Anynone going to cax who know how to use bk470?

mrbill2084

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I have been meaning to try it out, but I have been too busy to look over the manuals. If someone who really knows their stuff wants to school me on it at the show, that would be great. It has a ton of adapters, so I would think it could do just about any tube..

Also if anyone wants to use it on their game at the show, let me know. Someone wants to try it on his gauntlet legends and I really want to practice with it on a junk monitor or two I have before I try it on something of value...

I would think friday during setup would be best, but we can probably fine some space on saturday or sunday..
 
Operating that tube tester is really simple. Just read the manual. The procedure for using it is only a page or two. The rest is just the chart of picture tubes and what adapters to use.

-Ian
 
If you do any rejuving or short removing make sure the monitor is out of the cab, tube facing the ground for best results. - Barry
 
Its that so the burnt crud falls out of the neck? Good to know.

Well, you can always lay the cabinet down on its front.. :)

Exactly. I've watched many rejuvs done up at Dokerts and putting the tube on it's face yields the best results by far. I suppose the cab face down would work as well...........

Have fun with it, one of these days I may buy one for myself. Great tool to have. - Barry
 
If you do any rejuving or short removing make sure the monitor is out of the cab, tube facing the ground for best results. - Barry

While I agree that it's probably good to do that if it's convenient... I've rejuved MANY tubes mounted inside the cabinet exactly as they sit and never noticed any difference in rejuve quality. Especially if you're just trying to clean weak tubes, you're really just trying to "burn the crud off", and the only risk you really face is that the crud might cause a short, and then you'd probably want to put it on its face and remove the shorts. In all the tubes I've rejuved, I've never run into the problem of creating a short though.

Plus, what's the difference in putting it face down, making crud chunks that fall toward the front of the monitor, and then putting it back in the cabinet, causing the chunks to fall to the back? And none of the rejuvenator manuals I've seen have said anything about this in the procedure.

DogP
 
While I agree that it's probably good to do that if it's convenient... I've rejuved MANY tubes mounted inside the cabinet exactly as they sit and never noticed any difference in rejuve quality. Especially if you're just trying to clean weak tubes, you're really just trying to "burn the crud off", and the only risk you really face is that the crud might cause a short, and then you'd probably want to put it on its face and remove the shorts. In all the tubes I've rejuved, I've never run into the problem of creating a short though.

Plus, what's the difference in putting it face down, making crud chunks that fall toward the front of the monitor, and then putting it back in the cabinet, causing the chunks to fall to the back? And none of the rejuvenator manuals I've seen have said anything about this in the procedure.

DogP

It's what I've been told by quite a few people to do it face down so the particles fall into the tube and not back on the guns causing a short. It seems that having to do as little rejuving as possible is best to improve the gun quality. By doing with the neck up the chances of say burning the green gun clean, then burning the red gun and having the crud from it fall back onto the green gun to be burned off again is less. I've seen a few guns burned beyond use so it seems to me that doing anything to make it better for the tube in the long run to be better.

I have no idea what happens to the crud as it falls in the tube, but I've witnessed around 15 tubes rejuved neck up and have never seen a short after the monitor was powered up.
 
I think when you consider the shape of the tube, the crud would be at the back bottom of the tube and not in the neck when the monitor is in normal operating position. Now if you have a cocktail, then its a different story.
 
When you "rejuvinate" a tube, there shouldn't be any crud. All you're doing is burning off the outer coating of the cathode, to allow it to emit more electrons. The coating doesn't fall off in chunks, it vaporizes. Remember, we're talking about micron-thick coatings here.

The only time it helps for the tube to be face down is when you've got a shorted gun. Then the orientation of the tube may aid in allowing that particle of material you've blasted out with the short to fall away from the gun assembly. Sometimes you can even clear a partial short by tapping on the neck of the tube while it's face down.

-Ian
 
When you "rejuvinate" a tube, there shouldn't be any crud. All you're doing is burning off the outer coating of the cathode, to allow it to emit more electrons. The coating doesn't fall off in chunks, it vaporizes. Remember, we're talking about micron-thick coatings here.

The only time it helps for the tube to be face down is when you've got a shorted gun. Then the orientation of the tube may aid in allowing that particle of material you've blasted out with the short to fall away from the gun assembly. Sometimes you can even clear a partial short by tapping on the neck of the tube while it's face down.

-Ian

Exactly. When you're cleaning/rejuvenating, you're just trying to expose fresh material. It's not like there's a shell that falls off and lands on something else, and you're not going to affect the green gun by rejuvenating the red gun. I agree that for shorts, I'd recommend face down, because naturally, if there are chunks, you don't want them in the neck area.

DogP
 
you're not going to affect the green gun by rejuvenating the red gun.

