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It has occurred to me more than once that the process of buying all the machinery for making tubes from a formerly great company's corpse and moving them elsewhere is not necessarily the way to make great tubes.
Products are the embodiment of four things, mixed just the right way: knowledge, materials, tools, and labor. Knowledge is what makes the other three possible; labor is what gets the "mixed just the right way" done. Moving the tools to somewhere else and using new people tosses the knowledge and labor over the side. I have read accounts of the GE tube facility's reject rate going up for a day or so after the workers were off on holiday. When they got back in the groove, rejects went down. Of course, in this kind of "automation", the "labor" was actually highly skilled, experienced workers micro-adjusting the machines as they worked, a non-obvious mixture of knowledge with labor.
Our (i.e. humans') ability to adjust and control processes with computer-controlled tools of near-infinite fineness gigantically outstrips the abilities of the 1950s. I have no doubt that a new, start-from-zero effort to design and manufacture modern 6L6s, EL34s, and 12AX7s would produce incredibly uniform and long lasting tubes.
The only problem with this is that there is not enough money to do this. Especially with the competition from mediocre historical-legacy factory setups of old tube manufacturing equipment, there is no incentive to do something like this. No business manager would invest the money in the engineering team and soft/hard tooling to make tubes. The competition from the cheap/mediocre tooling means there is no reasonable reward for it.
That's a shame. Modern manufacturing is light-years ahead of the state of the art when people stopped worrying about how to make a good tube.
Products are the embodiment of four things, mixed just the right way: knowledge, materials, tools, and labor. Knowledge is what makes the other three possible; labor is what gets the "mixed just the right way" done. Moving the tools to somewhere else and using new people tosses the knowledge and labor over the side. I have read accounts of the GE tube facility's reject rate going up for a day or so after the workers were off on holiday. When they got back in the groove, rejects went down. Of course, in this kind of "automation", the "labor" was actually highly skilled, experienced workers micro-adjusting the machines as they worked, a non-obvious mixture of knowledge with labor.
Our (i.e. humans') ability to adjust and control processes with computer-controlled tools of near-infinite fineness gigantically outstrips the abilities of the 1950s. I have no doubt that a new, start-from-zero effort to design and manufacture modern 6L6s, EL34s, and 12AX7s would produce incredibly uniform and long lasting tubes.
The only problem with this is that there is not enough money to do this. Especially with the competition from mediocre historical-legacy factory setups of old tube manufacturing equipment, there is no incentive to do something like this. No business manager would invest the money in the engineering team and soft/hard tooling to make tubes. The competition from the cheap/mediocre tooling means there is no reasonable reward for it.
That's a shame. Modern manufacturing is light-years ahead of the state of the art when people stopped worrying about how to make a good tube.
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