Recently I found a 211 that has been collecting dust for 35+ years. It was tucked away on top of a heating duct. No idea what it was doing there.
That reminds me of the 211's I literally mined out of the ground sometime in the late 80's. An old time ham's wife let me and a couple of friends pick through his radio stuff after he went to a nursing home. He had come down with dementia and no longer remembered who she was, or anything about radio.
We rented a large U-Haul trailer and towed it with a pick-up. Both vehicles were crammed full when we left, and that was our second trip up there. Lotsa tubes and parts dating back through the 1930's. Some nice old books, too, which I had to air out to get rid of the smell of mouse urine. Some real treasures as well as some real junk.
The local radio club shack-on-a-belt and plastic radio types had told the lady that
no-one would be interested in that "old stuff" any more, and recommended that she find someone to haul it all to the dump (but thank God none of them were willing to help do the job). Fortunately, we got in touch with her before she found anyone to haul it away and she told us to take anything we wanted, because that would make the job easier for whoever cleaned out the buildings for her.
She and her husband had moved out of their old wood frame house and moved into a little concrete block cottage they had build next to it, and the old termite-infested house became the storage building. Over the years, the floor in one of the rooms where he kept his tube collection had rotted out and fallen to the ground below, and gradually the wooden planks and cardboard tube cartons had mixed in with the soil and turned to dirt.
After we cleaned out the tubes that were still on shelves, one of my buddies noticed what looked like a glass tube envelope partially peering out of what had become the dirt floor. I dug it out, and it was a 211. We dug around some more, and found over a dozen 211's buried in the soil. The metal bases and tube pins were heavily corroded, but the glass was intact. I took them home and cleaned them with soap and water and steel wool. The only permanent damage was etched spots on the metal base.
My HF-300 rig uses a 211 stage to drive the finals. I used it to test the "mined" 211's. I would let each one run filament-only for a few hours, then gradually apply grid drive and plate voltage, per the recommendations of RCA. Only a couple of the tubes were duds. The rest had as much or more emission and output than most of the spares I already had. I still have most of those tubes in my spares closet and they still check good.
Audiophools, eat your heart out!
