Vacuum Tube Problems in Vintage Electronics

Video Transcript

This is Laren Parker with Expert Village and we've been talking about how to maintain, take care of and diagnose problems with audio electronic equipment. One of the tricks and I'm just looking at this vacuum tube right here, because it reminds me of circumstances where I've certainly been out of my league as knowing exactly when you're out of your league. It's fairly easy to go through and take an old radio and look for the oil capacitors and see if there are any leaks, take those oil and paper capacitors and replace them with electrolytic capacitors or modern capacitors of the same value. Sometime when you're dealing with circuitry that gets a little but more complex, then it's good to know when you've reached your threshold. One area is vacuum tubes; I know that when I first starting doing electronics I had no idea what was going on with vacuum tubes. Now I'm actually quite good with them but one of the issues with vacuum tubes is they require quite a lot of power. There are specialists who usually take care of vacuum tubes. If you suspect that it's probably a tube problem within your equipment and you try swapping out a tube or something like that and it doesn't quite do the trick, it's probably best to go to somebody who used to dealing with voltage supplies of three hundred volts which is an odd for those things. Really just try the simple obvious things because what I find is that most people are simply afraid to even look. If you open something up, be sure you can put it back together, don't damage things and if it's nothing really obvious to you, then start consulting with somebody. A good way to do that for starters is look on the Internet for almost any piece of vintage equipment, there?s going to be a use net group or a wiki or some kind of society on the Internet that's trading messages about that piece of equipment and just open up your mouth and say, "Hey I've got a vintage Collins radio and I opened it up. Nothing short circuited, nothing looks bad but it sounds like this. I guarantee you that about twenty or thirty guys from somewhere in the world are going to respond to you and say hey have you tried this or have you tried that and they'll give you suggestions and even pictures and even diagrams and information so that you can take your learning further and fix your own equipment.

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