Warning meters in 300,000 homes could stop working

I have had to separate peak and off peak supplies that have been combined using Henley blocks.

One of them was a house with an electric storage AGA cooker.

It was dangerous and the customer had big electric bills, 

Just had a customer ask me to connect their peak and off peak supply tails together because the meter fitter refused to do it. Not been to site yet to do the work, and there may be a complication. But surely combining the the two feeds should be part of the meter fitters job, I am going to have to cut the seal on the fuse and probably the meter to complete the task.

Well bigger transmitter valves often look a bit hand assembled - the attached data sheet is an amusement only  and is for a modest 12kW CAM3 triode of a pre-historic design, with bright emitter tungsten cathode. Newer ones are thoriated. Apparently, as all the useful bits are inside the water/vapour cooled anode, which is made of metal, not glass they get X-rayed before being used to verify the cathode and the grid are concentric within the anode.
Even the cathode heater supply is fairly serious - hundred plus amps is not uncommon.

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Hello Mike:

It should also be noted that some transmitter tubes were also "hand made" by a glass blower, using Silica glass (pure SiO2) not lower temperature glass.

I had the opportunity a couple of times, to see the glass blower make these tubes envelopes..  

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay FL

Hello Mike:

I must admit that I never worked on the big Transmitter tubes (made for Marconi usually designated with a CAT number- CAT6 ) however we used similar tubes for providing RF heading when making regular receiving and audio tubes. At one time one of my jobs was a to start up these caged RF systems..

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay FL .

Well, I beg to differ, having worked along side both some folk who were able to successfully re-cathode a couple of argon ion laser tubes that the US manufactures assured us could not be done, opening up and re-sealing and annealing  a glass water jacket like a big Liebig condenser,  and also having seen the dedicated vacuum devices built for Alice - the UK one at Daresbury - That is not to be confused with  the one with the same moniker at CERN, which had a really substantial RF-line with provision to alter the phase for energy recovery - allowing removal of energy from the particles on each lap, or acceleration, at the flick of a switch, to reduce the induced radiation one would get from letting unused bunches of particles  crash land.
Then in the 'company' leagues rather than just teams of academics or  specialists, we have EEV == E2V , the only place I have seen so many operational glass lathes in one place. ..

We have the skills to do all sorts in the UK. We may lack the organization or the will-power.
Mike

Mike.

Hello Mike:

I really doubt that anybody in the UK has the ability to reneck (you called it re-cathoding) the water cooled transmitter tubes(valves). Many had tungsten filaments not coated/nickle cathodes.

By the way one of the jobs I had in my youth was renecking CRT,s.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay FL 

Going off topic a bit. 

I am listening to the news today about VE Day and some of the old BBC News reports are being played.
In 1979/80 Alvar Lidell, one of the BBC WW2 news reporters, moved into a local farmhouse with the farmers' mother who was caring for him. I sat and had lunch in the middle of a working day with Alvar Lidell, my dad and a carpenter who worked for my dad.
That's one of those odd unforgetable moments in life talking to Alvar Lidell about all the people he had met before, during and after the war, including Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Stalin.

youtu.be/-bMG8UW5sFo

Hello Andy:

According to my book "The Saga of Marconi Osram Valve on Page 197 it highlights Droitwich running at a Frequency of 200 kHz (1500 Wavelength ) Power 150 Kw  with an opening date of October 1934.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

Keeping things like that going are more a question of need/demand and perhaps political will power. The sort of folk that make elements for particle accelerators and electron microscopes (and we have both in Britain) would be perfectly capable of making (or re-cathoding ) transmitter valves- the diagrams are available, - if anything it's not even that fiddly compared to making, say, a laser tube. The real problem is that nostalgia does not pay, and longwave, and medium wave to an extent, are quite expensive to run, and worse, at least in the UK, are not protected from the rise of interference from switching power supplies, ADSL and so on, and are almost unusable in some built up areas.

Mike.