How often do you rotate the tubes in your nixie clock ?

[greg...@hotmail.com]

I've been rotating the Burroughs 5092 tubes in my clocks yearly to even-out the wear (sounds like car tires.....), but I'm inclined to do it less often after reading about the recent IN-18 death that could have been caused by stressing the pins.

Has anyone done less-frequent rotations ?

[David Forbes]

Greg,

I don't understand why you'd ever do this. The digits of a standard
clock get cycled at least once a day by displaying the time. Poisoning
will only occur to cathodes that never get used. Who cares if they get
poisoned? They're never used!

I have had several clocks running in my house for over ten years, and
they work just fine. The only sign of age is silvering of the glass on
the ZM1010 clock, which doesn't interfere with the ability to read the
digits.

--
David Forbes, Tucson AZ

[Tidak Ada]

Try to program your clock processor to execute a ring count for about 10 min's every night at for instance !:00 a.m. No need to change tubes!

---

From: neoni...@googlegroups.com [mailto:neoni...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of greg...@hotmail.com
Sent: donderdag 23 januari 2014 20:58
To: neoni...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [neonixie-l] How often do you rotate the tubes in your nixie clock ?

I've been rotating the Burroughs 5092 tubes in my clocks yearly to even-out the wear (sounds like car tires.....), but I'm inclined to do it less often after reading about the recent IN-18 death that could have been caused by stressing the pins.

Has anyone done less-frequent rotations ?

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[greg...@hotmail.com]

Try to program your clock processor to execute a ring count for about 10 min's every night at for instance !:00 a.m. No need to change tubes!

Unfortunately my 6-digit clocks are 100% hardware (4000 CMOS), so they cant be cycled

My big clock has 15 tubes for the hours, like a conventional clock, so they cant be cycled either

Fortunately the Burroughs tubes seem to be quite rugged, mechanically and electrically.

[Jonathan Peakall]

Same for me. Never had a problem, in fact I've never had to replace a tube.
Jonathan

[threeneurons]

Never. If the unused cathodes get poisoned, so be it. Won't see it, since they're never lit.

[greg...@hotmail.com]

I'm concerned about my cathodes sputtering away after several years. My big clock has tubes with a single-digit illuminated 24/7, which is the worst-case scenario. The Burroughs datasheet documents testing done circa 1960, and they observed basically no failures on several batches of tubes after 30,000 hours (almost 4 years). By rotating the tubes, I would expect I could maximize their lifetime by evening-out the wear on the cathodes, assuming that sputtering is the death-mechanism. If I were to wail until a tube failed, presumably from sputtering, there is a higher risk that the unused cathodes are poisoned (from their lack of usage).

So I see it as a tradeoff between (a) mechanical damage from resocketing, (b) cathode wearout. I just dont know how to optimize between these 2.

6091 nixies are getting hard to find, not to mention pricey. My clock has 15 of them, and I dont want to dip into the few spares I have.