Story Time: How you got to the nixie hobby?

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SWISSNIXIE - Jonathan F.

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Feb 4, 2018, 1:00:38 PM2/4/18
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I made this post to share my story how i found my way to nixie-tubes, and i'm curious how everyone else came to this hobby :)

My way to nixie tubes was a "double accidental". The very first encounter with this type of tubes were around 2001 when i was around ~10-11 years old, along my way to school there was a little local scrapyards, where me and my friends used to go and collect all kind of materials for more and less usefull constructions of electronic. One day we tear apart a old calculator that had "strange looking number tubes" and we took a few of them home, after a few tries to get them on with a lab power supply and the few search request with the internet of that time didn't bring up anything helpful, so the tubes ended up in a storage container, which ended back at the scrap yard again..
I never seen a vacuum or nixie tube again until 2013. At that time i ordered a few GM-Tubes from a bulgarian seller on ebay, he put a few IN-12 as a gift in the package. I instantly remembered my old scrapyard find, and started to reseach these type of tubes just for curiousity. From there on i fell in love with the typical orange glow that instantly remains of "old age" (from my point of lifespan :-) ) and just looks very beautiful. I quickly discovered that there are alot of different types of nixie tubes around, so i started collecting them. I also started to find out more about old electronic technology, and started to collect all kind of vacuum tubes and circuits. About a year in collecting tubes and stuff i noticed that i will run out of space.. so i had to decide to only collect nixie tubes since they don't take up to much space. Today, 5 years later I own around 240 different types of nixies with around 600 tubes total.

Im very interested in how you got to the tubes, since there are a lot of people here that have seen encountered nixies when they still were a normal electronic part and not something considered rare or collectible.

Dan Harboe Burer

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Feb 4, 2018, 3:06:44 PM2/4/18
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Okay I will contribute with my own story:

I first encountered the tubes back in the 1980s..  (I was 14 years or so) I was given a PCB from a clock with 4 nixie tubes..well as kids sometimes do I took it apart, dismantled the 4 nixies (I did not know they were called that back then - they were just wierd displays)  - and put them in storage and forgot all about them while playing with meccano, lego and electronics...
Later (1990 or so) I again encountered nixie tubes when I bought my first frequency counter at a local flea market - a Philips....neither did I think twice about them this time.. I just used the counter until I gave to a friend in the mid 1990s... 
Okay now time jumps to around 2001 where I by chance stumbled over a HP 5245L counter ..and dismantled it..at the same time I found Claus Urbachs kits (I think it was) and bought one..and threw together my first clock with the nixies from the HP counter
Within the same time frame I happened to find Raymond Wieslings Geekklok/ FLW kit.. and the lot of B7971s from "usmintquarters" I think they were called?  I managed to purcase approx 25 of them before the prices exploded... I got in touch with R. Wiesling back then and ended up buying and receiving a GeekKlok kit - and later a FLW. I have so far only assembled the Geekklok...
Wiesling recommended the Nixie forum back then.. and I have been here since then... and while collecting /dumpster diving/ scavenging other instruments and gadgets I kept accumulating instruments with nixies and loose nixies of course....
My friends know I like them so once in a while someone shows up with tubes or instruments with them. :)
I have no idea how many loose nixie tubes I have now..hundreds at least (when I don't include the approx 2000pcs IV-6 VFD tubes I still have in my garage). Apart from the IV-6, I stick to the US and German nixies.. I find them more pleasing than the Russian tubes :)
I also have ended up with quite a collection of instruments wit nixie displays.. I haven't got the heart to tear them apart if they work ..so my house is beginning to resemble the lab from "The Dish" :/

And the four tubes I pulled from that clock back in the 1980s?  I still have them here in my collection somewhere! :)

..
Dan

   
 


   

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Tomasz Kowalczyk

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Feb 4, 2018, 5:39:40 PM2/4/18
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I encountered them while studying at Warsaw University of Technology. There are still dozens of Meratronik multimeters being used there - mostly because these are really idiot-proof and students won't destroy them :)  Having a manual range setting is also a bonus, because students can learn about how the measurement is actually done. I doubt that the 5-digit display was still useful, as these probably weren't calibrated for years.
I instantly fell in love with the orange glow and the way the digits are not in one plane. I didn't know how these were called, but then... I've got a message from my friend, that one of the institutes will be disposing old equipment. It was not working as intended, but the displays were mostly intact. I literally carried as much as I was able to carry - a V-541, a PFL-21 and three C549As.  I didn't yet know which tubes are more worthy, if I had the knowledge, I would take another C549A instead of PFL-21 ;) 
Since then I am collecting tubes like a maniac - I snipe on internet auctions alot and visit local scrap electronics market regularly (that's where real deals can be found). I'm still studying and working at the same time, so I made only one clock so far, but I'm getting closer and closer to a solid base on STM32 microcontroller. 
Right now I own about 300 nixies waiting for better future as clocks.

