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For most of them I suspect it stopped being profitable sometime in the 80s. The small operators would have to compete with the OEM and big rebuilders like Channel Master, and as sets became disposable there were less and less people willing to have tubes rebuilt. There were several companies selling complete rebuild setups back in the 60s/70s, catering to TV repair shops, but I've browsed through the classifieds in electronics magazines from the later 70s and there were a lot of them for sale. I suspect a lot of those small operators never broke even, some may have never succesfully rebuilt a crt. Now, how would a rebuilder survive until 2012? The only real customer seems to be the government and maybe some industrial users. Let's say you are a one man operation, like Hawkeye was. If you wanted to make even a modest living (say, $30k/year) look at how many tubes you would have to rebuild. There is no way hobbyists could sustain you.
Video Display Corp is still rebuilding, correct? But they say they won't do vintage tubes. I wonder how much money it would take to change their minds? Looking at the kind of money being spent to rebuild 15GP22's, I wonder if that wouldn't change somebodies mind?
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Bryan
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