• WARNING: Tube/Valve amplifiers use potentially LETHAL HIGH VOLTAGES.
    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
    performed by someone who is thoroughly familiar with
    the safety precautions around high voltages.

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but they are very handy for in oscillator and divider circuits if you want to make a wicked analog synthesizer.

OK, since there may be some use for the 2D21. I have seen the 2D21 VCO circuits. (I may never use them) I promise not to nuke any more of them. They will probably wind up on Ebay. I can't promise the same for the 6AL5's. I wouldn't know that 2D21's glow purple, and 0A2's glow red in the microwave.

Please don't kill useful tubes. Please Please Please.

I know that this sounds harsh, but seriously, none of the tubes that I nuked even resembled useful. They were missing pins or broken.

I got two lots of tubes. One lot were all loose (unboxed) tubes, randomly dumped into about 50 2' X 2' X 2' boxes. The boxes had been thrown into a trailer by a cleaning crew. The trailer was not water tight and sat outside in Florida for several years. I got these boxes, and have gone through most of them. In some cases over half of the tubes were broken. There are many with severely corroded pins. In some cases the pins fall off when touched. These were offered up to the microwave, the slingshot and the BB gun. In other cases the pins were not strong enough to be inserted into a socket repeatedly. These were used for torture testing (the melted 6AQ5 and others).

Nuking tubes in a microwave WILL destroy the microwave. I fried a couple of them. Both were obtained from the local trash pickup, and returned to the trash when I was done. All experiments were conducted outside under controlled safe conditions. All experimenters were 20 feet away from the microwave, which was remotely controlled. The camera was operated by remote shutter. No, I didn't use my good camera. Yes, it is posible to generate plasma in a microwave oven.
 

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Hi tubelab,
Go ahead and have all kinds of fun with the contact disadvantaged tubes. ;)

6AL5's are used in many VTVM's and many stereo tuners. Send a box this way! :D

You know what else doesn't do to well in microwave ovens? Remotes. Car remotes for those really terrible party guests. Takes them a while to figure it out. :devilr:

-Chris
 
6AL5's are used in many VTVM's and many stereo tuners. Send a box this way! You know what else doesn't do to well in microwave ovens?

I have enough 6AL5's for all of the worlds remaining VTVM's.

Yeah, I know a lot of things that don't like being nuked. We had a high profile incident at work where the product safety people came in waving a burnt up Nextel phone. She had shut down all phone production. They assembled the best engineers to examine this phone, everyone was looking it over with puzzled eyes. When I saw it for about 5 seconds I KNEW that it had been nuked. No one in the room would believe me. After another hour or so of total cluelessness, I walked out of the room, obtained a similar phone, took it into the break room, and zapped it. I returned to the room and then dissassembled the phone. Everyone remarked how the burn marks were in the same places.

I have done a few microwave tests. Those anoying AOL CD's spark up good, but smell bad. Here is a 6146 being tested, it was cracked before i "tested" it. You can see fire shooting out of a hole in the tube, and a seperate ball of plasma drifting through the oven
 

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Well now I can't figure out most of the info here, and it isn't even close to post #1 but I must say it's fun blowin up stuff in the nuker lol. If you take a whole egg and nuke it, it smells exactly like popcorn for some reason. I showed my daughter that awhile ago and we both busted our guts laughing, it doesn't hurt the microwave but blows up and makes for a big mess inside the nuker to clean.:D Dave:)
 
wrenchone said:
The 2D21 thyratron tubes don't have any use at all in standard audio circuits,

Hmm... What voltage is needed for them to start glowing when grids are connected to the plate and no filament current? What is the voltage when it is already fired up? I suppose with 6.3V on filament it will work as a 8V Zener, but with less filament current... :rolleyes:

Tubelab, my 10% for the idea! ;)
 
jlsem said:



I suppose if I were to mention that silver wire sounds different than copper wire I could preface my comment by stating that I own a device that can launch an egg 200 feet into the pep squad, so as to gain more respect.

John

Exactly! The same egg may sound better with copper wire inside than with silver wire across.

I just made an input transformer. Using thin copper wire from relay. After covering it by a silvered copper and crossing in another direction by a permalloy I've found that it does not sound at all. One coil is open. Silver and permalloy shields did not help. :(

Pain in eggs when I think of rewinding it... :bawling:
 
I put my order in today to try some different tubes in my amp and also to have some on hand. After exploring what to try this is what i ordered: Two RCA 5y3gt rectifier's, a quad of new production JJ el84's, two new production 12ax7 Tung Sols and a RCA 5965. Can't wait till they get here, should be fun to see what kind of difference they might make etc.... Dave
:)
 
Tweeker said:

Ha, we attempted something similar in our office microwave... using a piece of pencil graphite (among other things) in a vertically-placed Bawls Guarana bottle. It generally would flash brilliantly, produce some foul smoke and gasses, then whatever conductive object we were nuking would fall over and melt a hole into the glass. Arguably, CDs and DVDs provide better microwave entertainment :smash:

Perhaps the most impressive microwave oven disaster I've witnessed (indirectly) occurred at my university's library. We had been evacuated due to a fire alarm. Upon returning a few hours later, I walked downstairs to the lounge area only to discover the microwave shelf was wrapped in "Police line: Do not cross" tape and the microwave was bulged out in every direction with the door hanging open. The interior was black and foul, with the remainder of an aluminum Chef Boyardee can shattered inside! :hot:

Back on-topic, I suspect those JJ's will be excellent!
 
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