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I got a sample of etched parts today, the quality is absolutely outstanding! Sharp edges, no etched spots, no under-etched places. I cant wait to put it all together! Sorry for quality of the photos, all were made in a hurry, as usual 😉 Hexagonal anode grid

It has been some time since my last blog post, don’t be afraid, I am still working on nixie tube project! Around 2-3 hours a day in average. I am building a shed on the garden where I will place all the workshop. I hope it will be finished in one month. I am also […]

I finnaly got a stainless steel foil (316 type) I orded a few months ago from US. I don’t understand why such a primitive thing is impossible to get (or just find) in EU 🙁 The thickness of it is 0.1mm, I was afraid it would be too thin, but it exactly what I need. […]

I got some old non-working tubes to disassemble as Ron Soyland does. There are some nice pieces of material that are I could hardly find else as a molybdenum sheets, nickel sheets and pipes, getters, tungsten electrodes.. It is also nice stuff to study for possible working techniques.

I’ve finally got an argon bottle, 1.3m³ of pure argon (99.996%) pressed in 8l bottle. It is pretty heavy 😉 The argon was chosen because it is has similar features to neon, but is much cheaper and – the most important – it is available.. This image comes from Wikipedia. The argon compared to neon […]

As I mentioned before, I am going to use a borosilicate glass in combination with tungsten wire. This glass is used in labs for scientific glass blowing, so the first place where I started to look for that glass were e-shops with lab supplies. There ale lots of suppliers, but all want some minimum quantity […]

I started searching for material by looking for tungsten wire.. I found several expensive offers on eBay, too much money for several inches of wire 🙁 Then I wrote several wire manufacturers, there the price/length ratio was much better, but the minimal quantity I had to order was 10kg of wire ($1500) 🙁 Finally, I […]

The essential matter when making vacuum tubes is good contact of electrodes and glass case, it is called glass to metal seal. It looks simple – just to melt glass, place the hot wire electrode in and wait until it cools down. But there is a problem of different thermal expansion coefficient (TEC), what causes […]