How long has it been since I purchased this thing? Looks like they have since come out with a 6 and soon to be nxt model of tube tester.
Anyway, sitting here on my bum after eating a way to much crappie, hush puppies, taters, and slaw and this thing started staring me in the face. Thought I had everything but no, will have to wait on a usb to rs232 ftdi converter before I can test this stage and proceed onward.
So, all you guys that need tubes measured, maybe I’ll get this thing going in a couple weeks.
… then one more tiny step. This is the heater section. Had to order more solder tips. Is there a care and/or what are good solder tips vs bad ones write up somewhere? It’s a generic ebay solder station, probably some kind of hakko copy.
I have been using a Weller WE1010 solder station with all the standard tips. Had it for about 2-3 years now and it seems to work very well. Gets up to temperature fast, gives me a good flow, and is very easy to change tips on the fly. Much better than my previous temperature controlled station, which was horrible, and took forever to heat up. The tips were hollow core types and were very difficult to remove. I destroyed 3 pencils just changing tips. The Weller WE1010 tips are solid core and slide in and out quickly.
The only thing I do not like about the Weller WE1010 is that it does not have a backlite display. So it is very difficult to read the temperature display off-axis. I plan to modify it to fix this problem.
Well, wasted time working all that metal for the ‘tube cubes’. The plasma makes for fast and easy cutting but it gives no idea if the metal is super hard. Things went slower than normal cleaning up the cuts, which kind of got me wondering what was going on. Normal drill bits don’t even make a scratch in the stuff. Back to the dumpster I suppose.
Was shooting for something similar to this where each tube pin/base type has its own ‘test block’, but aesthetically more like an old set of wooden alphabet blocks you had as a kid, sans a metal top with pinouts and tube socket mounted. Thinking this might avoid the rats nest of wires trying to connect a bunch of tube bases in series on one small panel, maybe reduce noise from close adjacent wires, easy to add more tube bases later, and help me connect the right output pins to the right input pins.
