Although sometimes it may take a little disturbance to the system, as it turns out, you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Some of you might recall back at the end of March, as I was doing some preliminary investigations for the 6L6 SE-UL amplifier, I managed to destroy a perfectly good KT-88. As I was doing some other design work yesterday I decided that if I was going to test out the new amp with KT-88s (as well as 6L6s) I would need to have at least two on my shelf. So I went shopping on line.

WOW! I know that inflation is running high, and that the war in the Ukraine has messed up the tube market, however I was not prepared for the prices I was finding. That little mistake back in March was really going to set me back. Knowing that there really is nothing I personally can do about tube prices, I finally did acknowledge that there is something I can do to prevent a recurrence of my folly.

While I was out yesterday, I bought a couple of sheets of those small adhesive stickers that people uses to label things. Then I got to work.

That’s the side of the power pentode test jig I used to destroy that KT-88 a month ago. All the connections are labeled now. I know from experience that this is not a foolproof solution. However it does seriously reduce the chances of me destroying yet another tube.

And since I was at it, I didn’t just stop at one jig. As I went through the shelf, which I recently reorganized, I found lots of other jigs and fixtures which could benefit from a little labeling. Here are a couple of high power variable resistance boxes I use regularly.

These little stickers are the “new trick” for this “old dog”. It took a $60 mistake to finally get me to do it, but now that it’s done I’m glad I did it. Especially because I decided that I’d need to have a matched pair of KT-88s for testing the new amp rather than a mismatched set. That’s probably going to cost me about $120 USD before shipping.

Now I need to get back to finishing up the 6AS7 SET.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.