I spoke to a vacuum tube designer a few months ago, well into his nineties now, who told me the same thing. He told me that apart from the glow fading due to the material used to produce the glow many tubes had a problem with the cathode not emitting electrons as designed and expected which also led to less glow after some time. He told me that the two biggest areas in tube design was in cathode design and grid design, all other areas he regarded as simple! So I too think that it will be hard to find any long life eye tubes out there.
/Martin On Thursday, 12 March 2015 18:30:38 UTC+1, gregebert wrote: > > I did some research and found that common magic eye tubes, such as the > 6E5, have a pretty sort lifetime, maybe 1000-2000 hours. > Have any of you found round, end-view magic eye tubes with a substantially > longer lifetime ? > > I'm building a new clock with green neon bulbs, and a functioning > magic-eye tube for the center of the clockface would be perfect. > I keep my clocks illuminated 24/7, hence the need for a longer lifetime > (eg, over 20K hours) > > I may end up making a fake magic eye tube with neon bulbs, but it wont > have the smoothness or the nice color of the real thing. > -- 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 neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/b8965c60-b0ec-45dd-bca9-0ccc0f9e181f%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
