i have been wanting to make tubes for a long ass time and now i can finally start gathering parts!

Geri Ellsworth? is that Jeri’s brother?

i’d like to see nixie tubes in weird shapes and funny symbols

from the pdf, this is the spirit of the hack:”It may seem to be crazy and impossible but I try. The writers in all available books have said: “Making homemade tubes is impossible.” I believed them for a long time, but I wanted to try.”

I seem to remember seeing this PDF a while ago…
Still, HaD is hacking paradise today. This is an exceptionally difficult project.

I hope Aleksander is reading this, as I have some advice, because I was going to try this myself, and have done a ton of research. Forgive me if you know these already- it wasn’t clear from your PDF if you knew about these parts:

The most difficult part is the glass to metal seal for sure, you got that right. 3 things that can make it much easier for you:

1. Get a glass tempering oven. In my city, Pittsburgh, PA, we have the Glass Factory, a dedicated glass-blowing/casting facility and mini glassblowing college. I learned from doing some over work there glass will shatter far less if you have a tempering oven. The oven acts as a controlled cooling chamber that takes a lot of the internal cooling stress out of the glass, by slowly un-heating it over a time curve set for a glass type. If you can’t buy one, find a local shop that has one and rent time on it. Glass needs a day or more to cool properly to lower

2. Use boro, or borosillicate glass. You didn’t mention what kind of glass you were using. Start with good, pure borosillicate or pyrex (trade name for a specific borosilicate glass)- and…

3. This is where I think you’re having the most trouble- You’re using copper. The thing about glass to metal seals is, you need to match the thermal expansion curve to a metal with a similar curve, or one stays too big in cooling and cracks the other.

Two metals with very close thermal curves to borosilicate glass are Kovar, and Tungsten. Both have been used for metal to glass seals, and believe it or not, I found both on ebay in wire spool form, perfect in size for making vaccum tubes, nixies and whatnot. Kovar is very expensive, apparently. Both should work much better than copper- sealing tighter to glass, and causing less breakage even without thermal tempering.

I figure, you could always seat pins on top of the metal through the seal, and plug on your nixie internal asembly, as it were, if you wanted to. The glass connection is the tricky part. If you wanted it to last longer, you could get the internals platinum plated very, very thinly, or add a very very small drop of mercury metal to the inside of the tube to assist as a getter. Many nixies and triodes did that, I’ve read.

I’ve found general Paschen’s curves for nixie gas mixture, but nothing with actual numbers on a scale to aid in plotting. Just a general picture like you found. Have you found anything more exact with values attached? This is what keeps me from attempting the nixie build, along with not having a vaccuum pump.

Have you considered blow molding your nixie tubes for more consistent stresses and volume calculation?

I applaud your success- you’ve gotten further than I, so forgive me if I said something you already knew and didn’t mention in your work.

Every one of today’s posts are excellent. Giant CO2 lasers, diy computers, vacuum/nixie tube building, and RF transmitters. Great stuff and I hope to see more like this from HaD in the future.

Dude! That is just cool. And I’d like to echo the sentiment I’ve seen expressed numerous times lately – these latest hacks are great! True hacks! Nicely done – this is the kind of stuff I come here for.

well i don’t have time to review the whole thing tonight but since my ‘brother from another mother’ posted i will at least take the time to chime in too.

there is only a handful of people that could pull this off with home based resources and even fewer that would take the time to do so, that makes this a great hack!

we see so many college group hacks and senior projects, not to downplay ANYONES work (i posses about half the knowledge to fully understand most the stuff here in the first place), but it gets a bit ehhhhh. you know how many RFID dorm locks can we see in between something really unique.

and today has been a plethora. good job aleksander and the rest of the hackers today and thanks HaD for bringing it to all of us.

For more DIY vacuum projects, check:

http://www.teralab.org/index.htm
http://paillard.claude.free.fr/

Exactly. This tube not “dead” after 700 hours.
About preparing simple neon tube in my kitchen- see this movie:

It was in 2009.

If you’ve got the ability to alloy your metal for electrodes, an iron and thorium alloy might work too. The radioactivity from the thorium apparently makes the strike voltage a lot lower by pre-ionizing the gas a bit. Same reason tungsten welding electrodes often have thorium in them. I suppose if you were melting some tungsten into your iron, as suggested above, you might as well use the tungsten thorium alloy, for the benefit of both.

Hey Hackaday, what are the requirements to be considered being listed under “extreme industrial manufacturing at home”? You’ve got my attention now…..