"Nixie tube" retro clock

[Dan Friedrichs]

This is a little odd, but I thought I'd post it anyways. "Nixie" tubes were vacuum tubes that contained filaments in the shape of each of the 10 numerals (0-9), and were used to produce digital displays prior to the advent of LED technology. I had an old (~1950's) piece of electronics test equipment that contained 7 of these tubes, but was otherwise no longer useful, so I salvaged the tubes and built this clock.

These tubes are typically mounted facing "up", but the particular ones I had face "down" (pins on the top), so I had to build a cantilevered box to hold them. The box is sweet gum wood, with amber shellac finish.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Dan,

Nixie tubes were used quite heavily when I started working in electronics. In air traffic control, we used a "digital" voltmeter for aligning the glide slope and runway centerline extended cursors on precision approach radar used for landing aircraft in bad weather and those meters were accurate to within a 0.10 DVC.

We have come a long ways baby!

[glenn bradley]

Too cool Dan. Being the young spout that I am, I had never seen those before (yeah, right ). What a novel timepiece that makes.

[Bruce Page]

That's something you won't see everyday! Very cool.

[Dan Hintz]

Hmmm, haven't seen many top-pin versions... probably have (or at least had) a boxload of them (the pin-down versions) somewhere in my junk pile.

[Jeff Monson]

Very cool Dan, excuse my ignorance but, what inuts the time and power to the tubes?

[Dan Friedrichs]

Very cool Dan, excuse my ignorance but, what inuts the time and power to the tubes?

There's a power cord coming out the back - I just did too good of job of hiding it in this picture, I guess There's also a pushbutton on the back that causes the numbers to rapidly change, so it can be set to the current time. I considered making it synchronize time with GPS or something, but that's a lot of hassle - instead, you set the time manually, and it uses the frequency of the AC line to maintain the time accurately.

[Jim Becker]

Very clever and interesting!

[Jim Rimmer]

I built a digital voltmeter (Heathkit-Bell & Howell) about 40 years ago that had nixie tubes. Leading edge at the time.

PS Spellchecker only recognizes nixie as a proper name.

[Matt Meiser]

Very cool. My senior project for my EE degree was to design an LED-based nixie replacement for a company that had some old CNC machinery that used them. It turned out to be more of a mechanical design project than an EE project--but I guess it was fairly good life practice since I've not done much EE works since graduating 15 years ago either!

[Roger Russell]

The cantilever is a neat idea! I'm feeling old because I remember when nixie tubes were state of the art.