Your Nicest, Rarest or Strangest tube

[Netlist]

Working on an old Fender these days, I had to dive in my tube archives and found some real old, odd, and funny tubes.
The idea came up of posting a picture of them.
Just to conserve all that old (and new) beauty,
this thread is made for all of us who also want to dig up some
nice tubes and post a picture of it.

I have plenty of them and maybe later I’ll take some pictures from different ones.

/Hugo - again feels the glow in his eyes...

 

[planet10]

845 not beffy enuff?

dave

 

[planet10]

And a pr of diodes to rectifier the 2 KV

dave

 

[planet10]

These are just cool looking (my favorite Martian tubes)

dave

 

[planet10]

This one is just big...

dave

 

[planet10]

This one was just a happy accident...

dave

 

[planet10]

a family from a 1932 Westinhouse radio

dave

 

[Rino odorico]

Now that's what I call cool!

Hey all, sorry...I don't have any pictures to post (I would still call myself a newbie). But I just had to reply to say what a great thread!

Good show!

Rino

 

[Sch3mat1c]

Whoa, how'd I miss this thread? 😎 🙂

Klystron:

Tim

 

[Guiness]

Largest mercury rectifier I have seen...

This tube has so much mercury it covers the glass and has a huge pool that moves around the tube when you turn it.

 

[planet10]

Someday i'd like to have enuff experience to build this little R2D2 twin pentodes into a stero PP amp.

dave

 

[Netlist]

Someday i'd like to have enuff experience to build this little R2D2 twin pentodes into a stero PP amp.

dave

You seem to have a whole museum of tubes.
Here are some broadcasting tubes; they are not mine.
/Hugo - Hopes the picture is not copyrighted.

 

[Netlist]

And here some industrial ones:

 

[planet10]

You seem to have a whole museum of tubes.

Most of those pictured came from a single stash. Early on in my learning about tubes (and becoming a professional eBay seller) i ran into 5 boxes of tubes at an antique store. The pr of 211s & 845s paid for the boxes (& a nice profit) and i had an array of interesting tubes left over.

dave

 

[ultrachrome]

newbie question

What makes the tube glow? I'd like to collect some tubes but I thought it would be neat to set them up statically but power them just to make them glow.

 

[fdegrove]

X-MASS TREE?

Hi,

What makes the tube glow?

For most tubes that would be the heater.
Toriated Tungsten often shines bright enough to double as a bedlamp.

Cheers,😉

 

[karma]

the filamint. or a nice blue haze if the tubes are gassy.

dang my tubes are do for a changen my getter is brown

 

[Gunders]

Here's a picture of my nicest tube. It's an old tube I found at school and it's now a part of my collection.

 

[Gunders]

I have one more picture of the same tube who I would like to post.....

 

[stokessd]

How about an acorn tube (used for RF), I scanned it myself on my flatbed scanner and cleaned it up. I use it a lot as an icon etc...

Sheldon