THE GREAT MULLARD MAGIC BLOG

  Ah, the age honoured skill of Upcycling as promoted by the redoubtable Sarah Moore in the scintillating BBC programme titled Money for Nothing where she prowls the Corpy tip to find some piece of old tut that she can transform with glitter and sequins into even worse old tut for some hipster to buy at an over inflated price. Upcycling is also the title of the German edition of a book first published in English in 1998 by Gunter Pauli which states that the goal of upcycling is to prevent wasting potentially useful materials by making use of existing ones. This reduces the...

We last left valve assembly where we had formed the electrode cage, today, we will describe what happened next in the valve assembly process.  Before the electrode cage could be mounted on the valve base, four additional components needed to be added and welded into position.  The first two components were the top and bottom screen plates and projecting tags which are welded through onto tags on the outer screen as per the photo below: -  The third extra component is an L shaped piece of metal which is first welded to the bottom screen plate and then bent over...

In previous blog entries we have seen how many individual valve components were made, now we will look at how they were assembled.   For component manufacture, we also saw how many automated production machines were utilised, however, when we come to valve assembly, things were quite different in that manual dexterity utilising just hand tools and a few light jigs are essential - yes - your valve was truly 'hand made'. Another difference is that component manufacture and the final stages of valve making - pumping, sealing and testing - were done at the two main Mullard factories at...

Mrs Mullard Magic and I have survived 30 happy years of marriage by always considering and consulting each other, however, this is - and was not always the case with other couples .....   just look at this American advertisement from 1925, specifically penned to involve WOMEN in the choosing of radios Always letting the woman have a say is very important and they should take note of this in France.... have you been following all the hoo-haa about the "Uritrottoir" where French ladies are incensed by the latest iteration of the famous Paris "pissoir". It seems that hoardes of BPH challenged...

As we have previously seen in this blog series, grids were produced in continuous  4 feet lengths and then cut to size for valve assembly - just like in the photo below: - As Mullard used millions of grids annually - all of which were cut by hand - in order to increase consitency and throughput, something had to be done.   Accordingly, the Mullard Engineering Department developed an automated grid cutting machine in which grid lengths are loaded into glass hopper tubes which allow whole strips to be cut to length sequentially.  All an operator needed to do was...