ZIF octal socket ?

[mesherm]

After carefully wiggling some precious NOS octal ST tubes from some stubborn sockets last night I naturally pondered why no one has made a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) octal socket with all the revival in tubes occurring recently.
I would envision the socket electrodes of gold plated beryllium copper split cylinders with a Teflon or Torlon rotating disk having tapered grooves such that a slight turn of a few degrees would cinch down the electrodes on the tube pins forming a tight grip. Rotating the disk a few degrees back would release the pressure on the electrodes and the tube could be easily lifted out. I see all sorts of exotic connectors and sockets but no ZIF ones. It surely can't be that hard to make.

[sorenj07]

that's a great idea. if they can do it for complicated 400+ pin CPU's they can do it for 8-pin and 9-pin tubes.

[EWBrown]

If you have any of the early release "skinny pin" J/J KT77s, then most octal tube sockets become "zero insertion force" as in poor, or even no contact at all. Even "virgin" octal sockets don't grip them very tightly(I know, I found out the "hard way"...) The Russian made ceramic octal sockets do work fairly well with these thinner pins. Similarly, some Chinese made 9 pin miniatures , 12AX7s in particular, will literally drop into an older well-used 9 pin socket, with no contact at all, though they are OK with the new Chinese made ceramic sockets, which have a death-grip on most other 9 pin tubes.

The most recent KT77s have this problem fixed, the pins are now "fat" and fit even old, well-used octal sockets quite snugly.

/ed B in NH

[Shannon Parks]

I think the cost would be the problem at say, $10 each for an octal socket. I'm already too cheap to spend $4.95 on a NOS octal (hint: this is where ham fests still offer values).

Of course anytime a tube has been seated in a socket for 50 years - like the Philco console I've been piddling with - it almost seems like they are glued in place. Certainly the tube gurus have some advice? I hate slowly wiggling a tube, just worrying that the base will loosen up from the envelope.

[dhuebert]

Yea, I suppose if you ordered 6.023E23 of them they might be fairly cheap. I was wiggling a 1970 vintage GE 6V6 out of it's socket one day last year when it let go suddenly and went flying to land on my concrete basement floor. POP! I almost shed tears over that one. And what about tube rolling? The guitar amp I'm building now might find the right sound with a bit of swapping, ZIF sounds like a good solution here. The Fresenius dialysis machine has ribbon cable sockets that are cool, slide the ribbon in and push a tab down. Neat, simple, two parts, Hmmmm. Put the tube in the socket and push a ring down to cinch?

Don

[sorenj07]

Yea, I suppose if you ordered 6.023E23 of them they might be fairly cheap. Don

yes! i'm not the only nerd on this forum who knows what yesterday was Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_07

[EWBrown]

Tube "wiggling" always makes me a bit nervous, I've loosened the glass from the base more times than I care to admit.. IF you can grip the base and not the glass, it reduces, but does not entirely eliminate , the chances of breaking the glass away from the base. 7 and 9 pin miniatures, Compactrons, and other tubes on which the pins are directly exited through the glass, have their own set of risks (I've even managed to crack or crush tubes in my past, so watch out for the "gorilla grip"). A set of those "chinese finger trap" metal mesh tube pullers comes in very handy for this, if you can locate one these days. They used to be included with a complete TV_7 test set, but even those are getting rare and costly nowadays. I've also had the "yank and pop" mishaps, and "snap the little teat off the top of the tube" accidents, as well. :o Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_09 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_11

I've tried various glues to re-attach a loose glass tube to its base, with mixed tresults at best, so YMMV.

/ed B in NH

[Shannon Parks]

snap the little teat off the top of the tube

Haha! The 'tube teat' - love it. Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_04

My wife always gets mad at me when I refer to cow udders as 'teats'. Dunno why.

[WA4SWJ]

In England when something quits working it goes "teats up" (or the more common US version of the pronunciation - just trying to keep it clean).

Funniest thing I ever heard was a guy in one of our plants there telling me that his paint gun had gone "teats up".

Regards,

[dhuebert]

yes! i'm not the only nerd on this forum who knows what yesterday wa

Apparently you are, I picked Avogadro's number just to be cute.

BTW 102461 was my birthday, so as of yesterday I'm 45 (ouch). Lets see, I have a sports car, a paunch, thinning hair, decreasing, ahhh, nevermind, achey joints, a bit of grey at the temples for that "extinguished look", yup sounds like everythings going according to schedule here.

Don
http://www.ahcm.ca/Galleries/FallColour ... get12.html

[EWBrown]

It all depends on the pronounciation, if it rhymes with "pits" then it's dirty, if it rhymes with "meets" then it's clean...

Not only in England, but also in the military, the term "teats up" (TU) was widely used. Phonetically, that's Tango Uniform...

Way back when (in the late 1800s) the Hemingray Glass Company, manufacturers of various and sundry glass items, made lots of telegraph, telephone and powerline insulators. In 1893, they invented and patented "drip points" on the bases of their insulators, and their technical advertising department used the phrase "See the teats on the petticoat"
(petticoat being the glass "skirt" or base of the insulator). Allegedly, this aided in "wicking" the water off the surfaces of the insulator, but this was proven to be mostly ineffective years later.

Copy of patent specifiication here:

http://www.insulators.com/patents/text/l0496652.htm

And a copy of an advertisement from 1907:




/ed B in NH

[TomMcNally]

I have manuals around here for broadcast equipment that instruct you to adjust something "one RCH" which of course, is a very fine unit of measure. When I was a kid, the engineer would yell "turn it up one red one"

[Uncle Ned]

My wife always gets mad at me when I refer to cow udders as 'teats'. Dunno why.

She would rather you call them nipples?

I always wanted to take my wife to a county fair and get her to enter a milking contest, after all, milking is kinda like riding a bike, it's not something one is likely to forget. I mean, with automatic milking machines, even dairy farmers hardly know how to milk cows any more.

IIRC, at one time someone in Japan was making an octal ZIF socket. Making new one with from injection-molded plastic would be expensive, 'cause an injection mold costs five figures. Terminals could be hassle as well unless they're a standard design. I suppose die-cut sheet plastic could
be used, I know laser and water jet cutting for metal is popular for low production sheetmetal items, I don't know how well it works for plastic.

[sorenj07]

I think it works fine for plastic. Is it possible to buy thick sheets of micalex?

[EWBrown]

A section of standard water pipe, which is threaded on both ends, is also called a "nipple", FWIW.

/ed B in NH Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_02

One practice that I've seen used by those who use some of the really "strange" Russian tubes (like GM70), is to make their own sockets, using a piece of teflon "plate" , drilling out the holes to fit the pin pattern, and using the metal parts of "Euro" style electrucal connectors to grab the tube's pins, and the wire leads.

Try to find a "real" GM70 socket, they're made of 100% pure unobtainium, only imported from Venus, and only on Februrary 30th, during leap years which are divisible by five... Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_08