SD memories for editing (Dave Sica?) ETF archiving and DVD distribution via Nick.
Starting monday, the entire rebuild process from raw glass to finished CRT will be shot. It will include washing & preparation, screen layering, aluminization sputtering, graphiting, neck operations, gun mounting, vacuum pumping, getter flashing, Cathode activation & quality control/burn-in soak test.
Also planned will be documenting the gun rebuild process: taking apart, Filament/Cathode/Getter replacement, rebuild of the electron lens structure, mounting on a new base/stem assembly.
The camcorder is staying at the RACS plant to shoot the 15G fritting process as 9x 15GP22 CRTS are currently at the factory.
The road to the future, ETF CRT plant planning:
After eventual closure, RACS will donate for the price of scrap metal any equipment desired.
My assessment after lengthy discussions between the R. brothers, Nick & myself is that the following equipment should be saved for ETF installation: Washing, screen coating station, aluminum sputtering stations. Also needed are at least one Hydrogen/Oxygen burning neck/base station (H/O2 is much cleaner than Butane/Propane gas), 2 programmable electric ovens, 2 vacuum pumps, QC gear, all gun rebuild parts and tooling, P4 phosphors and maintenance manuals for the saved machines.
Also any usable raw glass bulbs to make 9"/12"/16" imitation Pre-War CRTs.
This means at least one container's content to be shipped by cargo boat to the US.
Installation at the ETF: layout of the plant, site preparation - electrical, H/O2/ gas distribution, etc. François R. RACS's technical manager would accept to travel to Columbus to set up, calibrate and help with Plant restart.
All this means we will need money. We need to have a PR rep, a short video presentation to present the project, probably a web site and some serious lobbying to get funds.
While Nick finishes his 8 years in the Navy before retirement, it would be great to get the brand-new Nashville co. home rebuild plant currently at the ETF up and running so that he can practice maybe on a once-per-year basis what he has learned at RACS to not loose his skills and start training interested volunteers.
Also within those 8 years, the ex-Hawkeye gear could be progressively revived.
All this will take a lot of time, energy, goodwill and funding. I believe it's doable and a worthwhile project, after all a lot of seemingly weird projects manage to attract attention and funds.
Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France
Side Notes:
RACS can be contacted by Mail here: racs2 AT wanadoo.fr
English understood.
Phone: + 33.466.60.78.18
Fax: + 33.466.60.86.39
Contact: Philippe RAEDERSDORFF
Reminder: I help RACS on an entirely volunteer basis, no $$ involved.
One of the problems in continuing this activity is obtaining CRT parts such as Filaments, Cathodes, Getters. RACS has a huge inventory but it is not infinite. So far, sources have been USA & UK but others must be investigated in Asia/India where active production is still going on.
Western companies want out. As a consequence,prices take a steep hike. Just yesterday Southwest Vacuum (USA) quoted RACS a x4 price increase to rebuild some gun models. RACS can rebuild guns entirely in-house but used Southwest & other companies as a convenience to go faster on volume rebuilds.
In the days to come i will post to my PhotoBucket site pictures of the RACS plant and of the equipment to save.
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