The Brimar team have been appearing at the odd show over the last few years. It seems their project may be moving forward https://brimaruk.com/gbvp-2/great-british-valve-project/. They’re looking for volunteers in all sorts of areas. Just to be clear, I have no involvement with this (yet). I just thought you might like to know.
VB
Have we been here before?
What’s the story there Graeme? I see that they are already selling various branded tubes. Do you know where those have been made?
Pete & I were having a good chat with Thomas Mayer at ETF. He seems to have taken on the full Elrog venture and is producing very small quantities daily (up to 2 pairs) but is only ever likely to make the larger format valves as the investment necessary & machinery required to make miniature 9 pin or 7 pin types in any volume simply isn’t feasible.
Honestly I don’t know Guy. The stuff they are already selling is manufactured somewhere else. Chatting at vintage radio shows (cheap places to exhibit) over the last 2-3 years they weren’t very forthcoming about where exactly that was. But they were a genuinely friendly and enthusiastic lot and not, it seems, wide-eyed beginners. They had technical know-how and some weren’t young 
. I came away liking them and wishing them well. Beyond that I’m really in the dark.
VB
The sad truth behind that story was that they were far too slow shifting to production of the kind of vaccum tubes that there is still a market for.
Demand for quality audio valves (as opposed to the generic Russian and Chinese crap) to go into guitar amps and assorted pro audio kit is strong and getting stronger, while hifi is the rather thin icing on that cake - both markets will pay silly money for good stuff, as many of us are testament to.
Seems this corpse is twitching slightly again -
Looks like it will be a major undertaking to get all that going again.
I used to drive on a route that passed by the old Mullard Mitcham factory:
Thing which went bust twice to attempt to not go bust again?
I think the Brimar re-start stands a better chance than the TechTube one. Not only are the circumstances different but they also seem rather better focused on a proven demand (for genuine replica valves) rather than on an unusual in-house technology.
The real loss of huge amounts of hands-on knowledge is scary though. Of course the details of the manufacturing techniques were absolutely business critical. So they weren’t published. When ‘the age of the valve was over’ there was little incentive to record them or to preserve any records there already were. Then the people with the knowledge got old and died.
As an example of the stuff which was still available even 15 years ago you could have a look at this
https://forum.marstran.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=130
but I fear most of it is lost now.
