It all began with a cheap Chinese rotary vane vacuum pump and a desire to learn the witchcraft of DIY vacuum tubes. It ended with a string of successes – a working vacuum chamber, light bulbs, glow tubes, diodes, and eventually this homebrew power triode and the audio amplifier built around it.
[Simplifier]’s workshop seems like a pretty cool place. It must have a bit of an early 20th-century vibe, like the shop that [John Fleming] used for his early work on vacuum tubes. Glass work, metal work, electronics – looks like [Simplifier] has a little bit of everything going on. True to his handle, once [Simplifier] had a cheap but effective vacuum rig he started with the easiest projects – incandescent and gas discharge lamps. Satisfied that he could make solid electrical and physical connections and evacuate the tubes, he moved on to diodes and eventually triodes. The quality of the tubes is pretty impressive – stray gasses are removed with a bake-out oven and induction-heated titanium getters. And the performance is pretty solid, as the video below reveals.
Very impressive overall, and it’s not just the fact that he’s building tubes from scratch – we’ve seen that before. What shines here is that specialized equipment is not needed to make working and reliable tubes – just a MAPP torch, simple hand tools, and a low-end vacuum rig. Anybody could – and probably should – give this a try.
Tube amplifiers are adding a lot of noise.
You missed the point there, didn’t you?
I look forward to see your DIY BJT made at home ;)
Has been done… http://hackaday.com/2010/05/13/transistor-fabrication-so-simple-a-child-can-do-it/
(not a BJT, rather a FET, but still a transistor)
Easy if you have all the expensive equipment to do it with….
I think he was punning.
I was loving the fuzz around them
Tube is no better than today’s modern DAC. Matter of fact you can’t tell the difference when a DAC mimics a tube “warmth” like sound. The only cool thing about tube is that it’s analog and it freaking glows in a glass tube at vacuum lol.
As a guitarist I couldn’t disagree more.
AMEN!!! I just recently A/B tubes vs. solid state..both high end amps..digital def sounds sterile and flat…no comparison, I’m no purist/idealist..I use good digital amps as well as analog tube..the point heer is that they sound/feel nothing alike…
with the tech available today you can’t tell the difference with ears alone but you can definitely feel the difference, there is no question…
There is a difference. An audible difference. Once you know what to listen for the difference is like night and day.
You might be interested now that an electron which is released for me back into electrons exist in all states and all forms at the same time and electronic system all possible realities simultaneously until it takes hold and one reality which is the one in right now I have found since I was a child my plan with all the vacuum tube radios tune in on the a.m. and shot Wave radio band I could receive feelings of another world another reality where the people were so peaceful they had no guns no weapons the world’s so full of love he moving just as we are on Earth with no war and no weapons and no hate yes but using the old fashioned radio vacuum tubes and like feeling the electrons in the back and shoes I tuned into alternate and alternate reality that was the most beautiful place but the way the Earth is today I was suggested everybody and when they can go to escape the wars and hatred of this world this is Bob and we’re going to Hills
Now if he makes them so he can burn some getta then they will last a long time.
He’s using the titanium wire and plate as a getter, heating it after the tube is sealed with an inductive setup. As long as the heat stress doesn’t crack the glass, the titanium itself grabs any remaining atmosphere in the tube.
Impressive work. A milestone in homebrew non-linear device manufacture.
and linear device manufacture
And analog device manufacture!
It’s a relief to see that radio broadcasting technology will survive the coming zombie apocalypse.
without an annealing oven, the glass will have a lot of internal stress, these tubes will be even more fragile then mass-produced ones…
Perhaps he can take that into consideration if he decides to mass produce them. For now I am very impress to see someone who probably wasn’t even from the valve era reproduce such old (ancient?) technology. I like re-making old computers so he has far exceeded my skill set.
No need to mass produce anything…
An annealing oven is very nice to have if you do any kind of useful glass work, old-school chemists that made their own glassware knew that very well…
You can get by with a MAPP torch even for complicated apparatus, but it’s very likely to shatter from internal stress upon cooldown, which is a damn shame…it usually takes several hours in the oven to make nice stable glassware.
I myself still hope to one day get to the point where I can grow my own halide scintillator crystals, a process which suffers from similar problems (very sensitive to the cooling rate, tens of °C per hour is the max or they crack).
MAPP gas hasn’t been produced since 2008. What you’re buying now is “MAP-Pro” and the flame temp is only 3730F compared to propane at 3600F for a price 3x that of propane. Also, using either with oxygen it’s still smarter to stick with propane (Oxy/propane 5000F and Oxy/Map-Pro 5390F).
The differences between “real” MAPP and propane have never been very large when burning in air. However a lot of people that have propane torches also have MAPP (or pseduo-MAPP as you correctly point out) torches claiming that the later transfers heat to the joints faster, don’t know it that is true or not.
