Congratulations on the effort. You took off with the ideas and support of the community and landed safely. Just passed your check ride. Nice to see a really great picture! Of course, it's understandable rebuilding 15GP22 that old might only last a month, a year, or maybe the next 50+ years. At least, knowledge and practical skills have been demonstrated. This is definitely worth celebrating !!!! :thmbsp:

Im speechless! Bravo gentleman!! This is truely an amazing breakthrough!

I was able to visit John and see it in person, very impressive picture indeed.

:yes:

Update: 11/21/09
 

Just a note to let you know we aren't sleeping on the job.

Over the past couple of weeks since our initial success, John and I have been collecting and preparing 15GP22 electron gun asemblies.

John removed, and contributed 4 gun assemblies from his crt stash, and I was able to contribute 3 from my stash.

Yesterday I finished the EDM processing of the last gun and all seven guns were shipped to the gun rebuilder for eventual instalation of new cathode assemblies and mounting on new stems.

We have ordered a second batch of stems from the stem manufacturer, and we have a production date of about December 15th.

We have instructed the gun rebuilder to rebuild 3 more guns and mount them on new stems. Those guns will be shipped to Scotty when finished. Scotty has 1 rebult gun in his possession already, so we will have a total of 4 guns on the next trip to Hawkeye. We have not set a date for that trip yet, but we are hopefull that it will happen in December.

We will be rebuilding 2 under vacuum 15G's and preparing a couple leakers for some High Vacuum leak experiments that we will be conducting with John Yurkon at his facility.

We are very excited to be working with John Yurkon. He is making available to us, High Vacuum scientific equipment at his facility, that will hopefully be able to tell us if sealing the leakers is feasable. By using the instrumentation in John Yurkon's lab, we should be able to determine if we are able to seal the crt's do a degree that will hold a long term vacuum. The only other way to determine if we can seal these tubes would be to actually rebuild and seal some tubes, and then wait to see if they leak. That could take anywhere from hours to many years. In John Yurkon's lab we should be able to detect the degree of leakage before and after we seal a tube, to determine if the sealing method we are using is successsful. John Yurkon works in an ultra high tech scientific facility that makes targets for use in a linear accellerator at the National Super Conducting Labratory in East Lansing Michigan. Here is a link to their web site. http://www.nscl.msu.edu/

We can't begin to thank John Yurkon enough for his assistance in this project. With John's help we should be able to determine if sealing the leakers is possible or not.

Bob

This is simply incredible!