Giant B-7971 Nixie Tubes Available Here! Reliable and Honest Source.

Apr 17, 2004 2 Replies
U

Greetings,



I am respectfully submitting this information to all Radio and Electronic enthusiasts, collectors, clock makers, tinkerers and dealers in this newsgroup. This may be of interest to anyone looking to obtain Old, B-7971 Burroughs Nixie Tubes.



Available while our supplies last are these Giant, Alphanumeric Burroughs B-7971 Nixie Tubes. These historical tubes of yesteryear were developed in 1952 and used throughout the 1970's as displays for everything from Early Computers, Aerospace, Submarines, and the display of stock prices on the NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE.



We pulled them from an old warehouse, Perfectly Preserved and wrapped in paper to protect them from the years of age. Many electronic/electrical tinkerers have been using them for new and interesting projects such as Nixie Tube Clocks.



We ship overseas and also have available the Original Sockets to accompany the tubes, which are necessary in many applications and are as equally Rare and tough to find. Our tubes are in working order and although we do not test them individually, 99% of the tubes sold to date have worked perfectly! All of them are still as we found them wrapped and boxed. NO Complaints with our service or quality to date, and we hope this will be a good resource for those interested in this type of old technology.



Any questions, please Contact the Webmaster at snipped-for-privacy@usmintquarters.com and we will be happy to answer them. Thank You.



The link for more information and prices on our tubes:

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The link to our main website is:

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Thank You.


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A

Interestng. I got some old Nixie tubes once and every single one was gassy. A couple worked somewhat with the "blue" haze.

There's a trick you can do to reactivate the "getter" involving heating in an oven... :) but it only works for mild to moderately gassy tubes, not dead ones.

-A

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A

There are a couple of other possibilities which seem likely, since when nixies leak they usually just quit working: A) The tubes you had were late-production "ultra long life" types with high mercury content. These usually exhibited the blue haze, even when new, which is one reason why they were always installed behind an amber filter lens in the original equipment which used them.

and/or

B) You were severely overdriving them. Even the earlier types with no or low mercury content typically used a "Penning" mixture of neon and a small amount (1-2%) of argon. When overdriven, the blue/purple argon glow becomes much more noticeable. The blue haze of ultra long life types gets much worse when overdriven too. Nixie tubes are current-operated, and like any gas-discharge device exhibit a "negative resistance" characteristic which requires external current limiting (typically a resistor in series with the anode). The most common sizes of nixie tubes typically operate best in the 1.5 - 3.0 mA range.

-------------------- Alan "A.J." Franzman Email: a.j.franzman at verizon dot net --------------------
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