Subject: GLOWBUGS digest 354

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 15:37:04 -0600 (CST)

GLOWBUGS Digest 354

Topics covered in this issue include:

  1) Re: Crystal Etching and Ammonium Bifluoride, one more point
	by "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
  2) Re: Crystal Etching and Ammonium Bifluoride
	by Doug <[email-masked]>
  3) [Fwd: Valves/Tubes Web Page]
	by Conard Murray <[email-masked]>
  4) Re: 6BM8 .jpg file (URL correction
	by john <[email-masked]>
  5) Re: 6BM8 .jpg file
	by "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
  6) Re: 6BM8 .jpg file
	by "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
  7) Re: Ain't that AES catalog grand!
	by "Robert M. Bratcher Jr." <[email-masked]>
  8) Re: Transformers available
	by "Robert M. Bratcher Jr." <[email-masked]>
  9) 6BM8 Rig
	by Dave Hutchison <[email-masked]>
 10) Re: 6BM8 Rig
	by "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
 11) Re: 6BM8 / ECL82 group
	by Bob <[email-masked]>

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 13:43:56 +0000
From: "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked] (Larry Kayser), [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Crystal Etching and Ammonium Bifluoride, one more point
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

HEY! It's a reply from AF4K!

Larry makes a god point here guys.

I used to work in a crystal factory and here is roughly how the 
process worked there:

I worked for Cathodeon Crystals in Linton, Cambs. England around 1970
(Gosh that was ONLY 26 years ago!) and stayed there for a few months helping 
to make the precious rocks for the radio world! 

I used to commute over 20 miles each way in a Morris series-Z "Half 
hundred-weight van" with a 900 c.c. sidevalve engine, that hd a 
maximum speed of 40 m.p.h. (no tickets) and had to use 40 weight 
tractor oil in the engine due to leaking oil.  The first thing that they showed me 
was a very immpressive process for pumping air out of the hermetically sealed
crystal units, and these were all either HC-6/U size or the little 
tiny ones that were in vogue in the 70s and 80s. What was cool was 
that they made SOME HC-6/U size units with aGLASS case! Yes the 
entire thing was made of clear glass. I don't know who was buying 
those glass xtals or what they used them for. One could only guess.

The fabrication of crystals at Cathodeon Crystals ran something like 
this:

Step 1 involved the reciving in of the raw crsytal which as I 
remember was a man-made rock about 8-10 inches long, perhaps longer 
and about 1-2" in section.

I think there was a step here that I was less familiar with in which 
the large raw crystal was attached to a laterally reciprocating 
machine that ground the top edge perfectly flat using a grinding 
wheel with a mysterious white fluid tat ran over the wheel all of the 
time to keep it cool. It took about 5 minutes at a time to run this 
machine, and the operator sat on a chair watching it, and getting
hypnotized by the motion. They would often fall asleep and we had 
great fun with these folks in the factory! One white haired elderly 
gentleman with a red bow tie(!) from eastern Europe did this job and 
he was known to take 40 winks in the afternoons, so we would 
put a metal pan on the side of the moving table of the machine and it 
wold eventually fall off making a terrible clatter and wake him up, 
much to the delight of all of the factory workers nearby!

These raw crystals were then attached to a base plate in a computerized saw 
after being x-rayed to get the ANGLE of the crystalline structure inside 
the rock. They were then lined up on the base plate in the saw, a 
carbide-edged rotary blade came down onto the rock and sliced it up 
like sliced bread! The individual slices were then measured with a 
micrometer to make sure that they were the right thickness that was 
needed for the order. They were also x-rayed once again and the angle 
to the nearest 1/100th of a degree was recorded on the paperwork that 
travelled with the batch of crystals.

The next step was a lot of fun. They would take the crystal blanks 
and put them in a device called a "lapping machine" - which had a 
set of cog-like wheels that ran around inside two concentric circular 
gears, the outer one rotating. These smaller cogs each had six holes 
in them that could hold the crystals. The cogs came in many different 
thicknesses depending on the desired final thickness and the 
beginning thickness of the blanks. Once the crystals were in place, 
they would be run FIRST in a slurry of thick grease that contained an 
abrasive component. The operators had charts for how many minutes to 
run them for a desired shift in thickness. The COARSE adjustment was 
made first, and you could soon make a large difference in those 
jewels! Operators were given a target thickness. Typically about 60 
blanks would be whirring around in the lapping machine at any given 
time of the day. They had a number of these machines and they ran all 
day long. The final step in the lapping process was a set of 
specialized  lapping machines that were connected to the ANTENNA 
TERMINALS of some EDDYSTONE receivers! As they turned inside the 
machine, the grinding process would set up enough vibration of the 
crystals that it generated NOISE In the receivers and you could HEAR 
the crystals as the frequency shifted. Of course they would not ALL 
be at the exact same frequency so you got a kind of wideband noise!

