On 1/28/12 3:42 AM, Cobra007 wrote:
Hello everybody here in the neonixie group.
My name is Michel, dutch from origin and living in Australia for
nearly 9 years now.
I played around with the tubes and batteries and found a way to reduce
the size, improve the design and get better battery life at the same
time. This design is now in a concept stage, I should receive the
boards within a few weeks to try it all out for real (see "Nixie
Watch" on facebook).
I am interested in your thoughts on your proposed tube mounting method,
which appears from your renderings to be soldering the tubes to the PC
board through tiny plated through holes, with the tubes pressed against
the PC board.
It is safe to say that anyone who has worked with vacuum tubes will tell
you, "Don't do it!"
Here are three reasons:
1. The tube leads are not consistently plated at the tube exit point, so
expect to not be able to use more than half of the tubes that you buy.
I've personally examined the lead plating on a thousand of these tubes
under a microscope. Some of them are shiny, and others look like they
have spent their life in the salt air.
2. Soldering the tube that close to the glass will produce thermal
stress that is likely to vent the neon on some noticeable fraction of
the tubes you install. This, combined with #1, will make for a very
frustrating assembly experience.
3. You will not be able to replace a tube. The tubes do go bad now and
then, so replacement is necessary. There is no way to extract the tube
from the PC board if you have to remove the solder from 14 tiny holes
and break the lead-to-hole solder connection on all of them at once. You
can try sucking out the solder, but you won't get it all. Plated-through
holes will pull out, and the board will be ruined. Again, I speak from
experience removing parts from PC boards.
A better way would be to cut a slot in the PC board where the mass of
leads passes through, and fold the leads over to both sides, soldering
them to narrow rectangular pads like a surface mount device. That would
solve all three of the above problems.
--
David Forbes, Tucson AZ
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