Thanks for the info! I will keep an eye out for 5092's. Actually, I mistyped—I have the 5032's on the way, not the 5031's. I believe the 5032's have the modified Penning mixture you speak of because I saw the model quoted in a Burroughs document from the time as having been designated "ultra long life" and tested to have a working lifetime of somewhere between 200,000-500,000 hours.
It's a really cool read and one that I'm sure has been passed around here a bit as it's a top result in Google when searching "Burroughs nixie" https://frank.pocnet.net/other/Burroughs/616.pdf On Friday, January 6, 2017 at 1:15:35 PM UTC-8, gregebert wrote: > > > and some round top-view "ultra long life" Burroughs 5031 to try out. >> > > You really want the 5902's, not the 5031's, for long life. These tubes are > interchangeable, but the 5092 has the long lifetime. My first nixie clock > design uses six 5092's and from the 4 clocks we built, we've had no > failures or visible degradation after 5 years (that's over 1 million device > hours). > > I have a few 5031's, and several have deteriorated (partial or no glow on > certain digits) and multiple attempts to rejuvenate them have accomplished > nothing. Based on the coloring & behavior, I'm fairly certain the original > 5031's (orange glow) are neon-only, and the 5092's (orange+violet glow) use > a mixture (probably modified Penning w/ Ne+Ar+Kr) and Hg. > -- 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/d3f13a50-de39-4dd0-9a87-d851d120b529%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
