The Art of Making a Nixie Tube [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Art of Making a Nixie Tube [video]

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199 pointsjvermillard51 comments

This is really cool. I've been enamored with Nixie tubes since I was a kid, and I finally got my hands on some surplus CCCP tubes and started a project with them. I'm keeping somewhat of a diary of my progress with photos and videos in this collection of tweets about the process: https://twitter.com/jazzychad/timelines/773442085278085121

Heh, reminds me of when i first found out that the spare tubed a musician friend of mine kept around for his amp was CCCP stamped. Given that we are both old enough that we grew up during the tail end of the cold war, that seemed somewhat like consorting with the enemy at first glance. These days i wonder how much of the cold war, particularly after Stalin's death, was a massive US propaganda creation.

> how much of the cold war, particularly after Stalin's death, was a massive US propaganda creation.

I think we can do a sort of differential analysis of the propaganda by looking at the coverage of events then and now. Back then, the USSR was repressing dissidents and engaging in proxy wars with the US; and became the universal bugbear, reviled in film and popular culture.

Nowadays, Russia is repressing dissidents and engaging in proxy wars with the US, including shooting down a civilian airliner; but the propaganda intensity is much lower. Is that because Russia is nominally capitalist and run by oligarchs who park their money in the West?

Russia was a the big buddy and teddy-bear of US and EU during the Yeltsin years, while the oligarch were grabbing everything and anything they could of the soviet industrial capacity for their own enrichment.

Then comes Putin, clamps down on said oligarchs, and all of a sudden we are right back at cold war rhetoric.

As for repressing dissidents, lets have a look at the number of civil wars and whatsnot that was instigated by USA around the "free" world during the same timeframe.

Both the east and the west have supported dictators and "crushed dissidents", and if you do a headcount the results are likely to surprise you.

As for your comment about MH317, I guess we all forgot about Iran Air Flight 655 where a US AEGIS guided missile destroyer which was arguably back then (and even now to some extent) the best radar system in the world shot down an Iranian civilian flight while violating Iranian territorial waters at the time. MH317 was a pretty bad and tragic incident but frankly IA 655 was arguably worse.

That induction heating step is critical. Ensure you heat metal whilst the vacuum system is still pumping otherwise if you heat the metal after the tube is sealed the metal will out gas giving you bad vacuum, completely destroying your Nixie tube. It's a pleasure to see such refined work, many many frustrating mistakes were made to reach this level of refinement.

Isn't that why the getter is added?

What is a 'getter' though? And what does it actually do?

EDIT - Wikipedia [1] says it's a strip of (barium?) metal that is evaporated to react with any remaining gas/moisture particles in the tube and deposit them on the surface safely. It causes the shiny metallic film seen at the top of some tubes, I think?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getter

You are right, another article touches on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum

That getter is fascinating, it's a new concept to me. Recently we blew a picoammeter because we fired up a vacuum guage in UHV after disconnection from the roughing pump. The vacuum guage out gassed massively giving us shit vacuum, this then fried the picoammeter and left us scratching our heads for a few hours. Firing the vacuum guage while still connected to the roughing pump would have solved this problem. Thanks for sharing the getter information.

A month ago, nothing you said would have made any sense to me, but after trying to make a glow discharge tube, it is eminently obvious (you have to be extremely careful with sensitive vacuum gauges).

It's incredible to see all the different sorts of craftsmanship needed to make tubes. It would be fascinating to turn this video into a longer exploration of the evolution of each of the techniques used.

Artisanal vacuum tubes are a thing.[1] There's some interest in this from the vinyl record and overpriced tube amp crowd. There are even people who rebuild old CRTs for early TVs.[2] It's a lot of work.

[1] http://hackaday.com/2014/11/21/artisanal-vacuum-tubes-hackad... [2] http://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_rebuild.html

There's no vacuum in a Nixie Tube!

That being said, it would be nice if classic tubes of yesteryear can be remade efficiently. Especially for antique radio enthusiasts.

Why do you say there's no vacuum? That's one of the steps in the videos.

Technically, at the end of the process, the resulting tube's gas pressure is high enough to be called "low pressure" rather than, say, "rough", "medium", or "high vacuum".

Uh, what?

Production involves pumping down to high vacuum, heating to degas, and then refilling with neon/argon at low pressure. Granted the production tube isn't at high vacuum, but it's not equivalent to ambient.

When they fill it with gas, wouldn't you say it is no longer a vacuum?

No theoretical reason why r couldn't be done, I think the more common guitar amp tubes are even in commercial production in China (and supposedly they've improved the robustness too). Bit of a niche market though.

glasslinger on YouTube has been experimenting with making some of the more unusual tubes too: https://youtu.be/BXAjspPLzRQ

This entire class of technology was universally known as "vacuum tubes" for a good reason.

Almost as cool as artisinal lightbulbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmLp9Mn-5rg

I wish there was a parts list for this! One of the problems that took so much effort in tube lifetimes were the coatings used. I'm wondering what types of coatings he's using. Need more info!

I'd be interested to learn more too. Old methods of tube production produced a lot of waste like Mercury and other toxic (carcinogenic) byproducts. I believe modern production methods (where they still exist) are better, and I bet this subject would make an interesting video/read in its own right.

We should connect and try to figure this out - there must be more of us; maybe even dozens!

I'm really, really impressed with the amount of work that goes into making these tubes and can understand why he's selling them for around $150, but what I don't get is how he can compete with the nixie tubes that go for under $10 on eBay. Are his better or more reliable?

Primarily size. The $10 ebay nixies are tiny.

If you can find 2-3" digit size nixie tubes on ebay for a substantially better rate then these, I'd be very, very surprised.

