The Art of Making a Nixie Tube [video] (opens in new tab)

> 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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.