Tube Brands
 

My project for the past couple of weeks has been going through boxes and boxes of tubes... cleaning, testing, discarding, and sorting. Many of the boxes were rotted... some eaten up by silverfish. Also involved is the amount of dirt and bug droppings in the bottom of the boxes.

I didn't really think it was going to take me so long to go though these. I thought I would have this knocked out in a couple of days. Well, I was wrong! Typically, I allow a tube to warm up for 8-10 minutes in the tester. Many times, grid leakage doesn't show up for several minutes. Since I've started this, it seems on average that I end up discarding 1 in 4 tubes.

The majority of the tubes are typical brands such as Tung-Sol, RCA, General Electric, Zenith, Motorola, Philco. Every now and then, I come across typical "house brand" tubes (Silvertone, Truetone, Airline).

Now and then, I come across brands that might be considered by some to be uncommon. Some of these, I have never heard of. Perhaps they were cheesy brands from overseas. Below are photos of brands that I am not used to seeing.

So far, my favorite off-brand is SHIELD. After being in this hobby for 20 years, this is the first time I have found this brand. I made this my favorite because of their logo... which is pretty cool looking. So far, I've come across about a half-dozen Shield tubes. Pictured below is a 5Y3, 1B3, 6CB6, and 35W4.

Sylvania is by no means an off-brand, but this is the first time I've come across Sylvania "Industrial" tubes. I've dug up a small hand full of these. Pictured below is a 6SN7 and a 6AU6.

After that, we have FoMoCo (Ford Motor Co.). I found 4 of these. They did not say Philco on them anywhere.

Wilcox Gay... name seemed familiar so I looked it up. They were in business till the early 60's... making tape recorders, record recorders, and other typical consumer electronics.

ZALYTRON... WOW... just pull a weird name out of your ass and put TRON on the end, and BOOM.... a new brand is born! I dig the green box! I have a 12AT7 and a 6BH8.

GENERAL ELECTRONICS.... Think maybe someone was trying to be like General Electric??? Well, I've never heard of General Electronics, but, I did find one red-base 6SN7 in the bunch. It would seem they dealt with the nicer things in life if they were selling red-based tubes.

WG & Co.... it didn't occur to me till just now... as I was typing this... WG & Co. is likely an older logo for Wilcox Gay.

Oh yeah,,, the blue box in the background is branded MYTRON Electronics. Like I said... put TRON on the end of anything and you'll have another brand!

Anyone else have any not-so-common of off-brand tubes?

One more....

This isn't off-brand, but this is the first time I found this....

Someone put address labels on their tubes. What a cool idea for easy advertisement.

Now, being that these tubes were acquired here locally from a business, I wonder about the trip these two tubes made and how they got to being here in Texas... because the address label is from Bishops Sales in Washington.

SHIELD was a brand name used by Olson Electronics from Akron, Ohio. They sold surplus and some new items that had their brand name. Obviously, the tubes labeled "SHIELD" were not made by them. They were re-branded and could have been from Japan or the US.

I've got quite a number in my tube cashes Webcor, Dumont-Emerson and Hitachi most predominantly come to mind, but it has been awhile since I had a need to go rummaging through the unsorted unboxed tubes I have.

I have somewheres a 12AT7 that says "American Airlines", and another tube that has "FAA" on it. Though I don't think that FAA is the federal agency. You undoubtedly have seen "Standard Brand" tube boxes, they sold surplus and maybe recycled tubes...

American Airlines?? Wow... that would be something you wouldn't find in a typical tube caddy!

Yes, I ripped through a lot of Standard Brand boxes in the last week. What was a recycled tube? Was that just a nicer way of saying used?

WG&CO is Wells Gardner, maker of many private label products.
Sylvania Industrial was a line sold at Olsons, as well as Akrad, later to be Shield.
Zalytron was a firm that sold, self service tube checkers and furnished the tube stock, under contract.
Mytron, Micro and a few others were tube recyclers, that sold used, war surplus and rejects from the major tube suppliers.
If you look at the back pages of the older issues of Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics, they had ads, that stated tubes for 3 for $1.00. We bought some and some were a bargain.

Akrad... okay that makes sense. I have a couple of tubes that was hard to make out the name. The letters are green, and look as if they were painted on by hand with a small brush.

Was the Sylvania Industrial line built more like military tubes?

Couple more perhaps re-brands from my dusty bins; Cornell and Delta.
jr

Sylvania "industrial" tubes appear to be pretty much standard tubes, but labeled and sold for industrial use, so as to avoid excise taxes on consumer goods.

Their high reliability line were called Sylvania "Gold Brand", which carried type numbers beginning with "GB-" GB-5814, etc. Distinctive gold colored markings, and heavy duty construction.

The General Electronics 5691 or 5692 is a neat find. Never saw one of those, and wasn't aware that they ever made them, but it makes sense. They were a Paterson, NJ based outfit which fairly blatantly produced knockoffs of other maker's designs (particularly Eimac and RCA), and sold almost exclusively to the military, underbidding those companies which actually did original research and product development. I'm willing to bet that tube was sold as spare parts for the SAGE system, which was one of the largest applications for those "special red" types originally designed by RCA.

Here's a couple more.... the one on the left being another TRON brand. This one says Reliable SELECTRON Tubes.

The one on the right is branded TEN. That's all that was on it. I was thinking it might have come out of a foreign radio.

The FOMOCO tube looks like a dealer item like what would be found in an old FORD car radio perhaps?

SR

I've got lots of Formoco as well as Delco's that I've aquired over years, rebrands of course.
As for the tube marked "Ten", Japanese manufactured, don't believe anything like a stand alone but I do recall seeing those in Panasonic units.

According to a Motorola service manual, Ford motor company handled the warrantee repair claims on Motorola built radios, where Motorola handled the claims for their radios built for Chrysler, AMC, International truck, Jeep ETC.
Evidently, Ford bought their radios "AS-IS" and covered the repairs themselves.
Tubes stamped FOMOCO, should have a letter stamped next to the logo, stating who made the radio. :scratch2:

Interesting. There is a letter B to the left. Codes on the tube appear as follows on a 6X4...

322-1
5-18
B

This morning I came across a 6GH8A by Mitsubishi. Was the 6GH8A ever used in items other than TV sets? This one MUST have come out of a television.... it was pretty weak.

I often see Delco tubes... I even have a late-30's Delco radio. Sams shows that Delco had about 4 television chassis back around 1949/1950. In the past week, I've found a few Delco 6AU6's.