We typically think of neon signs as big commercial advertisements, hanging inside windows and lofted on tall signposts outside highway-adjacent businesses. [James Akers] has gone the other route with a fashionable build, creating little wearable neon necklaces that glow beautifully in just the same way.
Aiming for small scale, [James] began with 6 mm blue phosphor glass tube, which was formed to reference Pink Pony Club, one of Chappell Roan’s more popular songs. The glass was then filled with pure neon up to a relatively low pressure of just 8 torr. This was an intentional choice to create a more conductive lamp that would be easier to run off a battery supply. The use of pure neon also made the tubes easy to repair in the event they had a leak and needed a refill. A Midget Script gas tube power supply is used to drive the tiny tubes from DC power. In testing, the tubes draw just 0.78 amps at 11.8 volts. It’s not a light current draw, but for neon, it’s pretty good—and you could easily carry a battery pack to run it for an hour or three without issue.
If you’re not a glass blower, fear not—you can always make stuff that has a similar visual effect with some LEDs and creativity. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own neon creations on the go—perhaps for Halloween?—don’t hesitate to light up the tipsline!
That looks sick. I was expecting LED filament but actual neon… dang
Makes me wonder tho… how are those high voltages managed? tbh i’m not sure i’d want a few kV around my neck :)
Still an awesome project tho
the High voltages were managed with silicone “boots”. They are the best insulators. The wires coming off the midget are the pvc wires and not the nice silicone ones. Despite all this, none of the four of us received a shock…. even as it poured rain in the concert.
Not necessarily saying you should go do this on your own, as I have a bit of experience with neon, but it is (surprisingly) possible :)
You could achieve the same result with a $3 electric cigarette lighter from China.
Based on experiences of my own I worry that this is not a great idea because of the high frequency/high voltage a mini neon transformer would supply.
I designed the electronics & lighting for the light suits for Tron Legacy; back then (15 yrs ago) LED filament didn’t exist. We found a company that patented a technique for screen printing electroluminescent lighting onto a supple cloth-like plastic that would bend, twist and drape much like cloth so it was perfect. Problem was it needed 300VAC at 1200Hz, so getting shocked by it felt like being jabbed with a needle and the microphones recording the on-set dialog could pick up the 1200Hz singing of the EL material.
But the biggest problem was the actors getting shocked. Those Tron suits were practically wetsuits, and even though the EL was on the topmost surface, their sweat would reach the tiny Molex connectors I had on each EL panel. The actors would get zapped constantly despite our best efforts to seal those connectors, yet maintain them as connectors so we could change the panels as they failed (usually due to stretching; that would kill this material instantly).
After the first day of shooting with the suits, we got nothing usable all day since the actors could not perform while being jabbed by needles. It was actually the producers came up with what actually ended up being the perfect solution: don’t allow the actors in their Tron wetsuits to get sweaty. The next day they brought in four massive 20-ton air conditioners, and chilled all the stages down to just above the point where the actors’ breath could be seen. It worked great! Very few shocks after that and the actors were comfortable. The rest of us off-camera folks were all indoors working in parkas though…
As an engineer, it’s always a strange experience to see management successfully throw money at a problem you thought was nearly impossible to engineer around. No engineer I know would even think of burning megawatts on air conditioning to solve a moisture ingress problem, but management sees these problems in an entirely different light and sometimes the simplest solution really is to just spend money until the problem goes away.
What scares me more than soft high voltage, is potential glass shards generator around the neck.
Oh yeah. I guess I am a little desensitized to the glass breaking as a glassmaker.
I once hugged someone with a non illuminated glass necklace like this and it broke. The biggest bummer was the broken necklace- the glass just broke into a few pieces and although one of us had bare skin underneath, the skin wasn’t broken just the glass.
Props to Mr ScubaBearLA …. great movie.
As for management tossing money at a problem.
Depends – they’re “probably” (presuming they are competent managers), looking at the “big picture” (encompassing P/L’s, time deadlines, etc) making a judgement call on the action that might have a high probability of solving whatever problem is on the table.