At several steps along the way, things could go wrong! The lapping 
machines would sometimes go "UP!" That means it would all fly apart 
and you had a mess of crstals and nasty grease everywhere and had to 
pick your way through it all and start over.

Another problem was with "outliers" - some of the crystal blanks 
would wind up being too far off from their target thickness at the 
early stages or too far off frequency near the end. Often these ones 
had to be tossed out. Anyone here live near a crystal factory?? he he!!

After that the FINAL fine tuning was done by spraying GOLD onto the 
crystals, and that is how this plant did their electrode attachment. 
They put gold on the corner of each side of the blank for an 
electrical connection, and if they needed to lower the frequency a 
tad, they just added a little bit more gold. Then the wirs were 
soldered on, the whole thing was mounted in a holder & hermetically 
sealed with the vacuum pump machine and out they went!

I enjoyed working there. It was a lot of fun. I met a lot of neat 
people, especially the girls! But that was long ago..

On 15 Nov 96, Larry Kayser wrote:

> Greetings:
> 
> I have a small point to add on the issue of using hydrofluoric acid
> in the etching of quartz crystals blanks.  The first point is to
> that extensive etching to move a long way as Barry suggest is
> inappropriate.  He adds that the acid attacks the edges with vigour,
> intuitively I can agree but I had never recognized this fact, there
> is however another problem.  The acid does not seem to uniformly
> etch the surface of the crystal.
> 
> My experience is that the remaining blank, after etching, may have
> up to a 1/1000 of an inch bias in thickness with just moving in the
> order of 5 khz or so.  I have one sense of the cause of this problem
> might be the need to agitate the crystal in the etchant.  My work
> has not solved this problem...
> 
> 
> Larry
> va3lk / wa3zia
> 
> 
********************************************************
*** 73 from Radio AF4K / G3XLQ in Gaithersburg, MD USA *
**  E-mail to:  [email-masked]                         *
*** See the great ham radio resources at:              *
**  http://www.mnsinc.com/bry/                         *
********************************************************

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:13:30 -0700
From: Doug <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Crystal Etching and Ammonium Bifluoride
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

Hi Barry...I sure have enjoyed your information on the "Flourides"...
truly informative.  Now, not being involved in Chemistry, I'd like to
offer what we did in the (distant?) past.  After grinding rocks, hoping
to hit the freq dead on...which almost never happened, we dipped the
crystal blank in Carbon Tetrachloride that we borrowed from an old fire
extinguisher.  I'm not even sure Carbon Tet is even available any more,
but we sure used bunches of it to clean relay contacts in the Telephone
Company.  When we phased it out due to it's nasty habit of showing up
in one's digestive organs, we went to Trichlorethane, which was supposed
to be less dangerous.  Would it be better to grind (or safer anyhow) and
then degrease the blanks with Trichlor?

I can see a feller might want to construct a small oscillator for test
of these little crystals...something cheap and dirty just to see if 
you are getting close to freq...hmmmm, a project in the making.

Take Care,

Doug Dunn, K7YD
Livingston, MT

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 02:38:54 -0600
From: Conard Murray <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [Fwd: Valves/Tubes Web Page]
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--------------25A454E37012
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello fellow filament fanatics!
This site looks promising. 
73 de Conard, ws4s

--------------25A454E37012
Content-Type: message/news
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

Path: news.campus.mci.net!news-out.internetmci.com!InternetMCI.com!panix!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!surfnet.nl!news.unisource.nl!xs4all!xs4all!tgale
From: [email-masked] ()
Newsgroups: rec.antiques.radio+phono
Subject: Valves/Tubes Web Page
Date: 14 Nov 1996 17:36:32 GMT
Organization: XS4ALL, networking for the masses
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: xs2.xs4all.nl
X-XS4ALL-Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 18:36:32 MET
Summary: data resource
Keywords: valves tubes
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #4

Good-day fellow radio enthusiasts. This is just a quick note to let
you know that I have started to set up a Web page with some valve/tube
information which I hope will be of help to those interested in restoring,
repairing or using valve/tube - based equipment. I have had a few positive
reactions to my first effort, but of course I welcome any good suggestions
and constructive criticism in order to improve the page, which I started
following a reply I was able to post to someone elses posted query.

