Look behind the scenes of nixie tube making
Since I started manufacturing and selling nixie tubes and clocks, our customers from the USA formed the single biggest market for us. I remember years where we shipped 50% of our clocks to the USA. Today, I am excited to announce an improvement for our US customers – cooperation with Nicholas Stock from California. Nick […]
It’s time to finish the development of the first parts of the H tube – sub-assembly of the stem and ceramic rods. I designed this connection to be done using ceramics adhesive and it seems it will work. It is vacuum safe and it will provide enough support for the rest of the internal system […]
A bit longer video – I wanted to give you an update on progress in: 1:18 – upgrade of the glassworking equipment 5:28 – residual stress in the glass after sealing 7:25 – solder glass testing 11:20 – nitrogen purging setup 15:29 – connecting wires insulation 20:17 – anode cup manufacture 24:52 – ceramic parts.
Another test made – it turns out that dumet wire with its borated protective layer is not suitable for use in a high vacuum. Maybe at room temperature.. The borax layer (or the borated compounds) evaporates under high vacuum at 500C. I will need to find another solution.
A borated dumet wire would be a perfect solution for the insulated electrical connection between stem and digits inside the tube H. Borax would work as the insulating layer while copper-clad NiFe core would do the electrical connection which is easy to spot-weld to both stem and digit. Moreover, we have plenty of dumet already, […]
While working on the tube H itself, we have to keep in mind also the design of the electronics – without an absolutely reliable driver, the panel will simply not deliver the desired experience. Our first idea was to use a master module with just a string of shift registers – we do this normally […]
Finally some progress – I succeeded in sealing of the front window. I still need to do thorough testing, evacuating it etc.. but it seems the design I chose might work. The tooling setup is temporary – I will make it safer and more productive later.
The project of the “tube H” is running well, however, there are still some voids that need to be filled. One of them: I need to find good way how to insulate wires that are connecting the digits to the stem against parasitic glow.
I made another step in the development of the “H tube”.. In this video, I am trying to seal the front window into the tube envelope for the first time. This experiment is mainly about exploring weaknesses in our equipment with the intention to adapt it to this size of the glass.
To successfully seal the glass window to the main envelope body, I need to develop a holder for the glass windows which is able to withstand high temperature and hold the glass by vacuum. I think I can mark this “done”.
I am starting a project of a new nixie tube – a large 150mm front-view nixie tube. This particular tube is designed for an artwork that will be installed in October 2020. I want to keep you regularly updated on how is this project coming along. Wish me luck 🙂
The development of firmware for a product is a neverending story. I always wanted to keep also the clocks of our first customers up-to-date and with all the latest features, so we had to come up with a way how to update their firmware remotely. Thanks for help to: Lukáš Jezný – participating on the […]
I am going to switch to making videos instead of writing the blog articles. Each new video will be added as a blog entry. I hope you will like it 🙂 Yes! With Sebastian, we are trying to understand (and explain) the physics behind the fast switching of digits in a nixie tube. Link to […]
Puri and OOO clock in Grandhotel Pupp We finally delievered the Puri and OOO clock to Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic). The OOO clock turned out to be extremely difficult to finish – the ceramics shrinks and deforms and matching it to exact layout of mounting holes or tubes on board with electronics […]
Meeting Paul Parry Finally, after years of email communication, I had a chance to personally meet Paul Parry with his wife and see his workshop. As you probably know, Paul Parry creates nixie clocks and other devices under brand “Bad dog designs“. Among others, Paul is creator of the wonderful Bombe clock. We spent many […]
Fog! I am skipping February and March blogposts – but I will write them, I promise 🙂 I just wanted to write April’s post while the memories are still fresh.. What happened that it is so important? Let’s start from beginning – on 8th of October 2018 we made a tube #6059. There was nothing […]
Clock boards revisions During March, we prepared revision of electronics board for Puri clock, revisited board for project NX2 (details will come), new board for our Blub clock (details soon) and few prototype boards for our new burn-in/testing device (machine we will use for burn-in and testing of our tubes). looking into list of our […]
February.. We started using GIT We are now three people writing software for our devices – Sebastian, Radim, me. The same files need to be accessed from LAN and from internet as well (Sebastian on homeoffice or me from home). So we decided to setup a GIT for our source codes. It turned out that […]
