Fair market value of VT-137?

sweet & juicy SE amp for 1626 Darlings and the 6L6 family

A historical reason why they may have copied the 1626

Postby EWBrown » Wed Aug 24, 2011 8:56 pm

I wonder if there is a Russian 1626 version out there, just like they made their versions of 6L6, 807 and 6BG6.


There well may be a Russian equivalent of the 1626, as they directly copied our WWII B-29s, into their Tupelov TU-4s, immediately after WWII, under direct and specific orders from Josef Stalin, to "duplicate and not innovate" our design. Even though the "Reds" politically hated us, they definitely respected our design engineers, and the aircraft and related equipment which they created.

The Russians referred to the project as "Dar Bozhie" which translates to " A Gift from God" as out B-29 was decades ahead of any of their technology.

Stalin's orders included copying everything on board, including the HF radios (AN/ART-13, ARC-5s, etc) directly, and one of the results of this which lasts to the 21st century, is the wide array of Russian copies of our WWII tubes.

How they got the four B-29s which they used as the models for their design, was that they allowed US aircraft to land near Vladivostok, only under emergency conditions, after bombing missions over Japan. (Russia was officially "neutral" in respects to Japan, until the end of WWII, then they briefly declatred a state of war on the weakened and defenseless nation) They eventually ended up with four B-29s, three intact and one was a belly-landing, but not too badly damaged.

Those four aircraft were their "Dar Bozhie" (which was a strange name in itself, as the USSR's official government policy was strictly anti-religion, at the time).

Therer is an interstting documentary covering this, in depth, which occasionally appears on the History Channel or the Military Channel, and there is an interesting book about this project, called "The Brick Bomber".

The only thing that the Russians could not duplicate was the large tires for the landing gear, as their rubber vulcanizing technology was far behind ours. But then, they cleverly figured out an end run around this problem, and bought as post-war surplus, the large tires which we used on our "Arctic Snow Trains" which were openly available for sale after the war. The tires were very similar, if not identical, and served their new purposes very nicely.

So, after all of this, I would venture a fairly strong guess that they did copy the 1626, as well as the 6B4G, 2A3, 1625, 807, 813, 6V6, 6L6, 6SN7, 6SL7, 832A, 829B, etc, etc, etc ,and in many cases, they didn't even bother to give these new copies their own standardized tube designations, but to "steal" our numbers in the process - like GU-829, GU-807, etc..

/ed B
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