The page should be accessible at: <http://www.xs4all.nl/~tgale/valves.html>

I find that most discussion in respect of this subject can be found
on the newsgroup <news:rec.antiques.radio+phono> but I thought I would
post this note to a couple of other groups where people might be
interested as well.

Regards, and 73's, F.C. Trevor Gale, G8GFH (resident in The Netherlands).

--------------25A454E37012--

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 07:51:20 -0500 (EST)
From: john <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Subject: Re: 6BM8 .jpg file (URL correction
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

At 03:26 PM 11/15/96 -0600, you wrote:
>Hello gang,
>
>I finally got around to posting a .jpg file of the 6BM8 rig I've been
>working on.  It will be found at    http://cosmosbbs.com/rac.jpg
 
        That was ALMOST right!  
        
        It's actually at: http://www.cosmosbbs.com/rac.jpg

        Best 73
        /john

+--------------------------------------------------------+
|John Brewer [email-masked]                        |
|WB5OAU/4             AMI #24                             |
|Vintage Gear web page: http://www.mindspring.com/~johnmb/|
+--------------------------------------------------------+

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 05:19:44 +0000
From: "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked] (Lee Richey)
Subject: Re: 6BM8 .jpg file
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

HEY! It's a reply from AF4K!

GREAT - now how about posting the schematic too?
That way a few more of us could build one too...
I think there are three of us out here that want to build basically 
the same rig, OR a 6U8 version of it.

On 15 Nov 96, Lee Richey wrote:

> Hello gang,
> 
> I finally got around to posting a .jpg file of the 6BM8 rig I've
> been working on.  It will be found at   
> http://cosmosbbs.com/rac.jpg
> 
> It is about 225k or so, so it will take a few minutes to down load.
> 
> The rig is built on a 5 x 7 pc board which mounts on the open side
> (bottom) of a 5 x 7 chassis.
> 
> The switches across the front of the pc board left to right are:
> 
>  Power
>  Spot (momentary)
>  Xtal select
>  Band (80/40)
> 
> The four trimmers are plate tune and load for 80 and 40 meters. The
> key jack is behind the 6BM8 and the rf jack is visible to the right
> of the key jack.  Notice the small pilot lamp to the left and near
> the base of the power transformer.  It is used as a "plate meter". 
> I use a 2 volt/60ma lamp.  Works very nicely.  I expect to mount it
> from the underside of the pc board somewhere between the spot switch
> and the transformer.  The power line cord exits behind the power
> transformer through the pc board.  The end result is that, except
> for mounting holes, no holes are needed in the chassis.
> 
> There are no high voltage AC/DC/RF points exposed.  
> 
> I am going to post a picture of the rig at K3RAC (club station)
> soon.  It will show the  6BM8 rig next to the SX-122 and T/R keyer I
> use.  The file will be same site with file name of k3rac.jpg.
> 
> 
> -Lee-    -WA3FIY-
> 
> http://www.radioadv.com
> 
********************************************************
*** 73 from Radio AF4K / G3XLQ in Gaithersburg, MD USA *
**  E-mail to:  [email-masked]                         *
*** See the great ham radio resources at:              *
**  http://www.mnsinc.com/bry/                         *
********************************************************

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 07:03:30 +0000
From: "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
To: john <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: 6BM8 .jpg file
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

HEY! It's a reply from AF4K!
On 16 Nov 96, john wrote:

> At 03:26 PM 11/15/96 -0600, you wrote:
> >Hello gang,
> >
> >I finally got around to posting a .jpg file of the 6BM8 rig I've
> >been working on.  It will be found at   
> >http://cosmosbbs.com/rac.jpg

John - I have to say that is  a GREAT looking little rig!
Is the top surface made of copper? PCB material or what?
You were smart to use small slider switches and small trimmer caps
to economize on space! Great innovative design. This photo file being 
on the web ought to stimulate the rest of us that are interested in 
constructing an ECL82 TX into action!

