Here is the deal. My wife has been in favor of killing Tubelab all together for the last few years, especially since it has lost money for the last three years. Since the virus lockdown she lost her job and rarely leaves the house. Due to numerous home renovation posts by her younger friends on Farcebook we have embarked on several similar endeavors including a makeover of the entire back yard, so whenever the weather is acceptable I have been outside working. This leaves limited time for Tubelab.
The board house that has made all of the Tubelab boards since the first year has raised their prices. Lower board sales quantities have also raised per board costs, as have postal rate increases. On top of that the PCB house has screwed up 3 out of the last 4 board orders, so I have decided not go go back to them again....ever. This left me with no new boards, and a tentative agreement with Sherri to sell boards until stock is gone, then pull the plug on Tubelab.
In a last ditch Hail Mary 4th down pass attempt in the final seconds of the game (remember Fran Tarkenton?), I sent the TSE-II board files to a board house in China who quoted good prices and good results based on other users of this forum.
I got the boards back on Monday, built one and I am about half an hour from powering it up. Based on the results of some torture and high voltage testing, I may add these to the Tubelab stock, and consider ordering from them in the future.
The Unset prototype has not seen any power since the first week of the year, and I had decided to just post the design and let others run with it, as the agreement made between Sherri and I was to kill Tubelab. If the Chinese boards look good, I may revisit that proto, make a few small changes and get a few test boards made by them. This would be a single board design similar in size to the current TSE-II, capable of somewhere between 10 and 20 WPC, probably about 15. If it they look good, I will then decide what to do next.
As the weather improves I will probably have less daily Tubelab time, and a good bit of that is spent answering question via email and the forum, so things like the web site and better documentation will have to wait.
The board house that has made all of the Tubelab boards since the first year has raised their prices. Lower board sales quantities have also raised per board costs, as have postal rate increases. On top of that the PCB house has screwed up 3 out of the last 4 board orders, so I have decided not go go back to them again....ever. This left me with no new boards, and a tentative agreement with Sherri to sell boards until stock is gone, then pull the plug on Tubelab.
In a last ditch Hail Mary 4th down pass attempt in the final seconds of the game (remember Fran Tarkenton?), I sent the TSE-II board files to a board house in China who quoted good prices and good results based on other users of this forum.
I got the boards back on Monday, built one and I am about half an hour from powering it up. Based on the results of some torture and high voltage testing, I may add these to the Tubelab stock, and consider ordering from them in the future.
The Unset prototype has not seen any power since the first week of the year, and I had decided to just post the design and let others run with it, as the agreement made between Sherri and I was to kill Tubelab. If the Chinese boards look good, I may revisit that proto, make a few small changes and get a few test boards made by them. This would be a single board design similar in size to the current TSE-II, capable of somewhere between 10 and 20 WPC, probably about 15. If it they look good, I will then decide what to do next.
As the weather improves I will probably have less daily Tubelab time, and a good bit of that is spent answering question via email and the forum, so things like the web site and better documentation will have to wait.
No worries George, do what you gotta do for the best of you and your family. You'll always have support from the forum. No shame in adjusting your business model or even shutting down. I would think just cranking out your old products through Chinese PCB shops would eat up less time avoiding new development and leave more profit margin. As I mentioned, maybe try ALLPCB, they were unbelievably cheap for my group buy. The single sided boards did curl, however. The 4 layer boards were flawless.
I got these from JLCPCB. The are a bit darker in color that the US made boards, but otherwise identical. I fired this one up about 2 hours ago, cranked the line voltage up to 130 with a Variac, set the tubes into the "way too hot" zone at 28 watts per 15 watt 2A3, and let it play for 2 hours.....yes, it got HOT, good music, no issues. Bigger tubes, 300B's next.
Like I was Saying...Buy TubeLab
There's one good answer to George's "dilemma"; folks gotta buy his boards.
