Nobody in their right mind would invest in it. Soon as the overseas suppliers come back on line, which it's a safe bet they will, your domestic factory shuts down. That's likely to happen before you can even get your first tube out the door. Trying to catch up to a mature industry is a fool's errand.
This happened with COVID masks. The domestic suppliers were recognized as a strategic industry, but couldn't stay in business because nobody would pay their prices.
My hunch is that there's a lot of arcane domain knowledge in making tubes, that has to be learned, the hard way. There's a lot of stuff that falls into gray areas in between the traditional engineering disciplines, meaning that nobody learns it in school, and there are no textbooks on it. For the same reason that nobody will invest in a plant, nobody will invest their career in it either. And you can't modernize the design because then it won't be authentic.
I work in an industry that has aspects straight out of the Bronze Age and trying to find literature that parallels in any respectable detail anything that I’ve learned on the clock, I was first told by the old timers, and have since learned for myself, is a fool’s errand.
I am curious how many of the old-knowledge carrying Russian workers use the tubes off the clock. They’re elbow deep in making them…
We often have situations where we’re making units straight to the blueprint and well within spec, and eight months after we shipped them out the whole order comes back to be reworked and all we’re told is that some aspect we were initially told wasn’t critical, absolutely was critical and someone (often me) has to go through each part and do some necromancy to hit the new spec. Do I have the mating parts? Nope! Just poke and hope!
And in a company of about 150 people, there’s there’s twelve people who have a vague idea of what I do, but only myself and two of five engineers that have any knowledge of exactly how I do what I do. There’s another twenty or so people who’re in a similar “only a few people here know this stuff” position. We had one guy who definitely is the only one with his knowledge and after he retired, that department has been somewhere between useless and a total drain.
The tube makers know what the brands will accept and what they’ll reject, and they know how to hit that window of good-enough-to-not-get-sent-back. I’m curious what happens with them. I’m curious about the true health of those facilities prior to this year- were they like my company and neglected to apprentice anybody up as those with necessary knowledge died or retired?
The tooling to build them in North America again is surely available. It's probably a matter of whether it becomes financially viable.
“Economical” is the word those who could invest would use. It’s unlikely to be
economical to even put up a 100% automated building on US property for most investors for anything hobby related even if the only personnel they brought over were the engineers and project managers.
it would be cool.
…but not so cool that I’m stoked on the idea of paying $650 for a pair of 6L6’s made in Peachtree, though.
