Nick: Hi, I use TM because I was lucky to get few for reasonable price from local bancrupted research company, together with all the accessories. Diff pump are much cheaper, they need practically no maintenance (when used right way), but they it takes much longer time to start it up and also the cool down. TM is more flexible in this way and saves a lot of time, especially during development. And TM pump also provides oil-free operation, which is good, but essential matter in nixie tube making.
Terry S: I think if there is any tube vendor interested in nixie tube manufacture, they will know how to make it without me ;-) I think the problem is, that the amount of tubes which would saturate the market is quite low. Say 10.000 tubes for $100/pc = $1M, this would not cover the costs of specialised automated machines.. Sealing and pumping machines had capacities of hundreds tubes per hour.. That would mean few days of manufacture ;-) It will more likely stay in hands of people, from assembly to sealing and pumping.. Once local audio tube manufacturer sold tubes for around $2M per year (2008 or so), and they still make all the steps by hands, no automation. Nixiebunny: Hi David, thank for sharing this information! Regards, Dalibor Dne úterý 10. února 2015 17:46:20 UTC+1 Nick napsal(a): > > Hi Dalibor - just to add, I think that your price is fair - you need to > live, and its a manually-intensive & highly skilled job that you're > doing... people need to realise that. > > Just for the record, why are you using a TM pump? surely a cheaper > diffusion pump would be fine along with a suitable softer-vacuum backing > pump? > > Nick > -- 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/b8677a1d-7347-45c7-a38a-2575552a771b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
