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Gloden falcon? 1×3×6

Mud duck base

New Member
May 22, 2022
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0
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Picked up this amp with no tubes put 10 tubes in only one of the 3 light up any ides suggestions thanks
 

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I came to think of this amplifier as "a bridge too far".

The designer found the upper limits for this kind of design by going beyond them.

There was never a schematic diagram published for it. It used a seemingly-wrong combination of tube types. Had one pair of tubes in parallel, but each with a different type number. This is usually considered to be a bad idea.

Nobody ever offered to spend the money it takes to reverse-engineer a diagram. I had no incentive to bankroll that project myself.

Biggest hazard to doing that is the production of the thing could have been revised, making an early unit different from later ones. One diagram might not cover all the different engineering-change revisions.

A popular after-market modification has been to change the tube types used. The factory would use tubes with a 6.3-Volt heater. When those became progressively more scarce and expensive, there was an incentive to use the more-obscure types that have a higher heater voltage. 20LF6 and 30KD6 tubes were cheap for a while in the 80s and 90s. They were originally found in the lowest-priced tube-type color TV. When those all went to the landfill, these tubes just gathered dust in warehouses. Spare parts for TVs that would never be repaired. They were cheap until enough people 'discovered' them. By the early 2000s those type numbers had become expensive and rare like their 6-Volt cousins.

I unofficially declared this model to be a money pit decades ago. It's one of the few models we flat won't try to fix. And if yours has been modified to use oddball tubes, you could have blown out the heaters in some of the tubes you installed into it. Might want to find a tube tester and see if your new tubes still work. Or if they don't any more.

Or there could be other problems. Any tube-type linear that's around 40 years old will have other age and mileage issues on top of any problems with tubes. Filter capacitors go bad from age alone. Relays eventually develop wear-and-tear faults.

The only suggestion that comes to mind is find someone gullible enough to buy it.

73
 

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