Some properties of a glow discharge source in which boron trifluoride was used as a source feed-gas are described. The source generated a beam with a multipeaked energy spread with width approximately equal to the voltage used to generate the discharge (up to several kilovolts). The energy distributions of different ion species extracted from the source were not all the same and, in particular, the section of the beam taken from an energy band situated a few hundred volts above cathode potential was found to consist essentially of boron ions. Beryllium ions were observed to be generated close to the cathode of the source from atoms sputtered from the extraction canal. The highest total output current of the source was 100 μA.