On a whim, I did a search on helium leak-detection and came across this document link which is helpful info: https://www.leyboldproducts.com/media/pdf/90/c7/87/Fundamentals_of_Leak_Detection_EN.pdf Leaks will kill nixies, so be sure to understand them.
Several years ago I was researching neon art, and I decided against it until after I retire because I dont have the time to work on it with my demanding day-job. The most-concerning step was bombarding, which involves kilovolts at several hundred mA of current, which is instant death if you contact it. Nixie tubes dont require bombarding per-se, though if you want to make large tubes you might need to in order to cleanse the glasswork. Other options I've heard are to bake the entire assembly and flush with gas. Basically, tubulate both ends, rather than single-ended. If I can find a way to do neon work without bombarding, I will give it a try. I will not, under any circumstances do any bombarding. If flashover can happen thru your manifold into your vacuum pump, it will find a way of hitting you as well. I've even seen a video on youtube where an experienced electrician got killed opening the grounded door of some equipment even though his body was not anywhere close to being the best ground-path. Baking-out the metalwork seems easy enough with an induction heater; I think the challenge is finding metals that seal nicely against glass (Kovar), and cathode materials that resist sputtering which and can be etched. Working with mercury (toxic) is not something I want to do either, but apparently it's necessary inside nixies in order to reduce sputtering. Assuming I can get this far without bombarding, I will continue researching materials with low sputtering yields. Most industry research I've seen seems to be finding materials with HIGH sputtering yields, for use in semiconductor wafer processing. There's a fair amount of info on the web about glasswork; I have not seen a lot of info about annealing nixies but I'm fairly certain you will want to do that for reliability reasons to minimize stress around pins and joints. -- 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/a23adc6e-5bcc-4bc3-b483-a16f674af63e%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