Joe Croft

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Feb 4, 2018, 7:02:49 PM2/4/18
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Hi Yall,

My love for all things glowing orange started with my dad's nothingboxes back
when I was 6 or 7 (Long time ago) . Simple little relex oscilator's using a
neon buld, resistor and a capacitor. His circuit was a bit different than most
though. I've attached a picture. Naturaly, the powersupply was not what's in
the schematic. He used a big 90v battery from RCA that would put a tingle up
to your elbos if you licked your fingers and pt both hands across it.

I saw nixie clocks before maybe when I was in my 20s but didn't really have
the money to play with them until later in life when I made my NixieNeon
clock. It blends neon bulbs and nisie tubes together. I liked it because the
processor was not really involved in the running of the clock. It just let it
keep the time during power losses and gave it a little eye candy.

See http://ww.nixieneon.com. I have a kit or two left and several PCBs if
anyone is interested.

-joe
nothingbox.png

gregebert

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Feb 5, 2018, 12:46:05 AM2/5/18
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My name is Greg, and I am an addict.......of nixie tubes

It all started when I was in the 7th grade; most kids I knew were into sports or starting into drugs. I got my fix from Radio Shack P-BOX kits. The neon 'idiot light' project had 5 NE-2 bulbs bulbs and ran on 4 AA batteries. Well, that did it for me, and soon I was building blinking neon gizmos that ran on the 120V line (Meh, who needs a transformer....not me)

About 2 years later, my friend's father was selling off some surplus equipment he got from the TRW swap meet; I got a Microdot 412A FM SIgnal Generator, which had 6 nixie tubes for displaying the frequency, and a myriad of illuminated switches, knobs, and meters. This thing big (19" rack x 20" deep x 18" tall), heavy (almost 100 lbs), and chock-full of electronic and mechanical wonders. I really wish I had a photo; definitely the coolest looking equipment I ever saw. And I had one.....

I used the  frequency counter for a few years, which in itself was impressive because it measured over 550 Mhz with discrete transistor circuits when it was built in the mid 1960's. Then I junked it, though I kept the 6-tube+socket+cage in my junkbox for about 30 years, knowing someday I would make a clock with it. I had mostly forgotten about it till 2011, when I decided it was finally time to make my first nixie clock, and now it sits on my desk at work. The walls of my cubicle are decorated with PC boards I've done since then, all of them nixie-related.

I have 7 nixie clocks running now, with a total of 61 tubes in use. I keep telling myself I wont build another clock, but I end up doing that anyways (1 wrapping-up design, 1 on the drawing board, and more inside my head....).

There's definite;y something wrong going on inside my head; maybe it was caused by breathing-in too many toxic fumes from all the things we used to burn/blow-up when I was a kid.


Paul Parry

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Feb 5, 2018, 3:27:43 AM2/5/18
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My story starts very similar to Jonathan's,

I was the sort of kid who took toys apart, rather than play with them.. at the age of 6 my Dad would take me to the scrapyard and allow me to fill the boot of the car with 'stuff' that I can take to bits.. scrapyards were pretty good back then, you could find anything from scopes to random military bits and even the odd car! One of the things I got was a calculator the size of a suitcase and I never forget the strange glass number tubes inside, this was back in the late 1970's.
I continued to tinker and take things apart, at the age of 9 I had about 12 TV sets in my bedroom all with the backs off and stacked up in a 4 X 4 pile, something about the smell of warm valve based electronics.. My parents are both non technical and they just sort of shut the bedroom door and let me get on with it. 

