2012⁽³¹⁾

I am waiting for some stuff to come from US before I can continue building the inert gas manifold.. So I brushed up the parts of the oven for baking the tubes and made some progress on it. I found some Promasil fire-resistant boards in a local shop in 50% sale, perharps Christmas sale 😉 […]

I have been moving to new house recently, November was really busy month, almost no time for nixie research.. But there are also good news, I have more free room in the new house and big garden, where I plan a shack for nixie related activities (metal lathe and some other noisy and dirty tooling).. […]

The chuck is now mounted on the spindle, also the worm gears are now ready.. I wait for the jaws to be cut on the laser..

I made an idler pulley tonight so I am able to finally try turning the chuck!

I have almost no time to spend on nixies recently (moving to new house, newborn twins..), so there are some photos of my previous work.. It is mostly preparing of tools for work in the future.. A glassworking torch, oxy-gas..

Altough I haven’t written any post recently, I am spending almost all my free time on the nixie tubes making (or better – trying to make 🙂 ).  I am quite busy these days, mostly because of newborn twins ;-).. I built new spot welder (a tranformer based one) with a pincher and a stem […]

At the beginning – I would like to thank to Ron Soyland, I would not be able to get it work without his great help (hundreds of emails) and his extensive knowlege. Thank You Ron! When I bought the machine, I thought I will just google and download a manual for it. But it eventually […]

I am step by step disassembling all the helium leak detector I bought recently. There are several things to do.. cleaning the flanges, replacing the o-ring, checking the oil in pumps.. Ron Soyland mentioned that he disassembled also the spectrometer unit to check the filament state, so I decided to do so as well. The […]

I tried to etch a stainless steel today.. I used a mixture of hydrochloric acid (HCl), water and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The peroxide acts here as a catalysator, so when the solution stop etching, just add few mls of it and it start again (as long as there is still some HCl in it..). First […]

I accidentally skipped several levels in my research and bought a helium leak detector. It was located in France so I had to ask seller to arrange a shipment to Czech republic and.. it arrived yesterday! It is Alcatel ASM 51, 30 years old machine, but if it is working it will be much mightier […]

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 will try to make an induction heater from common induction cooker. Ron Soyland have already warned me that it will perhaps be impossible due to too low frequency of the induction cookers (60khz, needed is several hundred khz). I will try anyway, it would be so easy to just replace the coil that it […]

I used to spot weld wires for electrodes by placing them across and weld. That works but doesn’t look well and I think it makes strain in the glass when sealed (more steel wire in glass, different thermal expansions). I decided to make a simple jig from some aluminum junk so that I will be […]

The most difficult part of the tube will be definitely stems. More than 10 pins must go through, all vacuum tight of course, on small area. I have some ideas about how to do it properly, but the set up will be pretty complex. Furnace with inert atmosphere, high temperature (around 1000ºC), some kind of […]

I spent last two weeks by making completely standalone argon tubes. I wanted to learn how to make a vacuum-tight feedthroughs and try to tip off the tube from filling system. I prepared a simple manifold for filling with argon, what turned out to be leaky, but I didn’t go for super purity gas and […]

I was struggling with a glassworking lathe recently.. All went well, until I tried to start the motor 😉 My original shaft (inside the small bearings) connected to motor’s shaft was made from aluminium. But probably during pressing it into bearings and pulley, it bent slightly, so it became eccentric 🙁 So the shaft was […]

This PSU was made according to Lindsay’s PSU here: 40-400V, 20W power supply. I would like to thank for the writing of that great howto.

One of the most important tools for working with glass will be glassworking lathe. I decided to build one by myself, commercial solutions are too expensive or aren’t available.. It will consists of four ball bearings, two dc motors, one linear bearing, several aluminum profiles and some minor parts.. Synchronizing of the chucks will be […]

After some unsuccessful experiments with common (non-vacuum) stopckocs, valves, etc., I finally decided to use stopcocks designated for high vacuum. I found some on eBay for $25/piece. I applied a vacuum grease, set up an simple vacuum system with hoses and tried it. The stopcock is pretty vacuum tight, but there are still some other […]