To Buy or Not To Buy a TV-7 Tube tester, that is the Question !

My philosophy on TV-7 series tube testers:


I have so far collected as many as twenty TV-7 series tube testers from the United States, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Most of the tube testers I imported were good in their appearance, but were non-working or were not functioning properly.

As a non-English speaking person, I had to experience a lot of failures in purchasing real good tube testers at Ebay Auctions.
Somebody at his website suggests that we may as well not purchase those tube testers whose descriptions go as follows:

1) As I don't know about how to use this tube tester, I sell this equipment AS IS.
2) This tube tester worked fine a few years ago, so I believe this works okay.........
3) This was my dead father's tube tester, and I don't know how to use this stuff, so I sell this AS IS.

I bought such tube testers as described just as above, and some were exactly working and the sellers were only ignorant of how to use them and were telling me the truth. However, such cases are very rare. And I believe that non-English speaking persons like me should listen to English-speaking native's kind words of advice and should not try to purchase such tube testers.--
You are very likely to get non-working tube testers with false descriptions. If you lose your precious money by buying such tube testers, paying, say, 300.00 dollars, you yourself are to blame -- you are too naive to believe such sellers' words.....

Probably those expressions are their figure of speech, euphuism or metaphorical expressions, and we should read them like this:

1) This tube tester does not work properly. Even though I switched on, this tube tester would not work at all. Only its merit is that the pilot lamp lighted up, and the rest of function you must test yourself if you dare to purchase this!

2) This is a very beautiful tube tester, so I will sell this to you at a high price because I would l;ike to grab as much money as possible from you !!! I am selling this AS IS, Of course whether you buy this or not is your own discertion and responsibility, and not mine.

There certainly exist some conscientious sellers who frankly admit and mention that they are selling broken tube testers at
reasonable prices.
Very often I purchase those broken tube testers, but sometimes I didn't know that they were broken but at other times I just sensed that they might be broken ones, and upon receiving such, I found out that they were exactly  just as I had expected - broken tube testers. The merit of getting some of the broken tube testers is that by the time you have collected a sizable number of broken ones, you will learn to repair them, and acquire some abilities and expertise to fix and calibrate them.  
It is a great gamble to purchase some of the broken ones, which were obviously given up by the sellers as non-repairable, but if you succeed in repairing them, you can satisfy your pride and can sell some of them at some auction site in your country as a good working equipment at twice or three times as much price.

Fixing emission type tube testers is another good experience. I purchased quite a few of them, and most of them worked okay, and only a few of them needed some aging procedure because some of them had been kept in the warehouses for over ten to twenty long years without being used at all. Their structure is only simple; they have a transformer, tube sockets, and only a couple of capacitors and/or resistors inside. Their only problems were loose sockets, or broken neon lamps for short tests,or too tight frozen rotary switches. And in case of Precision TW-11 tube tester, 6H6 tube under the panel was wrong.
The tube testers work on a simple principle -- It is OHM's LAW WORLD, and if you know R=E/I or how to calculate the values of resistors connected in paralell or in series -- the rest of things depend uponm your ability to read and understand schematics and your experience as electrician, repairing radios and electrical appliances multiplied by your time and energy.
However, among the tube testers I came across, there were some about which I could not make head of tail .
They had broken quality meters and those meters are hard to find and purchase. They are not to be sold easily.
Only once in a while, you succeed in repairing bad meters miraculously, but such cases are very very rare!!

To be continued.....