Life, education, career and children then sort of got in the way until 2014 when kids had grown up, I had a secure well paid job and I just stumbled upon Nixie tubes again, they came up as a random picture on google images when I was looking for something, and it instantly came back to me the calculator I took apart 40 or so years earlier! that was that, I wanted to make a clock.. had no Nixies so found an old frequency counter on the bay that had 7 of the GN-4 tubes inside, brought a kit and converted it into a clock. Found it immensely satisfying and wanted to make another.. by a stroke of luck I found another one of the same frequency counters on the bay again and messaged the seller, he had 6 of them, all ex RAF surplus so I sold my first clock and with the proceeds purchased all 6 of the counters and then turned all of them into clocks.. sold them and brought more stuff.. I just enjoyed the process of making the clocks.. Move on another 4 years, I now get to make them for a living, which I am so lucky to be able to do :) 

Paul Andrews

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Feb 5, 2018, 8:08:20 AM2/5/18
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Mine is way less nostalgic. Despite apparently being older than most of you (which I mention only because I don't consider myself old, so it comes as a shock when I am the oldest person in th room), I have no memory of encountering Nixie tubes until this millennium. At some point I saw a Nixie clock - it was probably fairly recently,Mir would have been on the Internet, something like Pinterest or tumblr, and I remember thinking how great they looked, and how Incouldnt afford one.

Fast forward to just over a year ago when I was about to get married (again) and I was on Pinterest looking at steampunk stuff for the wedding and naturally I cam across some nixie clocks. This time they looked more affordable, maybe it was just relative to the wedding itself, so I bought a kit and put it together and it formed part of the decoration for the (indeterminate epoch) house-party themed reception/treasure hunt. It features in my wedding album!

Naturally, I figured I could do a better job of the software, and so started the obsession.

A few months later I was in a hotel on a business trip and I thought "I should just buy six of every tube". Oh the naïveté! Well I have a whole bunch now, but I am trying to be selective, buying just the ones that I find particularly interesting.

As far as my better software goes, well it turns out I had to build my own hardware to accommodate it, and I Just finished my first real PCB. Real, because it is a complete clock. I worked my way up to it by building individual parts as standalone boards I could breadboard together.

I have also gotten distracted with fixing other old tech along the way - antique fans and tube radios and my latest - a little RCA 45 record player - a 45J2.

Terry S

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Feb 5, 2018, 9:17:01 AM2/5/18
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For me, my first real exposure that I can recall was in 1989, when I started my 2nd real job in industry. The company had a large scale inspection CMM that had a nixie tube display, 3 actually, one for each axis. I was far more fascinated with the display than the instrument itself. Later I learned they had scrapped the machine, and of course I kicked myself for not getting to those display units!

I do recall seeing individual nixie tubes in packages at the local Radio Shack as a kid in the 60's & 70's -- at the time I could not imagine of what use they would be.

It's interesting how many of us seem to share in interest in old radios. I frequent rec.antiques.radio+phono, although there isn't a lot of activity over there these days. I have hundreds of radios in my collection. 

Years back I decided I needed to collect every known example of the 70's Zenith solid state "Circle of Sound" table radios. Soon I had them all and duplicates of many. There was a version that had a film strip style clock which was notoriously failure prone -- in fact they were all pulled from store shelves by Zenith and refitted with a blank panel where the clock had been, and pasted with a new model number sticker.

I had a good working example and one with a bad clock as well. At the time, my buddy Sal, who used to be an active member here in the Yahoo days, egged me on about nixie tube clocks. Eventually he sent me some tubes, and I hand-wired (wire wrap actually) a TTL based clock and installed it into one of the "Circle of Sound" radios, creating the first known example of a nixie tube clock radio. A picture of that clock radio graced the landing page of this forum for some time.

The "Circle of Sound" sets are long gone now -- sold off to make room for more vintage tube radios. But since then I've built quite a few nixie clocks, some from kits and some from scratch.  A few VFD clocks as well, and a couple dekatron projects too. I'm good with the electronics, but I admit I struggle with the enclosures. So I've taken to using found objects for housings where I can.

At 57, I can now see down the road to retirement and a little more leisure time to devote to the orange glow. And radios. And motorcycles.

