Well out of my depth here, so -
I’ve just switched on my new to me valve amp and after about 10 seconds or so, one of the 6C45N-E tubes got brighter and brighter and after a small flash is, alas, no more.
So, does anybody have a spare (pair) kicking about that they would like to sell me, or are there any widely used equivalents that I should know about and you could sell me ?
I knew there was a bloody good reason that I never used tube amps 
6C45 is a Russian valve, variously known as 6C45N-E, 6C45PI, 6S45PI, 6S45N etc depending on how the cyrillic characters have been translated to western alphabet.
It has no drop in equivalents, but it readily available, for example Watford valves have some:
It can be great, but like other very high transconductance valves it can be a bit of a deva and loves to oscillate at VHF and UHF frequencies, which can occasionally result in the type of failure you witnessed.
The other challenge is that the gain (mu) varies a lot between samples, so gain matched pairs tend to be an excellent idea if used in an amp without feedback.
btw what’s the amp?
Thanks for that Simon, very useful. It’s an early Border Patrol 300B SE with the larger transformers.
6C45Pi Electro Harmonix Gold-pin are good but fairly expensive and rare in the UK so I got mine from here:
The ones I’m currently using in the BP are NOS Reflektor 6c45Pi, used to be cheap and easily available from the Ukraine.
They’re pretty expensive, too.
^^
I bought some of these when Simon re-worked my P20 but they weren’t matched for gain…(however I had bought enough so we could find 2 that were close…)
From what Ive read getting some genuine NOS Reflektors is close to impossible to do now…
I think (hope) that I’ve managed to pick up a pair 