My story starts very similar to Jonathan's, I was the sort of kid who took toys apart, rather than play with them.. at the age of 6 my Dad would take me to the scrapyard and allow me to fill the boot of the car with 'stuff' that I can take to bits.. scrapyards were pretty good back then, you could find anything from scopes to random military bits and even the odd car! One of the things I got was a calculator the size of a suitcase and I never forget the strange glass number tubes inside, this was back in the late 1970's. I continued to tinker and take things apart, at the age of 9 I had about 12 TV sets in my bedroom all with the backs off and stacked up in a 4 X 4 pile, something about the smell of warm valve based electronics.. My parents are both non technical and they just sort of shut the bedroom door and let me get on with it.
Life, education, career and children then sort of got in the way until 2014 when kids had grown up, I had a secure well paid job and I just stumbled upon Nixie tubes again, they came up as a random picture on google images when I was looking for something, and it instantly came back to me the calculator I took apart 40 or so years earlier! that was that, I wanted to make a clock.. had no Nixies so found an old frequency counter on the bay that had 7 of the GN-4 tubes inside, brought a kit and converted it into a clock. Found it immensely satisfying and wanted to make another.. by a stroke of luck I found another one of the same frequency counters on the bay again and messaged the seller, he had 6 of them, all ex RAF surplus so I sold my first clock and with the proceeds purchased all 6 of the counters and then turned all of them into clocks.. sold them and brought more stuff.. I just enjoyed the process of making the clocks.. Move on another 4 years, I now get to make them for a living, which I am so lucky to be able to do :) -- 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/ab9899a8-165f-42bb-8cb3-4d2e8a81ace2%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