J Forbes

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Feb 5, 2018, 10:38:32 AM2/5/18
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They were part of the test equipment that my dad used at work, occasionally we would visit his work. Didn't think much of it when I was young in the 1960s. although the stuff looked really neat. Some time in the 1980s, I got a used Bell & Howell (Heathkit) DVM with three Nixies, used it very seldom, but kept it around. Then around 2001 David got going with Cathode Corner, and all this stuff started to get interesting again. In 2002 I got one of his first three wristwatch boards, and also I made a TTL Nixie clock. I had also got a few old Beckman counters, so I made a vacuum tube digital clock with NE-2 display. I've been wearing the three versions of David's watch design since then, and looking unsuccessfully at yard sales and thrift stores for Nixie containing equipment.

Jon D.

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Feb 5, 2018, 11:46:10 AM2/5/18
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When I was in high school in Fairfax County, VA in 1968-1970 as a freshman and sophomore (yes, I'm an old guy, too, like some of you), I was placed in advanced math classes (had calculus as a sophomore).  In one class, we went one day and marveled at an electronic quadratic equation root solver that had a Nixie tube display with a bunch of digits for each root.  I was blown away by the look of it, and I obviously still remember it to this day.  I don't know if it was tube based (it might have been at that time) but I suppose it could have been early in the solid state era (since I think it was a pretty compact unit, but then stereos were fairly large in comparison and we had a tube-based record player/amp at home).

But I didn't start buying Nixies or building Nixie clocks until about 2010, however.  Too busy working up to that point I suppose...then I ran across some articles on Nixie clocks on the internet somewhere and I was hooked.  

alb.001 alb.001

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Feb 5, 2018, 11:51:49 AM2/5/18
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   My story as as follows

When I was young I lived near Brunswick Ave and Bloor St in Toronto Canada.  There was a fried chicken place on the corner which closed and was replaced by a frozen yogurt place.   They had a sign made up using B7971 tubes which said " sorry, out of chicken"  in their window. That was the first time I ever saw a nixie tube.  Fast forward 15 years and I finished university and got the electronics bug and starting making digital clocks including the one next my bed still working after 40 years.  I got the nixie bug and started building clocks with them as well. I go to ham-fests all over looking for interesting stuff that I can use.  About 4 years ago I found a desk-top Sony calc which was nixie and works well.  It joined my already large collection of vintage desk-top calcs  including a 1960's era WANG Labs engineering one with nixie keyboard for input, electronics package in a small suitcase and printer which used spark erosion on aluminized paper.   I went back looking for that yogurt place but it and the sign are long gone.

    Phil

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Grahame

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Feb 5, 2018, 12:35:02 PM2/5/18
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Another old timer here... I was living in north Kent in the south east
of England and when I was about 14, round 1970, I was going to a radio
club in Dartford. I was building an oscilloscope (E.N. Bradley The
Oscilloscope Book) using a VCR139A and I was struggling to get it
working correctly and Geoff G3NPA at the club offered to help. So I
hauled the beast around to his house and sat in his workshop was a
partly built home made 6 tube nixie clock... All glowing neon and TTL...
I have never forgotten it.

My second exposure to neon was some years later when I was working for
the UK Atomic Energy Authority in Dorset. One of my projects was to
operate a small gamma ray densitometer that used a row of dekatron
counters from the PM tube. I spent hours looking at them.

My career (chemical engineer) took me off to the USA, Canada, France,
Spain... and when I had a more settled life I again picked up
electronics as a hobby. One of the areas I gravitated back to was
nixies, dekatrons and oscilloscope tubes.

Grahame Highlands Scotland GM4EKI


Keith Moore

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Feb 6, 2018, 1:18:48 PM2/6/18
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Unlike most folks here, I do not have any background in electronics nor exposure to the electronics perspective of nixies and glowing tubes. However, I do go way back with nixies, too. I started as a computer software developer in the 1970's and worked on Burroughs systems for years. Burroughs machines had neon and nixies as part of their design. So through the lifespan of neon, nixies, numitrons, LEDs, LCD, VFD, TFT, etc, I have been interested in the glowing things and the progression of the technologies though this brief history of a few decades. 
I really didn't think a lot about nixies between about 1980-2010. In the early 2000's I thought it would be nice if I taught myself a bit about electronic. I figured it would be useful  or at least quench a curiosity.  I started building B.E.A.M. toys and then progressed to doing on-the-chip gadgets the leveraged these amazing PIC and Atmel microcontrollers. I was really excited about the features these little chips had. And I started to experiment more and more learning ever so little about actual electronics, but a lot about these little ucontrollers. A few years later, I was talking with a friend about some of the self-teaching I was doing building tiny low voltage toys and robots. He is an LED display freak and he asked me if I knew about these things called dekatrons. I hadn't heard of them. So I looked into it and discovered that there was crossover into the old nixie work that I lived in decades ago. I couldn't believe (still cannot) that you can get such wonderful old display tubes and make them do amazing things like you all do here. I was hooked right there and then and got a kit from threeneurons and haven't looked back since (except to look back and buy more nixie stock and more projects). 

