Tube Brands

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Charlie

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?

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.