On Jul 7, 5:22 am, figureloop <[email protected]> wrote: ... > But I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to get the parts made cheaply by > factories when you are talking 10000 pieces. Heck, you can get custom > laser-cut gaskets from a place in Philly PA for less than $200 set up > charges.
Apples vs. pears. Laser or profile cutting the letters is a tiny tiny part of the process - the rest of it is pretty much manual. Most manufacturers regarded the exact details of manufacture as a commercial secret, so a reasonable start would be for someone in a university or research facility to obtain a broken B7971 and get the cathode & anode composition analysed. > Like I've said before, the key is to leverage modern agile > manufacturing technologies to get the component parts made, then set > up a low cost, production quality assembly and gassing station. Then > all that matters is if the labor per tube can be made cheap enough. We've had this same discussion several times over the past 10 years - have a look through the archives. There is absolutely nothing new in the "agile" approach - the problem here is that whilst you could conceivably 3d print (or whatever) the guts of a tube, at the end of the day assembly is a fiddly manual process, Its naive to suggest that you could just get two unskilled workers, train them & set up a factory in Malaysia/Thailand/wherever and cover your costs in year one. Have you ever run a business - I've lived & worked in many countries, including the far east, and you are conveniently skipping over the tricky stuff. Making replacement nixies is undeniably doable - anyone could do it given enough time & money - the big question is whether you would even cover your costs, let alone return a profit. It matters not a jot whether its off-shored or done locally. Nixies are fiddly little beasts with lots of diverse parts which have to be sourced or made, then assembled & tested - its a skilled process. Any nixie worth its salt needs Hg doping in order to get a decent lifespan - there are Health & Safety & regulatory issues. When I last costed this out I was working in Singapore and priced it accordingly - I assumed a market would stand USD 100 for the biggest nixes with a possible annual run of about 2,500 tubes however the cost of manufacture was still above the retail price. Break-even was about 5,000 p/a. How big is the market? Neonixie-l, the premier place (by far) on the web for nixies has only 400 members - its a niche interest and in this interesting economic climate, toys costing 600 bucks just for the tubes (say a grand complete) are not going to be mass-market. Its doable - you just need deep pockets and a realisation that to do it properly, it will require a lot of work. Nick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