Yeah the IN-18 which I think is the big kind goes for like 180 bucks each.

These ones are 145 and they are stupidly (in a good way) humongous. I want to try building with these, if I'm honest, wow.

His are way, way nicer than most of what you can get on eBay these days. And if you find the big IN-18 or Z568M tubes, they will have comparable prices.

I also noticed that Dalibor provides warranty — for initial batches, even lifetime warranty. That is very impressive and well worth the prices.

I've seen this elsewhere and what baffled me was the startup aspect of it all.

He spent 5 years doing this and a non-insignificant amount of money. How does he know it will eventually all be worth it?

It seems like such a baffling risky step to take.

I can't imagine him getting back money that was spent on the equipment visible on the video selling these tubes. It seems to me more like the money wasn't a problem, and he just really wanted to start making these tubes (which is awesome).

He is getting money, he started the business with a loan IIRC, he's located in the Czech Republic which means that the cost of some of those things isn't as high as you would expect.

He's selling them at around 150$ per tube, his complete Nixie tube clock sells for 1700-1800$ and he's shipping these units about as fast as he can make them.

The volumes aren't high but like with any other artisan crafted item they are making money of it.

Great to hear, after watching the video (I recommend 2x speed) it feels like he very much earned it, but starting this business with a loan, wow..

On the contrary - I recommend watching it at 1x for the pleasure of discovery. What's with the rush?

I watched it at 4:30 in the morning and it almost put me back to sleep.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

If you know what you are looking for; you can buy used lab equipment very cheap. Most sellers don't even know what they are selling. You do need to spend a fair amount of time browsing.

I've been thinking about a glass lathe on CL for awhile now.

My problem is space.

About the comment:

icantdrive55 7 hours ago [dead] [-]

If you know what you are looking for; you can buy used lab equipment very cheap. Most sellers don't even know what they are selling. You do need to spend a fair amount of time browsing. I've been thinking about a glass lathe on CL for awhile now. My problem is space.

What the frak HN?! Why is this have been downvoted to a flag kill?! This guy is absolutly correct! you can buy lab equipment on Ebay on the cheap, many sellers don't know and don't care.

Local listings are even better you can sometimes buy a whole lathe for "free" by just agreeing to take it of their hands these things are huge and heavy and the transport costs are usually higher than the cost of an old machine.

Here is an example of a Machine Shop Lathe for 150 GBP not that different than the Lathe He uses (He doesn't seem to use a glass lather with it's own heating elements, but just a glass chuck and a torch).

https://www.gumtree.com/p/other-power-tools/machine-shop-lat... (yes a "faulty" motor, which is usually fixed by a new fuese or a drive belt).

Here is a fully functional one for 500 GBP https://www.gumtree.com/p/lathes/metal-turning-lathe/1191030...

And here is a beast 15X50" refurbished lathe for 2500 GBP

https://www.gumtree.com/p/lathes/colchester-triumph-15x50-la... With his slightly smaller brother (more in line with the size of the lather the guy has in his shop from what I can tell) for 1500$ http://www.ebay.com/itm/CLAUSING-COLCHESTER-13-X-40-ENGLISH-...

Do they need work? sure but you can buy an entire shop for less than 10,000$ if you are buying used, have some patience and can fix things up (and if you are planning to run a shop and you can't fix your own tools, when sorry but don't bother unless it's a hobby you don't mind spending money on since if you can't fix 99% of the problems yourself you'll be out of business pretty quickly).

You can see from the wide shot of his shop that the lathe he uses is a pretty old one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awkzCmQ0kVA this isn't some high end CNC lathe, this is a pretty large prescision shop lathe which can be bought for <2000$ in good and working condition, and usually for <500$ if it needs some repair simply because the thing requires a small crane to offload (these things can weight 2000 or more lbs.).

Old lathes are the "free couch" (or almost) of the machining world, people can't get rid of them because they are too big, and they aren't a rare item to command a huge premium unless they are relatively new or highly specialized.

Other testing equipment is also pretty darn cheap, I've bought signal generators and scopes for <100$ on many occasions of Ebay and local listings which were probably worth 5-10 times more (and I've resold them after a short refurbishment).

It doesn't look downvoted/dead to me: http://imgur.com/IYl7FLw

It was dead a few hours ago ;)

He's got another business running, a classifieds website, which he says paid for him to experiment with nixies.

As for how he knows it will eventually be worth it, isn't that the case with most new businesses?

Previous discussion from around a month ago about Dalibor Farny building out his workshop etc:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308974

http://www.daliborfarny.com/#about-me (you might need to scroll down to the "About Me" section).

> I needed more room so I moved from the garden shed to a local castle.

I had to rewind to make sure I heard that right.

Number 6 is dead on the top left tube in the observation rack.

Heh, that's a nice touch on the video if that was intentional.

Glassblowing is a disappearing trade itself. I'm not sure what university chemistry departments are doing these days, an in-house glass shop with one if not several skilled glassblowers used to be pretty common. Likely it's cheaper now to have this outsourced.

Here's a story from Caltech:

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassbl...

Imperial College's chemistry lab has their own glassblower:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24787-dream-job-scien...

Interesting to see those IKEA cutlery drying containers being used (about 3 minutes into the video). I've often seen them used for all sorts of different purposes. A very useful product.

http://www.ikea.com/sg/en/catalog/products/70179546/

Yeah, they're awesome and everywhere.

The name ORDNING means "order" (as in "the opposite of chaos", not as in "telling someone what to do"), by the way.

That seems like a pretty expensive manufacturing process. Not very capital-intensive though.

That was a really amazing video. Thanks for sharing.

Glass is an amazing material because it's one of the few that I can say I know nothing about how to manipulate it.

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