In theory, you could potentially affect it actually. The rejuvinate function runs the filament at a higher voltage to get the cathodes good and hot. There's ony one filament connection, so it runs all the filaments that hot. You *could* see a change in the another gun, simply because it's been run hotter for a minute. It's also possible to cause a heater/cahode short or a heater/G2 short by running the filament too hot. This is because the filament can distort from the heat and touch something. Not very common, and usually only when the tube is already really far gone.

Again, position of the tube won't affect this.

You can actually sometimes get improvement from an old tube by running it a slightly higher filament voltage for an hour, like 8 volts for a 6.3v tube. It just heats up the cathode a little more and helps to cook off some of the crud. This is really more a trick used on really, really old tubes though (50's and 60's era TV tubes) - I don't know how much it affects modern arcade tubes. Sometimes cooking a tube like this will have dramatic effect, especially if the tube has been sitting for 30 years.

-Ian
 
Yeah, I was referring to burning crud off the red gun, having it "land" on the green gun, and then having to burn off the green gun again.

DogP
 
I'm not going to CAX but I will say that the 470 is probably the easiest rejuvenator I've used. The 480 is as well but a little bit more pricey. There was a post about how to use the rejuvenator back on r.g.v.a.c a while back. I cut and pasted those directions to help me out the first few times I did it. Now, it is a no-brainer. I googled for them but couldn't find them. I'll see if I can't find them when I get back home but it will be a while. I'll post those here when I find them. I usually recommend cleaning a gun before rejuvenating it. It is a little easier on the guns. If you don't get good results, clean again. If it still doesn't fix the issue, go for the rejuve. I put a little sticker from a label maker next to the rejuvenate/clean button that says" wait 20 seconds" so I don't forget. I usually wait 30. After I rejuvenate, I leave it on that gun for about 3 minutes to cool down and then readjust the settings again before retesting it. If you retest a very freshly rejuvenated gun, you will get "good" results but they will not be accurate.
 
Hehe. All this talk about the tube testers made me think of the old "brighteners". Back in the days of short-lived television picture tubes, they made these little brightener adapters. They plug onto the picture tube, then the set's connector plugs into the brightener. It's just a self-contained step-up transformer to boost the filament voltage a volt or so. It was a stop-gap measure to keep an old tube looking better. I've even seen some for color tubes, albiet the old style 21FJP22 type. Sometimes a brightener would work when a rejuvinator wouldn't boost emissions enough. And sometimes it would just burn out the filament faster...

I wonder if they ever made any for modern inline gun tubes(like the ones in arcade monitors). I've never seen one.

Of course, it's trivial to make your own, by winding a couple turns aroud the flyback core and using that as the heater supply to the neckboard, but you'd have to remember to remove the hack when the filament in the tube burns out and you replace it :D

-Ian
 
Exactly. When you're cleaning/rejuvenating, you're just trying to expose fresh material. It's not like there's a shell that falls off and lands on something else, and you're not going to affect the green gun by rejuvenating the red gun. I agree that for shorts, I'd recommend face down, because naturally, if there are chunks, you don't want them in the neck area.

DogP

I guess that alot of tubes I've seen rejuved also had shorts, so that would explain the tube face down. I never claimed to be an expert on the subject, just passing on what I've heard from more than 1 person who knows far more than I do about the subject. - Barry
 
I'm not going to CAX but I will say that the 470 is probably the easiest rejuvenator I've used. The 480 is as well but a little bit more pricey. There was a post about how to use the rejuvenator back on r.g.v.a.c a while back. I cut and pasted those directions to help me out the first few times I did it. Now, it is a no-brainer. I googled for them but couldn't find them. I'll see if I can't find them when I get back home but it will be a while. I'll post those here when I find them. I usually recommend cleaning a gun before rejuvenating it. It is a little easier on the guns. If you don't get good results, clean again. If it still doesn't fix the issue, go for the rejuve. I put a little sticker from a label maker next to the rejuvenate/clean button that says" wait 20 seconds" so I don't forget. I usually wait 30. After I rejuvenate, I leave it on that gun for about 3 minutes to cool down and then readjust the settings again before retesting it. If you retest a very freshly rejuvenated gun, you will get "good" results but they will not be accurate.

Big oops on my part. I have a bk 490.. Not 470..
 
The 490 is very similar to the 470. You can see all three guns at once with the 490. Does your 490 have a d-sub connector on the face of the machine? If it dies then it is a 490B. Also, do you have the CR23 adaptor? This is the most common adaptor for arcae tubes.
 
The 490 is very similar to the 470. You can see all three guns at once with the 490. Does your 490 have a d-sub connector on the face of the machine? If it dies then it is a 490B. Also, do you have the CR23 adaptor? This is the most common adaptor for arcae tubes.


my bk has these adapters:
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,13,16,20,22,23,24,25,31,35 ,37,36,38

I don't think it has a d-sub thing. Here is a pic
bk1.jpg
 
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