How do they work? I've just received a ball from sc and the lume is non-existent???
How do they work? I've just received a ball from sc and the lume is non-existent???
Go into a dark room and let your eyes adjust for a few mins. Super bright but you can't see the lume unless its very dark.
Tube full of tritium gas and a coating of luminous material.
Which model?
Won't look as bright in daylight as recently charged superluminova but great in proper darkness and lasts all night.
As other replies say,no charging needed the tubes glow constantly.In a darkened room/night time the lume is very impressive and remains constant . On mine the 12,3,6,9 large numbers glow bright yellow ,the 1,2,4,5,7,8,10,11 markers glow ice blue and the hands and 12 o'clock bezel pip glow bright green. You can often see some colour glow even in daylight. Nothing wrong with Ball lume
Originally Posted by gunner
I have a cheapie Luminox tritium quartz - in a dark room with eyes adjusted it's a very distinct and cool continuous lume.
Half life of 12.5 years, lume guaranteed.
the thing that puts me off tubes is it makes for unlovely hands!
ktmog6uk
marchingontogether!
Some of the hands can look a bit basic but take a look at the the main hands on something like the Deepquest, I think they're quite nice.
I have a Tritium tube watch (not Ball) and while the glow is not great initially it glows like a beacon throughout the night.
Gaseous Tritium Light Source (GTLS) v SuperLuminova
Yep, in slightly fading light, you won't really see the lume that well... unlike say, a Seiko.
It's when you wake up at 3am the Ball will impress... (ie, when woken up by the other half telling you to stop pointing the watch in her face).
If you can't see them in the dark, then there's a problem.
They knocked my socks off on the first Ball I owned...
My Ball is brilliant during the night... Normal superluminova lume fades in 10-15 minutes and then it becomes weaker than tritium tubes.
Tritium tubes are imho much better than classic illumination.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_illumination
There is no lume, and no stored light as with normal luminous material. Instead, a neutron in a tritium nucleus beta decays to a proton, throwing off an electron and a photon (and a neutrino, but ignore that for now). The photon makes its way out of the tube. The electron smashes into another molecule inside the tube, and throws off a photon as it brakes. This happens many times, since there are rather a lot of tritium nuclei. Some of the photons reach your eyes.
Well, you asked how it worked.
I don't think it has anything to do with the watch being 8yrs old, it's probably you are expecting it to work like SL.
A tritium watch has very little lume without the correct light conditions, try it a little later tonight, and as others have said when your eyes have adjusted to the light, the lume will be there.
If you take the room from a well-lit room to a dark room the lume will look feeble. Possibly still feeble after a few minutes and the eyes have adjusted.
Stick it on your bedside table at beddybyes time and after 10-15 mins have a look at it. Should be a consistent, steady lume which looks fine.
Keep in mind that Ball has watches with two levels of tritium, T-25 and T-100 (25 milicures, 100 millicuries of tritium on the dial). Ball and Deep Blue are the only watch companies that are allowed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to sell watches with T-100 tritium in the U.S. Obviously, the larger quantity of tritium in the T-100 tubes will be brighter. Please don't ask me how these two companies and no other ones get to use T-100 tritium. I have no idea. And yes, the older tritium tubes get, the more they fade.
Yeah, T100 and T25 designations refer to the total millicuries of tritium in the watch, but the tubes will glow the same in both T25 and T100 watches, unless the shape is different like flat tubes or the color, because the amount of tritium in each tube is still the remain the same.
EDIT: welp, sorry I'm not sure if the claim I made above is true now. I saw some posts that said Ball does change the amount of tritium gas in tubes for some models. This is confusing now to me since the tubes are supposedly already saturated with tritium gas so adding more shouldn't make them glow much brighter. I guess that just means they don't saturate their tubes to begin with.
Last edited by Citizen V; 6th October 2012 at 05:13.
Anyone know if you send a watch to the Ball UK service centre for a service, will they upgrade your t25 to t100 tubes if you ask them to?
Relume/retube and refurb sounds a bargain !!!
I love Trit tube watches, I've got a traser that's very bright indeed. I need to try a Ball at some point soon I think...
Oh that doesn't look so good tbh
Can you do a longer exposure in pitch darkness?
T25 and T100 refer to the amount of tritium on the dial/whole watch not the amount in each tube. The former meaning less than 25 millicuries of tritium, and the latter greater than 25 but less than 100 millicuries. So many T100 watches just have more tubes or larger tubes (like flat tubes).
They can have a higher concentration of tritium in the tubes though. There was a Ball model I read about that had two versions, same amount of tubes in each, but one was T25 and the other T100. Can't find which model that was though.
EDIT: Found it. The Ball Trieste came in T25 and T100 variants. T25 was supposedly for markets that don't allow T100 watches.
I'm not sure if it can be done since they probably replace the entire dial instead of removing and replacing the tubes individually. But worth asking them.
Last edited by Citizen V; 7th October 2012 at 20:01.
That's weaker than weak
Aaaaah. Cheers for that
:-)
Aaaaah. Cheers for that
:-)
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