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Hi everyone, last night I bought a lot of 560 60's Philco Germanium transistors on ebay, I bought them because my stock of Ge transistors is a bit low, hopefully there are some good ones in amongst them which are good enough for use in a Fuzz Face, I know that it's basically a case of pot luck, but we'll wait and see......

Awesome find, fingers crossed they are fit for purpose for you

IvIark wrote:Awesome find, fingers crossed they are fit for purpose for you

Cheers mate, I might go through them and test them with my Semiconductor Analyser when they arrive in the post, I need to do some servicing work on my Analyser first though, since the three clips broke off the test wires cause the wires were really thin, shouldn't be too difficult to fix though.....


Just thought I'd post a pic of the Philco transistors here:

That's an impressive looking haul

For sure, I'm just wondering what the type-numbers written on the transistors are going to be cause they may be listed in one of my transistor spec books, I did see some other Philco transistors listed on ebay, they were some 2N1500 types, gold coloured metal encapsulation and leads, if they're still avalible next fortnight I might buy them......


I'm assuming that the little numbered paper tags on the transistors represent the measured Hfe's of the devices......

Just thought I'd post an update, I went to the Post Office just up the road from where I live and picked up a parcel which turned out to be the lot of 560 60's Philco transistors, the bodies on these transistors measure about 1cm by 3mm, so far they look like pretty interesting little devices but i haven't been able to gauge how much leakage they exhibit since my poor old Semiconductor seems to get confused and mis-identifies them as either multi-colour leds, silicon transistors, or dual-diode arrays, I did find a couple which had what appeared to be internal short-circuits so I'm assuming that those particular devices are no-good, the majority of the ones I have tested looked to be good, I found one device marked Philco 1966 1M5, so I'm guessing that the majority of these devices are probably about 50 years old or so, these devices were probably meant for High-Frequency Radio applications and I seem to remember reading somewhere that these devices were designed to work at frequencies up to about 60Mhz or so, still I can't see why these devices wouldn't work well at audio frequencies since they should have ample current gain, note that Ft basically represents the frequency where the current-gain falls to 1 due to the inherent parasitic-capacitance of the device, all transistors exhibit this parasitic-capacitance regardless of whether they're germanium or silicon devices, anyway, I think these should be good for building Fuzzes or Rangemasters, etc......