If you can afford it, BUY MORE BOARDS. Store 'em. Give 'em away. Will them to your handiest grandchild. Doesn't matter; gotta move them from George's house to YOUR house. Otherwise, Miss Sherri is gonna end up sailing 'em into the creek like Frisbees.
Remember what Herb Stein (famous economist, father of Ferris Bueller's Ben Stein) said:
"Something that can't go on forever, won't."
Life is merely a long struggle against ENTROPY of all shapes and sizes.
I'd add a pithy quote from Dylan Thomas, my very favorite Welsh alcoholic, but that's probably too much.
There's one good answer to George's "dilemma"; folks gotta buy his boards.
If you can afford it, BUY MORE BOARDS. Store 'em. Give 'em away. Will them to your handiest grandchild. Doesn't matter; gotta move them from George's house to YOUR house. Otherwise, Miss Sherri is gonna end up sailing 'em into the creek like Frisbees.
Remember what Herb Stein (famous economist, father of Ferris Bueller's Ben Stein) said:
"Something that can't go on forever, won't."
Life is merely a long struggle against ENTROPY of all shapes and sizes.
I'd add a pithy quote from Dylan Thomas, my very favorite Welsh alcoholic, but that's probably too much.
Surely I can put some UD boards to good use.
The thing holding me back until now has been the high shipping/handling/tax/import fees. I ordered something from the US one time and the additional costs were close to 50%
Fortunately I can afford that now.
Maybe a crazy question as I have no idea how this works: when you have boards being made in China, would it be possible to have them drop shipped straight to Europe? Saves inventory and double shipping?
Minimum number of boards of course.
The thing holding me back until now has been the high shipping/handling/tax/import fees. I ordered something from the US one time and the additional costs were close to 50%
Fortunately I can afford that now.
Maybe a crazy question as I have no idea how this works: when you have boards being made in China, would it be possible to have them drop shipped straight to Europe? Saves inventory and double shipping?
Minimum number of boards of course.
No, the current board stock is not threatened by her, or other forces. If I was to unplug Tubelab today, I would sell them until stock ran out. I also have no desire to pressure anyone into buying something that they do not need or want...unlike some people on the internet.
Your saying reminded me of things sailing. When Sherri was the manager of a warehouse complex we often got asked to clean out abandoned warehouses that were full of junk. We opened a warehouse full of well used 45 RPM records that had been worn thin by a hard life in a juke box. Most were disco, and many of those were in Spanish......they do fly like Frisbies, and make for decent shotgun targets. Did you know that no matter how hard you throw it, or where you aim, you can't hit a fast moving freight train with a 45 record.
I have run four other mail order electronics businesses, and one electronics design business, each was crafted to avoid conflict with my employment agreement at Motorola. All made money at some point, and withered with the changing times. SS50 bus "home computers" came in the 70's and went out in the early 80's. Satellite TV receiver, DIY dish kits, and other TV devices came in the 80's, and died in the late 90's when Motorola bought General Instruments and entered that market.
All of my DIY stuff as a kid used tubes because they were freely available everywhere. My "parts store" was the local landfill trash dump. I got a job at Motorola in 1972, and silicon was free, just by filling out a sample request form, so all my DIY stuff was silicon based.
I traded my first car for an old Scott tube stereo in the late 1980's. After some fixing, it kicked my Carver / Phase linear system right out of the rack, never to see power again. Within a year I was building tube stuff again.
Tubelab was an idea that sprung up in the late 1990's when I couldn't make tube amps fast enough. I made one, someone liked it, bought it, told their friends.....repeat. I had gone to a local board house for about 20 of what would eventually become the TSE board, to save the DIY of the board itself, a slow and less than optimum process. I had created some simple plans for people to DIY their own amps, since my target customers were mostly Motorola or IBM employees or were FAU students. They were technically minded, or knew tech type people. I was selling "board and plans" kits as I had done with several of my previous projects.
A lunch time discussion with some friends at Motorola led to the question, "Why don't you make a web site to sell boards, and post your plans"......Poof, Tubelab was born....almost.
