Building Triodes With Blinker Fluid

January 9, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 67 Comments

The triode is one of the simplest kinds of vacuum tubes. Inside its evacuated glass envelope, the triode really is just a few bits of wire and metal. Triodes are able to amplify signals simply by heating a cathode, and modulating the flow of electrons to the anode with a control grid. Triodes, and their semiconductor cousin the transistor, are the basis of everything we do with electricity.

Because triodes are so fantastically simple, they’re the parts most commonly crafted by the homebrew tube artisans of today. You don’t need a glass blowing lathe to make the most basic vacuum tube, though: [Marcel] built one from the light bulb used in a car’s tail light.

The light bulb in your car’s tail light has two filaments inside: one for the normal tail light, and a second one that comes on when you brake. By burning out the dimmer filament, [Marcel] created the simplest vacuum tube device possible. In his first experiment, he turned this broken light bulb into a diode by using the disconnected filament as the anode, and the burning filament as the cathode. [Marcel] attached a 1M resistor and measured 30mV across it. It was a diode, with 30μA flowing.

The triode is just a diode with a grid, but [Marcel] couldn’t open up the light bulb to install a piece of metal. Instead, he wrapped the bulb in aluminum foil. After many attempts, [Marcel] eventually got some amplification out of his light bulb triode.

The performance is terrible – this light bulb triode actually has an “amplification” of -108dB, making it a complete waste of energy and time. It does demonstrate the concept though, even though the grid isn’t between the anode and cathode, and this light bulb is probably filled with argon. It does work in the most perverse sense of the word, and makes for a very interesting build.

VFD Display Becomes An Amplifier

November 9, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Born well into the transistor era of the late 80s, [Fernando] missed out on all the fun you can have with high voltage and vacuum tubes. He wanted to experience this very cool tech, but since you won’t find a tube checker down at the five and dime anymore, where exactly do you get a vacuum tube to play around with? [Fernando]’s solution was to rip apart the vacuum fluorescent display from an old radio (Google Translate) and use that as a triode.

Inside every VFD is a filament, grid, and cathode – three simple elements also found in the triodes of just about every tube amp ever made. By applying a small voltage to the filament, a larger voltage to the cathode, and sending an audio signal to the grid, this triode amplifies the electrical signal coming from a stereo or guitar.

[Fernando] built his circuit on a breadboard, and with a little tweaking managed to get a fairly respectable amount of gain from parts salvaged from a radio. While using VFDs as amplifiers is nothing new – we’ve seen it a few times before, tube builds are always great to see, and bodged up electronics even more so.

The Construction Of An Triode, By Hand

June 7, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[Claude Paillard] is truly talented. He makes triodes by hand. This is a long and arduous process that has many steps, each of which could be messed up pretty easily. [Claude] makes it look easy though.

You might recognize this from way back in 2009 when we covered it on hackaday.com

[thanks for the tip David]

Hand Made Triode

January 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 29 Comments

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[Claude Paillard] makes his own triodes (google translated) for short wave radios. The site doesn’t have a lot of details itself, but links to entire books on the history of radio tubes and manufacturing of them. [Claude] takes us through the entire process of building a triode in a 17 minute long video. Even if you aren’t into them, this is fascinating. From the looks of it, several of us might only be a pump or two short of being able to cobble one together.

[thanks Dieter]