Forgot to mention this: Tube sockets As you know, IN-18's are getting rather expensive so you need to be very gentle with them.
I decided to use socket-pins soldered onto the PC board (inexpensive & available on Ebay), rather than actual 'sockets', because my past experience with nixie-tube sockets found they require quite a bit of force to insert & remove. All of my IN-18's, except 1 oddball manufactured in 1977, have very soft pins, and I'd be afraid to push them into a socket. Even though my clock sits on the shelf and I hope I will never remove the tubes again, I had to insert & remove all of them a few times while building the case. If you decide to use socket pins, be sure to number each of your IN-18's and assign them to a socket location on your PCB. Then push the socket pins onto the IN-18, and solder to the PCB. This will minimize the stress on the tube because the socket-pins are custom-fitted to each tube; once you do this, though, you dont want to swap tubes. You can easily remove the tubes; re-installing requires some care but very little force. I created a .stl file for a 3D printable pin-shell, but havn't bothered to build it because the tube is held securely enough without it. -- 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/00da9a76-24ab-4222-b65b-a6fb496da2fd%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
