Old Hammond Tubes??

[wcrankshaw]

Another casualty of the Nashville flooding is an old Hammond organ at the neighbors. It's not a B3, but one of the church style ones. It's sitting on the curb, and I think I'm going to nab it. It has a bunch of hammond branded tubes in it...GZ34, 12AX7, EL84, something that looks a lot like a 6V6 but has weird looking plates with copper, and some others. Also I'm sure the transformers are worth getting. Anyone know anything about those tubes. I've seen a couple things online suggesting they are rebranded mullards, which might make them a pretty sweet find.

EDIT - It's one of the H-100 models from mid 60s-mid 70s.

[Sweetfinger]

Yah! Most of the components should be ok after cleaning and drying. There may be some bumblebee caps inside as well. The tubes will be fine even if nothing else is.

[ron vogel]

They (Hammond), just like many of the other organ manufacturers used rebranded tubes of different manufacture. They could be Mullards, or RCA's, or Ge's...really depends on what supplier was used in a given year.

I go though a lot of salvage organs, and even see mixed brands within the same organ.

If it has bumblebee caps in it, it was made between '58 to '62...I would venture to make an educated guess they woould be RCA's...which are excellent tubes. Later than that you would probably see black beauty sprague caps...and in that case probably the Mullard's or GE's.

[captntasty]

Whatever the manufacturer, tubes selected for organs (I guess we're talking mostly preamp) had to be non-microphonic, so you know they're good in that respect.

[CharlieP]

Sounds like a treasure trove!

[roughcut studios]

weird looking plates with copper

those are 7591's. Used in some Ampegs and a bunch of hifi stuff. They go for fairly good money on fleabay. ...Jon

[Rhodesplyr]

Yes, there were a lot of Hammond casualties in the flood--a good friend of mine who owns Nashville Pro Hammond got hit hard.

The H-100s had monster power supplies--huge power transformers and nice chokes--and they usually had two Mullard GZ-34s in them. Of course, if the power transformer got flooded, it can be bad news. If the octal tubes got flooded, you'll have to make sure that 1) there's no conductive junk inside the tube base and 2) it gets completely dried out inside the tube base. Miniature 9-pin tubes should be fine. Output tubes as someone else said are 7591s.

I tried to bring back a Hammond organ preamp that got submerged in Katrina, but I gave up. The nasty thing about floodwater is that it's usually DIRTY water. Theoretically, you should be able to dry them out, but it doesn't always work out that way...

Hammond never used "bumblebee" caps, as far as I've seen. They usually used RCA small signal tubes. All original EL84s I've seen in Hammond amps are Amperex/Holland.

[roughcut studios]

flooded hammonds

I have a couple of those h-100 power supplies and main amps if anyone needs transformers to repair one of those beasts. P.M me.