Bravo & 72.5 de G3XLQ / AF4K
Bry
********************************************************
*** 73 from Radio AF4K / G3XLQ in Gaithersburg, MD USA *
**  E-mail to:  [email-masked]                         *
*** See the great ham radio resources at:              *
**  http://www.mnsinc.com/bry/                         *
********************************************************

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 10:01:19 -0600
From: "Robert M. Bratcher Jr." <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Ain't that AES catalog grand!
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

At 12:31 PM 11/12/96 +0000, you wrote:
>
>Hi gang,
>
>Just got my very first AES catalog (learned about it here
>in the group). Wowsers, what a neat thing it is!
>
>Anyone here not having it should.  Call them at 1-800-820-5411
>if you don't already have a copy. VERY good deals on 
>our kinda stuff.
>
>
>Dave
>
>

I've kept all my AES catalogs for the last 7 years! They are interesting...

Robert M. Bratcher Jr.
E-mail to:
[email-masked]
Record collector, 8mm, super 8, 16 and 35mm Film collector.
I like old radio's too.
Collins, Hallicrafters, National & Hammurland are my Favorites!

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 10:01:26 -0600
From: "Robert M. Bratcher Jr." <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Transformers available
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

At 04:20 PM 11/13/96 +0000, you wrote:
>Oh Man!! You guys really hit a nerve with me on that one!!!!
>
>re>>An idea .... wind a hellatiously large coil under/over/beside the street
>>in front of your house. Wait for one of those goobers with the KW
>>bass-thumper earthquake-producing hear-it-at-a-mile audio systems to
>>drive by and let him have it with a 3500Hz tone. You might remagnetize
>>his speakers too.
>
>I've been wanting to try that for years! Those goobers really tick me
>off!!  I wonder if you could build a mobile unit for use in traffic!!
>
>
>73..........Glenn   N2BJG    [email-masked]

I my area (Houston) it seems to be young blacks with that loud boomy bass.
They put 10 or 12 inch woofers in the back with part in the trunk. Sure I
like heavy bass too with my oldies R&R but mine doesn't boom like others do.
But then I've got one of those woofer boxes in my Chevy S-10 PU as part of
the stereo system. Sounds great when cranked up but not boomy at all. I
don't play it loud all the time just during favorite songs.

Robert M. Bratcher Jr.
E-mail to:
[email-masked]
Record collector, 8mm, super 8, 16 and 35mm Film collector.
I like old radio's too.
Collins, Hallicrafters, National & Hammurland are my Favorites!

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 12:31:04 -0500
From: Dave Hutchison <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: 6BM8 Rig
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

I tried bringing up the jpg file listed in several e mails recently but
nothing was there...

Is there another e mail address other than www.cosmosbbs.com/rac.jpg?

73's

Dave Hutchison KW9U

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 10:34:03 +0000
From: "Brian Carling" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Subject: Re: 6BM8 Rig
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>

HEY! It's a reply from Bry, AF4K!

Hello there Dave. Well I got it ok!
Be SURE you are typing the address in correctly:
http://www.cosmosbbs.com/rac.jpg

I dunno what else to tell ya! It's a beauty! He really did a fine 
construction job.

Are you interested in building one yourself?

On 16 Nov 96, Dave Hutchison wrote:

> I tried bringing up the jpg file listed in several e mails recently
> but nothing was there...
> 
> Is there another e mail address other than
> www.cosmosbbs.com/rac.jpg?
> 
> 73's
> 
> Dave Hutchison KW9U
> 
********************************************************
*** 73 from Radio AF4K / G3XLQ in Gaithersburg, MD USA *
**  E-mail to:  [email-masked]                         *
*** See the great ham radio resources at:              *
**  http://www.mnsinc.com/bry/                         *
********************************************************

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 19:11:04 +0000
From: Bob <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: 6BM8 / ECL82 group
Message-ID: <19961116191102.AAA28710@LOCALNAME>

OK here Brian.  I got the JPEG and it look real nice.  Is the schematic
available electronically??

>Will you please drop me a reply a.s.a.p. and let me know that you got 
>this, and address your reply to the whole group. That way we will all 
>know that it is working!

73
KE4QOK 
Bob
136 Hermitage Rd.
Newport News, Va. 23606

------------------------------

End of GLOWBUGS Digest 354
**************************