I've noticed black residue collecting on the inside of at least one of my nixie tubes over the past 1-2 years. What's interesting is that it is collecting right where the glass of the tube is touching the glass cover of my case (yes, I goofed on the case; nothing should touch the tubes...). It's a small dot, perhaps 1 mm in diameter so it doesn't bother me much.
While I'm not at all surprised that sputtering is likely to be what's happening, I'm rather amazed that it would concentrate on a single point especially because glass is a very good insulator. Furthermore, the tubes are run at DC so there isn't any high-frequency/capacitance issue as far as I can reason. Have any of you folks out there who work with neon signage seen deposits on the inside of tubing near supports, etc ? I wonder if this could be exploited on nixies to keep sputtering from soiling the entire inner surface of the tube and draw it somewhere away from the viewing-area. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/cc268424-3a60-4aa2-b8bc-3c5986705bda%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