Even if the difference is small the availability of MAPP burners and gas bottles makes them attractive to a large group of people, including me.
You can “brush” away stress using a large flame and polarized glasses. The larger stresses appear as rainbow swirls through a polar filter.
Now that is a really useful comment!
Sorry for the double comment, just clarifying I wasn’t ironic. It’s always great when you can see how you are affecting material (or any product you are building) and getting tangible feedback, so you can stop guessing or using mere rules of thumb.
His “bakeout oven” gets hot enough to soften glass – I would think this is sufficient for annealing.
Perhaps the WHOLE POINT is being missed….arduino or notuino…you MUST respect a .and ability to go back and do what he is doing with very little commercial lab or factory equipment. I could not have done these things 45 years ago as a hobbyist and yet TODAY, he shows us, quite dramatically simply how easy it is to do or create today what we can not only sit and wonder why did I not think about a way to do this…yet he does and shares it and keeps on showing us simple complexities of yesterday alive and ” learnable and sharable”(pardon my colloquialisms). Celebrate this man’s generosity of experience.
Yes, I will shut up and get off my soap box, but get off the man’s back because he is smarter than most of us and is kind enough to be willing to share it with us other hacksters.
nuff said.
Larry R. KE5QMH
Absolutely freaking NOT if you are using LAB glass. Besause they have an neutral expansion coeffisience.
I can’t believe no one has posted this link. Sometimes I’ll play this just because its relaxing. Its people like this who give me hope that we will survive after the next “Armageddon” ;-) WOW!!!
Hand Made Vacuum Tubes by Claude Paillard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw
When I was teaching I would show my students this video and use it try and make the point that the wonderful thing about computers and electronics is the nothing is impossible or out of your reach. The answers are there if you care to dig deep enough. Don’t be afraid. Its not magic and fairy dust making all this technology work. Don’t have the software you need? Write it. Don’t have the specific piece of hardware you need? Build it.
It wasn’t often but when the “light came on” in a students eyes and they realized “Wow. So that’s how this stuff works?!? I want to lean more!” it was so worth it!
This is fantastic, I think HaD has done some great articles on his great work. The muzac is brilliant.
I came to post this too, though playback has been disabled on external sites. While I appreciate the “you can do anything” sediment, I also try to temper it with a degree of realism. Yes, many of these things are all possible but they all take time, trials and resources, even assuming they are within the grasp of the people undertaking them. Even Claude Paillard did not learn this whole workflow or build these overnight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-QMuUQhVM
This one (half) video might work?
>>While I appreciate the “you can do anything” sediment, I also try to temper it with a degree of realism.
I agree with you but how many times do we see TODAY that people are just stumped over the littlest things. If my sentiment is “over achieving” its nothing more than to TRY and balance out all the “blank stares” I see with people today dealing with today’s technology.
And lets be honest. If someone IS truly interested today the answers are SO MUCH easier to come by than it was 20 years ago.
That is why I still have an entire encyclopedia set from the 70’s. You could build a CRT with the info. You could manufacturer the phosphors as well. It’s as if someone printed Wikipedia……
…when Wikipedia was very, very small.
I rather make plasma “globes” with interesting shapes and gas fills. Bet there’d be a market for them.
What, like these? http://r.ebay.com/SdAZgj
I don’t want to know what you were looking for when you discovered that.
Heavens, no!
Props on this!
Reliable? I doubt it. A rotary vacuum pump is no where near a good enough vacuum even with a proper getter. Titanium as a getter is not nearly good enough, it primarily wants to react with oxygen which leaves a lot of nitrogen in there. That is just not a good enough vacuum for long term use.
You can find used diffusion pumps and turbos all over eBay. A small diff pump can be had for $100, though you will be fighting the fusor crowd for them. I have even picked up small Leybold TMP50 turbos for $100 ea. The drives were another $100 or so.
If you make the tube small enough, you don’t need a strong vacuum.
No, you do. The filament will die pretty quickly.
2mm gives a mean free path of 0.5 hPa, which is only medium vacuum, reachable with a single stage rotary pump.
A TurboMP is not something made for home use, too much stored energy, these thing have to be bolted down.
But why not looking at a diy TSP (Titanium sublimation pump) or a diy getter pump?
For proper operation of a vacuum tube you need to be in the 10^-5 torr range, at least.
I actually have quite a few turbos at home. One on my mass spec RGA (Pfeiffer 71l/s), put one on my SEM (Varian 350l/s), one on the little carbon coater I just build (Leybold 50l/s), another leybold for the RGA on my big vacuum system which has a big Seiko 2000l/s. I am also looking at putting a leybold 700l/s on the smaller vacuum system I have.
Yes, if the big mag lev Seiko locked up it would be pretty, it would probably rip the pump and valve right of the bottom of the baseplate. But so could a lot of the other stuff I have going wrong really quickly. It’s a calculated risk, I have seen many crashed turbos and it really does not happen that often. You usually have to do something pretty stupid to crash one.
