We’re suckers for a vintage electronic teardown here at Hackaday, and thus it’s pleasing to see [Thomas Scherrer OZ2CPU] with a 1962 AEG oscilloscope on his bench. It’s definitely seen better days, and is a single-trace 10 MHz unit of the type you might have seen in a typical general purpose electronics lab back in the day.
Pulling the cover off, and as expected there’s a row of tubes each side of the centrally mounted CRT. No printed circuits in sight, and no transistors either, though the rectifiers are selenium parts. After a clean-up it’s time to look at the tubes, and they show the metallic deposits characteristic of long operation. We’re more used to that from older televisions than test equipment,
Gently bringing the power up it looks promising, but there’s a purple glow from one of the PCL82 triode-pentodes. Replacing that and a double-triode results in a ‘scope that surprisingly, is working. It was evidently a high quality device in the first place, with components capable of lasting for over six decades.
We’ve seen more from his bench involving tubes, including this device using a magic-eye tube as the heavy lifter.
“metallic deposits characteristic of long operation” – more likely the barium “getter”that was vaporized as part of the manufacturing process.
you can see both at the same time, in very old much used tubes, also the location is different, The Getter is on the top, in the tubes i show, and shine is different too, i got a bit over 1000 tubes stocked for my repairs, and nos tubes dont have the metalic deposit from long opperation. Thanks a lot for watching, and thanks for comment, and also a big thank to Hackaday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getter