On Wednesday, December 17, 2025 at 11:31:23 AM UTC-5 Leroy Jones wrote: I would advise being very cautious regarding the tightness of the fit of the tube pins into ANY socket! Certain sockets are so tight that they tend to put a side-loading spreading force on the tube pins enough that in extreme cases the glass tube base will crack. My standard procedure now for any such socket for tubes such as NL6844A and 8422 is to use a tapered aluminum soldering probe to wallow out each socket pin to a much looser fit on each tube pin. If you go too far and open the socket fork too much, you can reach in there using a pointed exacto blade and add back some tension. Sockets adjusted that way give the tube a very easy and buttery feel going in and coming out of the socket, yet they retain good contact. Those russian socket pin forks are some real doozers last time I checked. As I recall they are massive thick things with practically go give at all. My impression of them is they will destroy a tube in a New York minute! My advice is STAY AWAY from those russian sockets by all means. Get the good USA made green ones and carefully open them up for a nice fit. Your tubes will then not break.
Thanks very much for the advice. Although I could *probably* manipulate the Russian sockets to work, I agree that you'd never know if mechanical stress will cause issues or breakage down the road - especially with thermal cycling. I have decided to not be stingy and just fork over the $ for US made sockets. My experience with other Russian hardware is that frequently costs are cut to bare minimums and the quality often suffers as a result. It's curious how the Russian designs are basically cloned by the American products... and yet modified to require their own pin layouts. -- 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 view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/616ad2f9-9f08-49b4-8205-6e256396aff9n%40googlegroups.com.
