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I already wrote a few times at my site about 6C18C. Search if you are interested.

 http://www.GoodSoundClub.com/TreeItem.aspx?PostID=2292

If you use the 6C33C for amplification or regulation then you would hardly avoid attention to 6C18C. It was the ancestor of 6C33C and it has larger anode mass – a very good sign. I got a couple years back a party of 6C18C from 1964, 1968 and 1969 and I run them at Milq bass channel. I do like them BUT… The 6C33C was introduced and “more reliable version of 6C18C” according to BAT’s Victor Khomenko. Leaving for 2 year with them I understand what he meant – the dam tube is just too fragile and to mechanically unstable. A few of them failed catastrophically and a few of them I did not risk to put in my amp – it was a bunch of garbage riddling in them. One of them was perfect – in fact very perfect. The rest were good but… did not live for a long time.

The tubes are 40 year old and then are in perfect shape, with dense and glossy getter. However, as soon those tubes begin to work then they very rapidly losing getter. The getter is necessary to remove the gas that made up by cathode bubbling from vacuumed tube. I do not know if the cathode in 6C18C produce too much gas or the tube heat up and is loosing it’s hermetic status but I do know that one 3-4 weeks of use and the tube has no dark silver deposit atop: 

So, it is not good. I was trying many different things that I was advised to stop this process but it did not help. An old man told me that in order to preserve the getter I need to dance naked each full moon around the tube driver by 1.666V. I tried and it did not help. Now, I have a small army of the tubes like above and I wonder what to do with them – to use them or not? The funny part is that I do not hear any worsening of sound from those tubes. The next step would be to pump the marihuana smoke into the 6C18C balloon and to play exclusively Luigi Russolo’s music…

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