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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Artisanal vacuum tubes are a thing.[1] There's some interest in this from the vinyl record and overpriced tube amp crowd. There are even people who rebuild old CRTs for early TVs.[2] It's a lot of work.

[1] http://hackaday.com/2014/11/21/artisanal-vacuum-tubes-hackad... [2] http://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_rebuild.html

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Almost as cool as artisinal lightbulbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmLp9Mn-5rg

There's no vacuum in a Nixie Tube!

That being said, it would be nice if classic tubes of yesteryear can be remade efficiently. Especially for antique radio enthusiasts.

Why do you say there's no vacuum? That's one of the steps in the videos.

Technically, at the end of the process, the resulting tube's gas pressure is high enough to be called "low pressure" rather than, say, "rough", "medium", or "high vacuum".

Uh, what?

Production involves pumping down to high vacuum, heating to degas, and then refilling with neon/argon at low pressure. Granted the production tube isn't at high vacuum, but it's not equivalent to ambient.

When they fill it with gas, wouldn't you say it is no longer a vacuum?

No theoretical reason why r couldn't be done, I think the more common guitar amp tubes are even in commercial production in China (and supposedly they've improved the robustness too). Bit of a niche market though.

glasslinger on YouTube has been experimenting with making some of the more unusual tubes too: https://youtu.be/BXAjspPLzRQ

This entire class of technology was universally known as "vacuum tubes" for a good reason.

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