“burning megawatts on a/c”, is / was a very minor expense – compared to the movie budget vs. projected profits… also somewhat “out-of-the-box” thinking that is refreshing…. would’ve done
the same thing (given what we publicly know).
However – constantly throwing money at a problem is NOT a panacea for everything.
The US education system comes to mind……billions, upon billions – and guess what ?
As we all know, zero improvement on the talent pool. GenZ’ers/X’s, etc – that can’t tell
you how many states are in the “USA”…… smh ….
I was with you until the end and then you went sideways on education in the US. For reference, the average annual spending by the US Department of Education on elementary/high school kids is less than $2000 per child ($90b against 50 million school-ages kids in the US). If you think that’s an extravagant and unnecessary outlay for education of our kids, then I’ve got nothing for you. We are not overspending on basic education, we are way underspending on basic education.
By comparison, more than 42% of the DoEd’s $342 billion budget in 2020 was for financial aid and direct loans for tertiary students. So paying, largely private, universities tuition fees. You wanna get all het up about waste of tax dollars, go ahead, but at least aim it at the appropriate target.
Sounds like a complex and expensive solution for wanting some connectors. Those connectors could probably easily have been somewhere halfway a cable and away from the body / sweat, and soldered or crimped connectons can easily be sealed with some kind of glue / epoxy.
If only they had hired you. I’m so impressed.
The queeny bitchiness of this place sometimes…
“despite our best efforts to seal those connectors”
Just wanted to say I’m a huge fan of your work on Tron Legacy, the result is stunning. All the costumes in that film are fantastic, though my favorites are the Daft Punk suits/helmets.
wow, those effects sounded fun!
I like chatting with the folks working with Industrial Light Magic. Some of them taught me how to make those crackle lightning tubes seen in star trek an star wars. They are a bit more heavy an finnicky as there are a lot more interruptions to the arc path (the interruptions being bits of broken glass).
In this case, the 7 torr fill is less than 1% atmospheric pressure- so its super conductive. Even in the rain, none of us felt any current on our bodies. The neon was more conductive than the path to ground through wet wire and us- so the electricity just stayed going through the tube.
I could certainly see how a flexible screenprinted lightning fabric would have more resistance than a low -pressure neon tube. I am amazed they were able to get its effect with just 300 volts!
Here is a crackle tube for ya…
https://expressional.social/@JamesAkers/115229038443004161
This could be its own HAD post. I love stories like this.
We were once asked to replicate that for a costume… for the sake of anyone reading this, the reality is that even the really good EL panel is basically invisible in anything other than daylight. Nowadays you would use LED strip. It can be painfully bright, but I’m not sure what you’d do about large areas without having a lot of very dense flex PCBs made. I don’t know what they did for Ares, I’d be interested to find out.
That’s actual neon! Wow I’m in love with neon and I like the idea!
Not to be a killjoy , but from a safety standpoint, this just sounds like a bad idea. Zooming on the provided links show a power supply capable of 5KV @ 20ma. Standard GFCIs trip at 4-6ma. 9w of power to a small area like that would also be quite warm. That and jumping around at a concert with delicate glass around your neck….
Maybe use LED flexible filament instead? Looks like it can be found in multiple colors on ebay. More efficient, smaller battery pack needed, and likely more resilient. I understand the look wouldn’t be as cool as actual neon, but from a practicality standpoint I wouldn’t gamble with glass.
Thank you for your concerns. It rained at this concert actually and the neon was fine throughout the evening. No zappy’s to my neck despite my non outdoor installation :) Yeah its 5kv, but this is far from my first wearable neon rodeo, and I actually turned the midget transformer current down a bunch for its concert brightness.
As a professional neon maker, the LED wire would take me longer to make and fix so its rigid. Its actually more work for me for a result that just isn’t as eye catching in the end. Sure its fragile, but none of the four I made for my friends broke in the evening. I broke two of them from my own carelessness, (dropping them from my messy desk)- but was able to just splice in a new section and repump them.
It’s nice to see a neon project that’s actually using neon tubes for a change. I don’t think I would want to use it for something wearable though. Even a small neon transformer really hurts when it zaps you and can leave some nasty burns too.
Worn in Atlanta will give your life a whole new meaning…