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Old 21st Nov 2017, 11:11 am   #1
Ian - G4JQT
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Reading/Fakenham, UK.
Posts: 1,320
Default Sorting your valves!

A tip prompted by my request (and generous offer from Phil) for some 6BW6 valves.

Like many of us I have a random collection of valves I built up over the past 30-odd years. They were sort of categorised, but after moving to a new workshop 10 years ago they got well and truly jumbled. I found I was buying any I needed rather than sorting through, and this had to stop! But the job seemed almost insurmountable.

Last summer I had the idea of laying them out on the lawn and grouping them. Should this be by valve type or in alpha-numeric order? Without an encyclopaedic knowledge of valve types or the tedium of looking many of them up, I decided alpha numeric was the least worst. But there were hundreds; after one hot afternoon progress had been painfully slow. This was going to take days and days of bending down and crawling over the lawn - and hoping it didn't rain!

I happened to mention this to Mike Barker who had a suggestion. He suggested if they were really very mixed and if I had so many that it would be too time consuming to sort them into groups, just put them in numbered boxes as I find them and use a basic spread-sheet program to catalogue them.

Good idea. This was a two person job over about four days; a friend calling them out and placing them into a large-ish numbered box, and me typing them into the list. There was lots of tea/coffee/banter and biscuits!

We filled 21 boxes with a total of 990 vales. Many NOS, many without their own boxes, quite a few unidentifiable, and one or two very odd or very old ones - no idea how I acquired those. I've just found a carrier bag with even more...

One top tip; don't use boxes that are too big! If you're after two 6BW6s, say one in box 11 and one in box 17, you don't want to be sorting through more than about 30 valves in each box, especially if many of them are loose and unboxed. It also helps if those that are in their own boxes are upright and marked with the vale type showing - obvious I know...

I haven't tested them. Too big a job. That comes as they are needed. But the whole effort was a worthwhile job, although you need some sort of program so you can search for the ones you want on the screen as they become highlighted. Of course doing this on paper would work, but searching written columns would be very tedious. (Yes, this is how it was done in the past!)

So come on. I bet there are a few here that have been putting off a similar job. Now the long winter nights are here, get a radio friend to help, just don't forget the refreshments!

Ian, G4JQT

PS: I offered the 40 or so unidentifiable ones on Freecycle. A teacher wanted a few to show his class what valves were for a science/communication lesson, and the rest went to someone who wanted them for inclusion in an art exhibit...
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