Getter cutter machine I am building a machine which will cut getter strips to individual pieces with minimal attention from the operator. The process must be clean, precise and reliable. It is not very difficult project, so I decided to take it as first project for my planned youtube video build series. I am learning […]
Okay, December is over, 2018 is over, 7.1% of 2019 is over.. It’s high time I wrote a December update 🙂 Burn-in machine Probably the most single amount of time was invested into building of the new burn-in machine. This project is completely on Sebastian, I am just a source of information about current burn-in […]
Mid November.. we are having a meeting with guys from Creepy Studio, discussing results of Designblok. I am pretty frustrated, with this amount of resources spent (wasted), trying hard not to show it and demotivate others. Actually, I am depressed. I don’t mind failing when it is about building a machine, trial and error experiments […]
This year, October was unusually warm and beautiful, it was great to look through the window while working and watch people enjoying the weather 🙂 So, this is what we did in Octorber: Puri Nixie Clock I started development of Puri Nixie Clock in August 2017, more than a year ago. In october 2018, it […]
Summer is always busy. We need to do more work before holidays season (July/August) and then need to catch up with the work we delayed – and this happens in September. Fortunately, beside regular work on nixie tubes and clocks, we started several new projects and I want to write about these. Sebastian – our new […]
Everytime I finally get to writing a post I am surprised how much time passed.. Since September, I decided to post updates every month. There are more and more things happening, more open projects, more people working on them.. So I must write continuously. Otherwise the information are condensed and miss the details and opinions I […]
New year started in good way, there were no troubles with manufacture on our side, no surprises on side of suppliers. After Christmas holidays, we jumped into work relaxed, with new energy. The days are longer, with more sun, spring will come soon 😉
Another exciting year is over, let’s take what it brought to our nixie tube endeavour!
Customers often ask questions related to lifespan and reliability of our nixie tubes. We recently made a tube with serial number #3000, I think we now have representative sample of tubes to make some nice statistics. In following months, I will write several articles covering all the problematics.
Recent 6 months were pretty busy, we now make much faster progress in development of our little nixie tube factory than anytime ever. This blogpost is a summary of our successes and also problems we face to. Let’s take a look what’s been going on here: Zen Nixie Clock The Zen Nixie Clock is what […]
Year 2017 is here, right time to review year 2016. Year 2016 was about transformation from one-man-show to small company. And because business is about numbers, I decided I will share them with you. Maybe business people among you will have some notes to my decisions 😉 One year ago, I set myself a goal […]
I am bringing new information regarding the Zen Nixie Clock progress.. Briefly, 99% of all things ready, whole project is now blocked by issues with the aluminum stands.
Middle of September is here – expected time of shipment of the Zen Nixie Clocks, let’s take a look at what is ready and what we are waiting for.
New updates regarding the Zen Nixie clock are here! Aluminum parts surface finish I just received first small batch of tube bases from Adruu, Netherlands based company specialised in surface treatments of aluminum parts. The results is amazing – uniform surface, very nice satin texture. The bases are bead blasted first, then bright dipped and eventually […]
The Zen nixie clock is successfully evolving, right time to share the current phase in a post! Display case The case is designed in a minimalistic way to emphasize the nixie tubes themselves. The overal shape of the case and surface finish of the parts will fit every interior. The stand is made of aluminum, […]
It has been almost two years since my last post on the blog. In 2014, I decided to switch to Facebook and add only short posts with photos. Facebook is great platform for sharing short posts and interact with people, but I found I miss writing more detailed posts. We are now working on several interesting projects […]
I think it might be interesting to write down all the info about my participation in the When Prague Meets Shanghai contest as it eventually became one of the milestones in my fight for resurrecting the nixie tubes manufacture.
Hi! Do You count yourself as a nixie tube enthusiast? Would You like to become a part of nixie tube’s rebirth? I worked really really hard past two years, on full time basis, putting a small scale nixie tube manufacture together and I am almost ready now.. I designed first nixie clock with tubes made […]
I currently build a getter flasher according to Ron Soyland‘s design (he will publish it on his site soon). There is a few photos from the building process:
Soooo.. After six weeks of intensive development, I am posting first photo of finished ShanghaiTime clock. As I already wrote, I designed this clock for a glass-art contest “When Prague Meets Shanghai” arranged by a czech company producing high-end glass chandeliers called Preciosa. I plan to write more, attach some photos of the innards, electronics […]