> 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.
Replacing the tubes will indeed not be the best experience, but I think it can be done without doing damage. For sure I would prefer the cut out slot as you mentioned below. This board is only for trial, and I won't know unless I try. I have used quite a few vacuum tubes before and always in sockets. What I remember is that you can't solder a wire to the pins of those tubes, or at least I couldn't do it with the tools I used at that time. > > 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 -- 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.