Of the four of us who hatched this idea, I was the only one still a Motorola employee a year later. Two of the other three had left South Florida in search of employment since IBM and Motorola were in serious downsizing mode. This nearly killed Tubelab, and took out most of the customers too.
By 1996 the IBM plant where the PC was born and 10,000 people worked was empty and had been sold. Motorola closed its Boynton Beach plant in 2003, and it was demolished. I wound up back in the Motorola Plantation facility where I had started in 1973. It has since been sold.
Somehow Tubelab survived all of this, and was incorporated in 2005, but Sherri and I are the only people left involved in it.
At the risk of agitating somebody...
Kelly Johnson's first boss at the Lockheed "Skunkworks" supposedly said: "That SOB can SEE AIR."
I spent my last 12 years of "honest" employment doing Computational Fluid Dynamics, and I got so that I could anticipate sea-water, but I couldn't quite "see air".
However, I do know why you can't hit a fast-moving freight train with a frisbee'd 45:
The "boundary layer" around the train cars is quite likely quite thick, probably also DENSE (relative to the surrounding air) and moving at nearly the speed of the train.
A 40g disk flung into that soup is gonna literally bounce off.
PS: "CFD" stands for "Colors For Directors". Just tell me what you want the model to show...
Kelly Johnson's first boss at the Lockheed "Skunkworks" supposedly said: "That SOB can SEE AIR."
I spent my last 12 years of "honest" employment doing Computational Fluid Dynamics, and I got so that I could anticipate sea-water, but I couldn't quite "see air".
However, I do know why you can't hit a fast-moving freight train with a frisbee'd 45:
The "boundary layer" around the train cars is quite likely quite thick, probably also DENSE (relative to the surrounding air) and moving at nearly the speed of the train.
A 40g disk flung into that soup is gonna literally bounce off.
PS: "CFD" stands for "Colors For Directors". Just tell me what you want the model to show...
I got the version 2 prototype back on the bench today for some testing. I connected it to an Allied 6K7VG power transformer, which according to the specs printed right on it is too small for the job.
It is the brother (I bought 10 or 12 to make guitar amps back in 2004) of the transformer in my SSE which is still running after 17 years of my abuse which involves sucking 220 mA out of a 150 mA rated transformer. Yeah, it gets too hot to touch, and starts to smell funny after 8 hours of this abuse, but it doesn't fry. If it does, I still have 3 more still in their boxes from 2004.
So with $22 worth of tubes the amp makes 15 WPC at the edge of clipping into a 5K ohm OPT with 100 mA of idle current per channel and 463 volts of B+. The THD at this point is 2.47% at 15.15 watts.
Rewiring the OPT for a 2.5K ohm load, and cranking the current up to 130 mA per tube gets me 22 watts at 2.1%THD, but things get too hot at this level.
It is the brother (I bought 10 or 12 to make guitar amps back in 2004) of the transformer in my SSE which is still running after 17 years of my abuse which involves sucking 220 mA out of a 150 mA rated transformer. Yeah, it gets too hot to touch, and starts to smell funny after 8 hours of this abuse, but it doesn't fry. If it does, I still have 3 more still in their boxes from 2004.
So with $22 worth of tubes the amp makes 15 WPC at the edge of clipping into a 5K ohm OPT with 100 mA of idle current per channel and 463 volts of B+. The THD at this point is 2.47% at 15.15 watts.
Rewiring the OPT for a 2.5K ohm load, and cranking the current up to 130 mA per tube gets me 22 watts at 2.1%THD, but things get too hot at this level.
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Excellent news and great performance you are extracting from those “cheap” tubes.
I would be in favor of a single board similar in size to the TSE-II, limited output isn't a big deal to me. Also, SS power supply is a plus in my mind, if it doesn't take too much effort on your part, George.
My selfish hope is that this product comes to fruition. I'd be willing to pay double the going rate and wonder if other TubeLab fans would also be willing. Lower volume, higher price. I'm game.
