My favorite Nixie tube

[Paul Andrews]

at least for now! Just de-soldered a bunch of these from an old counter (and some 7441A chips). They were very grimy, but cleaned up nicely and they all work well. Cathodes are shiny and there is no darkening on the glass:

[Mike Mitchell]

I'm a Dalibor Farny fan. I couldn't afford six tubes, but I found a single-tube clock that works with a Z568M tube.

[Terry S]

I like the horizontal wire grid as well, what is the tube?

Terry

[Paul Andrews]

It's a Mullard ZM1177

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[gregebert]

My favorite: Burroughs 5092. Small (0.6" numbers), but very reliable. I've never had one fail on me, and I've never encountered a defective one via Ebay.

I have clocks with other tubes (6091, IN-18, and coming soon, b7971), but I can tell they dont have the same ruggedness.

[jf...@my-deja.com]

On Wednesday, March 29, 2017 at 8:50:15 AM UTC-7, gregebert wrote:

I have clocks with other tubes (6091, IN-18, and coming soon, b7971), but I can tell they dont have the same ruggedness.

I am not sure what you are expecting, but I have had no longevity problems with my B7971s.  By now, the three six-digit clocks have been running 24/7 for 40 +years.  I did nothing heroic to "protect" them, using plain old carbon comp resistors to limit the cathode currents from an unregulated power supply.   The tubes were surplus from John Meshna, so I assume that they already had been in use for over 10k hours (estimating about 2k hours/year).  My only B7971 failure occurred when I dropped one about 1 meter onto a concrete floor.

[gregebert]

I'm certainly not expecting 40+ years of continuous operation from any of my tubes, but if that's what you've getting I may as well give it a try and run my 7971's 24/7 .  I assumed that bigger tube + more pins + more interior surface area & materials would lead to significantly shorter lifespan.

[Quixotic Nixotic]

On 29 Mar 2017, at 16:50, gregebert wrote:

> My favorite: Burroughs 5092. Small (0.6" numbers), but very reliable. I've never had one fail on me, and I've never encountered a defective one via Ebay.

I have had a few of these used, which showed quite severe cathode poisoning, but I was able to recondition them with cycling the digits at higher current until they shine like new again.

Regards,

John S

[Tomasz Kowalczyk]

Fun fact, there was someone who (by mistake or with bad intention) labelled once some tubes as ZM1177, while they definitely are NOT them. I knew that while buying those tubes, but well - I was curious and they costed 6$ with 74141 drivers and shipping.

So photo number 1 is sellers photo advertising 2x Z573M and 2x ZM1177. Smelly... 

Upon inspection after buying I am 100% sure - those are Z573M (or Z5730M) with all markings removed and this not-very-proffesional-label painted.

Z573Ms also look suspicious - they have only the model name on it, but unlike every single RFT tube I own (and I own almost 100 RFT nixies!) those two do not have WF logo.

Soo... what do you think? are those relabelled on purpose to sell to a client, who was in need of ZM1177s by someone who knew, that back before 1989 you couldn't just buy something from western world and import it to Poland? 

And does anyone have an RFT nixie tube without WF logo?

[Tomasz Kowalczyk]

 Whoops, of course when I was writing about tubes with red coating, I meant Z574M, not Z573M.

BTW. a random question about Burroughs tubes and their sockets, I've recently bought some broken PH meter with B-5445 tubes in it. They were sitting tight in their sockets, but after I've desoldered them, I can barely insert half of pin lenght inside sockets! Is it normal for Burroughs made sockets to require much force while inserting tubes? I'm afraid I could damage them, as I have only 4 working tubes, and these are pretty rare around the world (and non-existent in my country), so losing one would mean I lost all of them.

[Paul Andrews]

There's some interesting tubes for sale on ebay atm. DR-2010 (made in Brasil?), and in light of Tomasz post, some ZM1080 tubes.

[Alic]

The horizontal mesh tubes are beautiful indeed, but my favorite is a tube which has grid all around : the ZM1012!
I wish Dalibor would make a variant of the RZ568M with mesh like this! But it would probably not work well because of the added distance between the cathodes and the anode mesh.