I have been a pied piper for preservation of old computer technologies and software for years (https://mediaarchaeologylab.com/) so I added to this my passion to preserve and demonstrate these great glowing devices. Thanks to all of you for the advice and inspiration over the past years! I still do not know electronics well but you all have made me feel welcome and continue to provide lots of meaningful fun/learning. 

Nick

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Feb 7, 2018, 4:27:48 AM2/7/18
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Where to start? I made my first radio (valve) when I was about 9 (parts from HL Smiths in Tottenham Court Road), was a very science-based kid (with a lots of arts & drama too). We had all sorts of nice kit at school, including a load of dekatron counters for stuff like timing intervals and scintillations... seem to recall some nixie stuff too.

Did electronic engineering and a load of maths & physics at university - lots of equipment there had nixies/dekatrons, but everything was moving to LED so stuff was being chucked, so started pickup up tubes in the late 70s...

I started realizing I had a collecting problem when my girlfriends at the time were complaining about entire rooms full of stuff - since those days I've sold most of the big kit and concentrated on the nixies (and audio valves) - as of this morning, about 12,000 valves in the stock list, of which about 8,000 are nixies, VFDs, Panaplex etc. Just fell in love with that orange glow - always liked signs too... tried making signs myself, but it's very very tough...

I should point out that I also collect some other stuff, so it's obviously a personality trait. Maybe a good one. Maybe not...

Luckily SWMBO (of 30 years this year!) is extremely understanding - I have a separate building for my workshops so most stuff is out of the house. I've been lucky enough to know John Smout who has been a fount of useful information on design - my forte is definitely just on the electronic front.

I only worked as an EE whilst paying off the student sponsorship - I was put through university on a scholarship from ITT and worked at STL Harlow (where fiber optics were discovered). Designed a bit of the Dopplar MLS (Microwave Landing System) for Harrier jump jets and some other nice stuff, then decided EE wasn't for me professionally, so moved into the software arena and became a h/w & s/w design engineer for DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) in France (Annecy & Valbonne), Switzerland (Geneva & Zurich), the UK (DEC Park in Reading) and a bit in Maynard, MA. Then moved into the Fintech world: Had a few startups, a couple of which crashed and burnt and a couple that did OK. Retired for a bit, got bored and am now a CTO for a charitable fund in the Gulf region, so am 3,500 miles away from my workshops... (though I have quite a nice small one here now and there is a good Makerspace nearby)

Main interest now is in designing micro-power IoT environmental monitors - these are based around the MSP430 series of processors from TI.

Nick

blkadder

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Feb 19, 2018, 3:53:57 PM2/19/18
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  I think my first introduction to Nixie tubes was while browsing around the web, and I started reading about how you could put your own clock together using these funny little vacuum tubes called Nixies.  I have had no electronics training or really even an interest in electronics, aside from how to wire a car stereo.

  I purchased a kit from eBay along with a bunch of IN-12 tubes from Russia.  I was really in over my head with the kit, as to never really doing any electronic work.  I read lots and lots of web pages about what kind of tooling I would need, so more money spent on first cheap equipment (quickly recycled) and then better equipment.  My first project was a total disaster, but I was determined to get one working. 
  My next kit came from PVElectronics, and I thought i had messed that one up, but an email or two to Pete and it was working!  Such a thing of beauty, I could watch it all day long.  Now about five years later, I have put together kits and given them to family, friends, etc.  Now I have two kits to build that my wife made me promise would be kept in our house.  Luckily the newer kits have the ability to sync the time online, so no more adjusting them every time the power bumps, or daylight saving time comes around.
  This group has been invaluable to me for learning new things, getting ideas on enclosures, and seeing what all you professional guys have come up with.
  Thanks for being there for me everyone.
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