You could easily do a Ti-Sub but you really need to start at a decent high vacuum with these like you do with ion pumps which often have a ti-sub combined with them. So either way you are still going to need a turbo or DP to get down to the start pressure of the ion pump, which can be a pain to start.
One possibility would be a cryoabsorbtion pump. They cool a stainless chamber holding zeolite with liquid nitrogen to get down to pretty high vacuums. They are good for evacuating small closed spaces, one place I took some glassblowing classes at was using them to evacuate tubes for NMR machines. Only bad thing about these is they need a supply of LN2 and they have a short run until they need to be warmed up an regenerated.
Third option is a cryopump. Probably the hardiest of pumps but really expensive, even used.
The fact that these tubes work at all is impressive though. Perhaps if he were to flush wth pure oxygen and use a better getter then the reliability would be improved.
As for diffusion and turbo pumps why not do a write up on them here? What sort of set up would one need to
get a suitably hard vacuum at a resonable price?
lol –
pure oxygen + getter temperatures = explosion
Not at the levels his vacuum pump is capable of. It would just lead to light oxidization of the getter, as intended.
I’d still be antsy running pure oxygen through a jury-rigged pump, though. Hell no.
Im not sure how many would be really interested if I blathered on about turbos and stuff. Vacuum tech is very neat and fun but so expensive. Materials matter and some things you just cant get away with cheap.
Putting pure O2 in there would not be a great idea. At roughing pump pressure probably nothing would happen but you never want to pump oxygen with a standard mineral oil filled pump, big fire potential. You need a fomblin filled pump for that.
Nitrogen bro, or argon. Something that doesn’t react
Titanium reacts with nitrogen too.
But the way he is doing it, not so much. You can use sublimated Ti at very high vacuum to finish a vacuum but at roughing pump range of vacuum you are not going to get much. Plus he is oxidizing his plate which creates an insulating layer which is not really what you want in a vacuum tube. I really have no idea why he is using titanium to begin with.
You can get standard barium getters online, I saw someone selling them once. With his induction heater he could easily flash them. Though I am betting the getter material will just turn white pretty much immediately.
A regular barium getter would likely handle the gas load in his tubes without trouble. Commercial vacuum tubes were often only pumped down to the 1e-2 to 1 torr range before the getter was fired, due to the short pumping time on the sealex machines used and the limited conductance of the evacuation stem. More info can be found in the excellent book “Vacuum tube design” by RCA, which is freely available online.
I just looked though Materials of High Vacuum Technology and they talk about the sealex machines too. They say generic filament lamps are brought down to -2 and and vacuum tubes down to -3, FWIW.
I was daydreaming about making a vacuum tube from a mason jar. I don’t know why, it just seemed like fun. I don’t even know what I’d use a vacuum tube for given my lack of knowledge in electroncs
But now maybe I’ll give my idea a shot, just for sh!t$ and grins.
I actually saw someone at wyong hamfest who did just that. The gain was apparently pityful, but it did work. He had a hole in the top of the jar to attach a hose for the vacuum pump, as it’s a bit hard to get a good enough seal. I forget what he put on the filament though, some white substance. I found someone elses blog that has some photo’s of said tubes: http://blog.marxy.org/2016/02/beautiful-day-at-wyong-field-day-2016.html
These lamps do not have an activated cathode. For this reason, it shines as a simple light bulb and the cathode emission is low.
So where can I get some thorium to coat a cathode?
(just musing, not serious)
Use thoriated tungsten. Or dissolve thoriated TIG welding electrodes in acid to liberate the thorium dioxide.
Haha! Great job MacGyver. Just to replace a radio tube in some abandoned warehouse guarded by bad guys.
It looks similar to some of the first vacuum tubes from around 1910.
I’ve always wondered about getters. All of the previous articles I’ve seen about home-made vacuum tubes and Nixies have used getters scavenged from dead vacuum tubes. It’s interesting that Simplifier has managed to use titanium wire for this. I had wondered if this would be possible/effective.
In the way that he has, not really. You need surface area and a wire is not going to cut it. you could run current through the wire and heat it to a point where it starts sublimating like in a ti-sub pump but they need to be activated at a much higher vacuum.
I once saw someone online selling getters, I cant find it anymore. You could also cut up neon sign electrodes, the inside of the electrodes is coated with a getter material that is activated when the tube is being processed.
With his later tubes he uses the broad titanium sheet forming the plate to double-duty as a getter. Seems to be fairly effective. Sure it’s not going to have the lifespan of a factory tube, but hey—what more could you ask for?
look up glasslinger on youtube for tube manufacturing magic. and dont get distracted from his appearance (or his disastrous cam) :) i recommend starting on his first vid
Czech out this guy: http://www.daliborfarny.com/#section-about-me