Couldn’t he find a longer version of the song, or a different one?

Very cool though, wish I had this kind of equipment. Would love to make my own tubes.

Also, what kind of setup is required for cutting glass with a wire like that?

i want to do this for a living.

I wish the writeup was in english.

it may have just been the editing of the video, but did it look to anyone else like that old man was just making up the measurements as he went?

I get the impression that not only can this guy make vacuum tubes, but he built all the tools he uses himself. Like that spot welder, it looks handmade.

harbor freight has some really cheep spot welders. harborfreight.com just search for spot welder.

the guys work shop is amazing. Most all his tools he created himself. Its a nice touch at the end where he graphs the tubes specs.

That’s really amazing! I think i have all the equipment requiered, so if i got some extra time i will try to do it. But i also have to learn some french i think :P

Atrain:

All you need is a nichrome wire and a transformer with high current and low voltage (i think 5v will be suitable and the current depends of the wire diameter and lenght). Make a pseudo-cut in the glass, place the wire in the “pseudo-cut” and turn it on!

thanks for posting greetings from the netherlands
marco

Absolutely superb, I sincerely hope we NEVER loose this kind of dedication to technology.

Wow, He is Realy cool ! Real Hacker

Damm i didnt finished my school http://www.lis-mbo.nl/

This is some seriously beautiful work.

I second the notion to create Nixie tubes using this!

As someone who was actually PLANNING to build a giant
Nixie by hand myself, I wonder if he used any mercury in these (didn’t see any). In Nixies, a very small amount of mercury was often used along with argon/neon inside, and varying the noble gas along with the amount of mercury changed the intensity of the orange. Look up Penning mixtures on wikipedia.

What metals did he use? I’ve been planning my Uber Nixie to use tantalum wire for ultimate cathode & annode life, but that is a bit overkill…

Lastly, I’d be curious to see the working life for his tubes. The hardest thing to control making a vacuum tube is the metal to glass seal- depending on the type of glass and ESPECIALLY your choice of metal, a good seal can be hard to achieve. Many Nixies have gone bad due to their seal. He’s annealing the glass, I think, in that cannister between steps to reduce strain in the glass (tempering it), and to alieviate compression stress from the heated metal shrinking at a different rate than the glass. Understand, if you just melt glass around a metal wire, it will not make a perfect seal unless you anneal the glass (otherwise it will crack)

This guy makes it look EASY- there is a LOT of small bits you have to know about both glassblowing, metalurgy, and glass-to-metal contraction properties to do something like this properly (researched forever for my Nixie). He has the right equipment and serious skills.

FOR OTHERS wanting to try this- if you get good with glassblowing, you can try this yourself, provided you have a vacuum pump and, for Nixies, a glass cylinder of a noble gas (less than 100$)- just do some research here:

http://www.pmillett.com/tecnical_books_online.htm

This guy has a lot of books on tubes- many are quite good, and they are all FREE. I learned everything I have from reading all of these, some of which are original company manuals for production!

Hope this helps. REMEMBER- most of the basic fab is not too difficult with a lot of glassblowing experience, it’s the GLASS TO METAL SEALS you need to worry about.

Coolest. Thing. Ever. And lots of respect, guys like this are so very rare …

“also, what kind of setup is required for cutting glass with a wire like that?” – atrain

I’ve seen something like that done. Basically, you just get a power supply capable of putting out some amps, and hook up a thick enough wire to it (you could probably pilfer it from a toaster — I think we used piano wire). Wrap the wire around the glass (making sure not to have the two ends touch, which would short circuit your short circuit!) and hit the power. The glass cracks due to thermal expansion. If needed, you can squirt some liquid (like alcohol) around the joint, which will cool off the glass quickly, causing it to break.

Yeah, that was cool, but if I hear the first 60 seconds of “The Man I Love” on piano more than 20 times, I go insane and kill the closest bystander. Good thing the video ended at 17 minutes. That was a close one!

@25: And high-current, low voltage power supplies aren’t actually all that exotic. A soldering gun is one, for example — it’s actually a step-down transformer. The U-shaped piece of metal tubing the tip fits into forms a very thick one-turn secondary winding.

in one word – genius.

In a few short days Hackaday has shown us everything from modding new hardware, someone pushing the edge of car aerodynamics and now this master!

2008 is going to be a great year if you can keep this up!

Wow! He made a light bulb? Man life was hard for on indicator lights before LED’s. All that just so he could see that his radio was on? In my opinion the sounds is enough :/

———-
Hahahaha sorry couldn’t help it.

Glad I’m not the only one who felt a deep respect for this guy once I saw his workshop and skills

Now my dream is to be like him in the future… but with transistors :-D

I wonder how hard would be to make an almost-hand-made transistor..

This was superb. Cheers.

I think it’s especially cool that he’s even injection molding the little blue bases himself too!

Instructables website (Instructables.com) has a home brew Arc welder made with two microwave oven transformers – he home brewed the secondary transformer windings with wire laying around.

Seems things may be more simple than we think.

I mention this because of the Idea of creating the necessary tools to cut glass and spotweld. High amps low volts – :-)

I would also love to try to make a Homebrew spotwelder

then, this is the realization of a 2300 mhz station and after of a 10 ghz equipment whose descriptions appear in radio-ref. these both realizations are crowned (with success) in the field by “france-england premieres” in 1968 and 1969. a superb “cross-band” 2.3-10 ghz qso over a distance of 40 km (24.85 miles) is still in memory of the sacred good times of the signatories!

lover and respectful of the old and venerable components, he revives reception tubes of 20s in making emitting it 3 watts on the band 80 m in telegraphy. qso across europe will be realized … see chapter qrp transmitter.

his reverence for the sir arthur collins’s equipment, lead him to restore a number of collins radios, and especially the 618-t.

and then, is it to participate in its own way to the centennial of the invention of the triode by lee de forest in 1906, he launch on the manufacture of the mythical tm developed by the general ferrié in 1915. making a lamp, it’s not so easy, but to getting things complicated with difficulty, f2fo will make everything he needs for this project, and especially various pumps, and a molecular one, to get vacuum allowing employment in emission of the made tubes.

a dozen lamps will thus see the light of day …

to check the measurements, a qso will be realized on january 1, 2005 on 80m in cw between montrouge, 92 and camaret, 29. the tubes are robust and will comme on contacts …

the original purpose, which was to cross the atlantic, was reched by f6bwo who has realize numerous qso on 4 continents.

the work

the work — amply illustrated — is composed of the following chapters:

tubes: history of vacuum tubes, from their emergence in 1906 until the advent of the transistor in 1960
qrp transmitter: realization of a transmitter using lamps from before 1925
triodes: making of a tm triode and necessary tools (pumps, oven …).
photos: some photos of making steps
mr mignet (pdf: 58 pages – 2 mb): original document describing the making of the “3-electrode vacuum tubes” by a pioneer in the twenties
additions of 6 october 2005 (not reproduced in pdf format)
review after one year of made triodes use (published in megahertz magazine #281 – august 2006)

the printable versions of the first four chapters in pdf format are available below:

the tubes (part 1) 72 pages – 68 mb
the tubes (part 2) 49 pages – 61 mb
qrp transmitter 41 pages – 5 mb
triodes (part 1) 36 pages – 31 mb
triodes (part 2) 25 pages – 15 mb
triodes (photos) 6 pages – 24 mb

if you want to know more, continue to scroll these pages. the text, photos and video are of the author f2fo.

the video

the mp4 video file is available below:

making of a triode tube 17 minutes – 125 mb

presentation: f9oe
transcript: f9hs

paillard dot claude at free dot fr
december 31, 2007