I'm looking to buy a lot of vacuum tubes on an auction, but I have much idea about what this tubes can be used. I know that you cant say the model of each tube, but perhaps you can help-me identifing the use of any tube on the photo. I pretend to use in audio amplifiers, but I wanna know to what use they can be used beyond of audio purposes. Thank you for read 
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I don't see many damper diodes. I see many high voltage rectifiers from old TV sets. Damper diodes can be used in audio amps. HV rectifiers are useless! There may be a few, very few useful tubes, but I wouldn't buy these.....Even for free the shipping is probably more than the tubes are worth.
At one point I was given nearly 2K tubes loose in boxes - literally a couple of dozen sweater boxes full from a similar operation. Ultimately I ended up sorting through the lot and found about 100 tubes that were worth keeping, all used, the rest were taking up space or were bad. I put them out on trash day and they disappeared long before trash pick up. A few weeks later I got a call from a neighbor as to whether I would be interested in purchasing some tubes, when I got there it was all I could do to keep from smirking - he was offering me the tubes I had just thrown away.
I'm looking for tubes like 6bq5, 12au7/12ax7, 6ca7 to test the amplifiers that I make here... Currently I'm making a vox ac30, and I will need 1x 12au7 and 2x el84/6bq5 (at least)... There is a photo from amplifier on attachment...
I dont have much money, and here where I live, vacuum tubes, power/output transformers, chassis, is a kind expensive component.
For example, if you take look on "mercadolivre.com.br", you can find one used el84 by something like 30R$ + shipment (around 15R$), so, I'll spend 45R$ with one used tube. Well, if you go to ebay, is not hard to find a pair of used el84 by 8 or 10 U$ (1 dollar = 2.03R$) + shipment... The problem on buy there, is the paypal. I dont have credit card to this, and paypal needs it. Other problem is the shipment, take almost 2 months to pass by the "alfandega" (custom house?).. They do that because, by the law I can buy a max of 50U$ outside the country (not including countries that are on Mercosul), and If I buy more that it, I'll have to pay 60% of the price in taxes...
As you can see, work here with tubes is hard, if you dont have much money to invest, this is why I always looking by some lots of old tubes, or anything else about, that can cost to me something that I can pay...
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When I was a teen, I hung out with this real old guy at his TV repair shop (he was older than my dad - maybe 45. He would get TVs in for repair that, upon examination, were beyond economic repair. The owners would get the bad news and he'd have to put the old TV down. All of the tubes would go into one of his big five gallon buckets based on the pin configuration. Later when he needed a good used tube he could prowl around in the bucket and pick out several and test a few until he had a good one. The point being that all of the tubes in the buckets were untested and the vast majority were probably about shot.
I have to think this practice was typical. When you see a large lot of used tubes, please consider this scenario a possibility. Also consider that used tubes that tested well were often placed into a "correct" tube box. Why not, what else are you going to put them in? When somebody inherits grampa junk, he may happen onto some of these and think they are new. Why wouldn't he? I've open up boxes like that to discover tubes that have obviously been in service.
My advice is to only buy used tubes from knowlegable people you trust or in person after testing on a tester you trust.
. He would get TVs in for repair that, upon examination, were beyond economic repair. The owners would get the bad news and he'd have to put the old TV down. All of the tubes would go into one of his big five gallon buckets based on the pin configuration. Later when he needed a good used tube he could prowl around in the bucket and pick out several and test a few until he had a good one. The point being that all of the tubes in the buckets were untested and the vast majority were probably about shot. I have to think this practice was typical. When you see a large lot of used tubes, please consider this scenario a possibility. Also consider that used tubes that tested well were often placed into a "correct" tube box. Why not, what else are you going to put them in? When somebody inherits grampa junk, he may happen onto some of these and think they are new. Why wouldn't he? I've open up boxes like that to discover tubes that have obviously been in service.
My advice is to only buy used tubes from knowlegable people you trust or in person after testing on a tester you trust.
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You are lucky....an old friend from high school gave me over 100,000 tubes. That was nearly 10 years ago. After paying rent to store them for 10 years, I have finally managed to look through all the boxes and sell, give away or toss most of them. I still have about 10K of tubes left in my house. Talk about a low WAF!
Before the usual emails....no I am not giving away any of the usual audio tubes. I keep those.....some of the 2000 6AL5's were used for target practice (hard to hit the little guys) and the 1000 6AK5's went to a military radio guy.
I thought about wiring about making a tube version of Nelson Pass's beast of 1000 J-fets until I figured out what the sockets cost.
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