Quote:
Originally Posted by Tubejunke
Mr Lee's idea to me sounds great and I hope that anyone who has the capital to run a non profit C.R.T. rebuilding facility has the best of luck with the builds. Now Electronic M looks at it more from the challenge of the build and the mufti-faceted craftsmanship and education that would be necessary with the realization of the need for, well, to be frank; money to throw away.
I tend to just see the reality that such an operation would involve a ton or overhead. And this overhead in the form of skilled (again mufti-faceted) labor would first be hard to find. I don't see this or any operation to be a one man deal. The individual for even close to that would almost need to be formerly trained in electronics, glass work, and metal work or fabrication, and ideally have some years of experience either building or rebuilding vacuum tubes.
So, it would be hard to shoot the original dream of such a hobby down. I'm sure you will have plenty of customers; initially at least. Most definitely it would just be a labor of love and I'm glad that there are still minds out there like MR Lee that just want to do a good thing for no real reason other than the interest and/or helping people. The thought process is to me reminiscent to that which many young people had back in the late 60s
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A young person back in the 60's? Really? I'm 50 years old..too young to have been a "young person" back in the 60's. Well, I was born in '64, so if you are talking about being 5 in 1969, then "guilty as charged". I credit my thinking with a thought process more along the lines of that which I acquired from my grandfather, who was a "young person" during the depression and had to learn to do for himself with what was on hand. The same guy who got home from the Navy after WW2 only to find shortages which kept him from buying lumber, so went to a dump and salvaged crates from aircraft wings for wood in order to build an entire two-car garage. The same guy who once got a flat, by himself, on some lonely desert road in the 1960's only to find someone had stolen the jack from his flatbed truck, so searched the desert for a couple hours, gathering up enough stuff to make a lever out of scrap laying around to lift the truck, keep it lifted, and change the tire. The same guy who I was traveling with when the alternator quit on his pickup during the middle of the night in Nevada, so we drove on for a hundred miles with the lights shut off and me sticking a flashlight out the window, shining it on the white line on the side of the road, passing one other car the whole time. And then, when the battery was too dead to run the engine, we slept in the cab with our feet sticking out our respective passenger windows until daylight, and then finding ourselves on a slight incline where we could walk beside the truck leaning on it to get it to roll, we pushed..yes pushed.. the 1971 Ford 3/4 ton that last 10 miles into Needles, California, down the offramp, and coasted right up to the service bay of an auto repair shop we didn't even know was there. I could tell dozens more such stories after spending years working with him and just hanging out with him. He was the kind of guy who didn't know he wasn't able to do anything, so he just went and did it. I hope I'm half the man he was.
One question: Does everyone who, as a hobbyist, restores old radios or TV's have an entire furniture/cabinet shop and electronics manufacturing facility tucked away somewhere in their home? Have they all been able to turn their hobby into profitable business ventures with all that demand for ancient B&W sets and AM/Shortwave radios out there? Lucky them! I'm beginning to see this all in a new light!
I wasn't talking about having to turn a profit from this by having to rebuild hundreds of CRT's. I was talking about the feasibility of doing it oneself simply as a hobbyist. I've spent perhaps 100 hours between research and actual work getting my DuMont going. Most likely a lot longer than it took to originally build the set. And I still know very little about HOW it works..but it does work. And yes, it was a labor of love that wouldn't have ever gotten done otherwise. I don't believe I will ever recoup my investment in either time or money. I also restored/repaired a 1921 Brunswick wind-up phonograph and a 1938 RCA Console radio last year. Neither of which I'd ever laid eyes on before, let alone knew a thing about working on. They are both daily players today, but I doubt I could make any money off either of them.
How many of us knew everything there is to know about something before we actually tried it?
Obviously, taking apart the tube isn't the main issue. That can be done, after proper evacuation of the vacuum, with $50 worth of special hand tools. Or a $6 dollar glass cutter if your really good or not particularly concerned with the potential failure rate if you don't get it right in one scribe. It's what comes after that's the big deal.
Just for the sake of conversation, here's something interesting where someone is actually making their own simple CRT's:
http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/crt/crt6.htm