I found a giant vacuum tube at a electronic store. Can I use it for a VTTC

schmitt trigger said:

Many years ago, I worked at a company which employed several induction heaters.

It used similar tubes like these, but from EIMAC. Don't recall the part number.

The heater on its own would glow as bright and white as large incandescent light bulb.

The anode's high voltage and high current made these tubes very dangerous. As a fact, the worst industrial accident I've personally witnessed involved one of these.

Click to expand...

Would you like to share what happened and why happened ?

The ones I referred to were Raydyne induction heaters, the DC was obtained from a bank of 9 mercury rectifier tubes.
But for safety, all enclosure access, doors etc, had limit switches to shut the machine down to prevent accidents.
Although I did hear of one case where the maintenance guy over rode the limit and got a severe RF burn across his back.
Max.

This https://frank.pocnet.net/sheets/026/7/7003.pdf tube was the biggest one I ever worked on unless you want to count e-beam evaporators which is where this tube regulated 15 kV at 1.5A.

It's basically a BIG CRT Power supply without the CRT. You pump down the bell jar every time and you electromagnetically sweep the 30 kW electron beam across a water cooled crucible containing metal such as Nickel or copper. It also had like a 2 Meg-ohm 200 W resistor as a bleeder.

Without going into any gory details, did you watch the movie The Green Mile's electric chair execution scene?
The worst part was the smell. Almost 40 years later and my stomach still churns.

As Max mentions, all of these dangerous machines have plenty of safety interlocks. But maintenance people had bypassed them.
I would say that 8 out of 10 industrial accidents have the same root cause: safety procedures are ignored or bypassed.

I usually worked on the power supply alone. Some days I could not work on it and I didn't.

schmitt trigger said:

Without going into any gory details, did you watch the movie The Green Mile's electric chair execution scene?
The worst part was the smell. Almost 40 years later and my stomach still churns.

As Max mentions, all of these dangerous machines have plenty of safety interlocks. But maintenance people had bypassed them.
I would say that 8 out of 10 industrial accidents have the same root cause: safety procedures are ignored or bypassed.

Click to expand...

Yes, an old friend (now long dead) had RF burns on his arm from working on radar during WW2 (you had to reach deep inside to adjust something, so all the engineers had the same RF burn in the same place on their right arms). Anyway, that's just setting the scene - he also told a story of a workmate who was killed - while working in the dish you removed the safety interlock, PUT IT IN YOUR POCKET, and took it with you. This guy used to remove it, and put it on a nearby shelf - one day someone refitted it, not knowing he was in the dish.

This is supposedly how microwave ovens were invented!.

While doing my training in the Royal Signals, one instructor stressed that anyone opening the transmitter to change the frequency taps without ensuring the power was off, would be placed on a charge. (Not the electrical kind)
When attending the class about a week later, he noticeably had a band aid on the tip of every finger.
Needless to say, everyone guessed why and he did not live it down.
Max.

MaxHeadRoom78 said:

While doing my training in the Royal Signals, one instructor stressed that anyone opening the transmitter to change the frequency taps without ensuring the power was off, would be placed on a charge. (Not the electrical kind)
When attending the class about a week later, he noticeably had a band aid on the tip of every finger.
Needless to say, everyone guessed why and he did not live it down.
Max.

Click to expand...

When I was at secondary school and doing woodwork, there was a circular saw in the supply room, where the teacher cut the wood for the class - it even had a key switch on it, and needless to say we weren't allowed near it.

One day we turned up for woodwork, and the teacher (Mr Woodard - apt name! ) had a bandaged hand, and refused to discuss it. However, I noticed that the circular saw looked uncommonly clean, and a close examination found blood spots on the saw, and on the floor that had been missed.

He never admitted it though, but it seemed a fair bet!.