How Lovely are Thy Components
As the years pass, you tend to collect a lot of lovely components which, unfortunately, never come to any use.
I was once planning to build a 2 kilowatt audio amplifier with electron tubes, and got myself a terribly large
high voltage transformer for the power supply. In the mid 80's it was very popular in audio circles to go back
to the electron tubes. The real hi-fi buffs, the audio pro's (the Golden Ears) had decided that tubes sounded “better”
than transistors.
Behold these beautiful electron tubes. They
are the size of little footballs, intended for kilowatt radio transmitters. Displayed like this they look ravishing,
but that is nothing compared to how nice they would look mounted on a polished chassis, in moody lighting, with
filaments glowing orange and anodes glowing blue. The biggest tubes are PHILIPS TB 4/1250 (1.25 kW power
dissipation), the somewhat smaller ones are PHILIPS QB 3,5/750 (750 W power dissipation), and the smallest
tube is a 3E29, a double pulse triode intended for pulsing microwave oscillator tubes.
The transformer to the right delivers some 2 kV
0.5 A and was intended for the audio amplifier mentioned above. The reddish transformer in the middle delivers
33 volts and a lot of amps. I have set fire to many a nail with it; galvanised iron nails burn like torches. It
could also be used for arc welding. The long, black thing is a linear kilowatt potentiometer (Sandblom och Stohne,
135 W, 1,7 A) intended for dimming the lights in theatres, cinemas and similar
places the brutal way, connected in series with the lamps.
Other extreme components are these variable
capacitors, taken out of the Motala (Sweden) long-wave transmitter, about 30 and 40 cm in length. The grey plate
to the left is a 15 kV 1.5 nanofarad high voltage capacitor, that can stand as much as 75 kVA high
frequency loading. What on Earth would I use it for?
Maybe that's a part of every true hobbyist's life; the projects you never finished?
Many, many years
ago I got these two, old German electron tubes, triodes made somwhere around the beginning of the 20:th century.
I presume they are completely unique, two gems from the early days of radio technology. (Keep in mind that Lee
de Forest invented the triode in 1906.) The round one is one of the earliest ever made, somewhere around 1906,
with a filament voltage of 3.1 volts and a filament current of 0.53 amps. The anode voltage was typically
30 volts, and was not to exceed 60 volts. It is handwritten on a label glued to the tube base. Unfortunately
the filament is broken. The straight tube is made in 1908 at the Huth company, is named “Huth Sparlampe” and has
a filament voltage of 2 volts, and a filament current of 70 mA. This tube is working, but my project
buiding a one-tube receiver with it, was never finished.
Behold these beautiful electron tubes. They
are the size of little footballs, intended for kilowatt radio transmitters. Displayed like this they look ravishing,
but that is nothing compared to how nice they would look mounted on a polished chassis, in moody lighting, with
filaments glowing orange and anodes glowing blue. The biggest tubes are PHILIPS TB 4/1250 (1.25 kW power
dissipation), the somewhat smaller ones are PHILIPS QB 3,5/750 (750 W power dissipation), and the smallest
tube is a 3E29, a double pulse triode intended for pulsing microwave oscillator tubes.
