BadNixie.com

The “RackMountable” Nixie

This projects represents a first for me in that I have taken an existing enclosure and made it into a fully functional Nixie clock. The process was relatively simple (compared to building a case from scratch) in that the majority of the work was already done. The enclosure was originally designed as a display unit using NL8091 Nixie tubes for the AN/GSQ-53 government issue Time Frequency generator from the1960’s. So, I added the  electronics to drive the tubes. new wiring harnesses for the sockets, drilled a few holes here and there, spruced it up a bit and there ya’ go..self sufficient a nixie clock that in its former life was just a slave display.  I also added NE-2 colons and an AM/PM indicator as well and relocated the 1PPS sync LED to the front for a little added interest. The electronics used are once again Jeff Thomas’ extricated from a NixiChron originally designed to drive IN-18’s. I souped up/down the Anode resistors a bit per the NL8091 spec and voila, a fully functional Nixie clock. This is the first of 3/maybe 4 of these I will be building and the next 2 will be a little less reserved, shall we say.

 

Michael Barile

BadNixie.com LLC

RM-3 sports a polished and copper anodized enclosure

Diagram showing the ID-953 (I believe this to be a newer version of the ID-952) display connected to the AN/GSQ-53

Here are some pics of RackMountable #5 that was built for a design contributor. I cut off the 19” rack mount slots on the ends of the faceplate and moved the 1PPS LED to the rear. The black wrinkle-finish powder coating came out beautiful. Reminds me of a piece of Nav gear straight out of a cold war recon. plane!

I've reworked/built 5 of these indicator carcasses now and turned them into Nixie clocks. Take a look at 4 of them in the movie below. They are all driven by Jeff Thomas NixiChron electronics. I decided to make use of the 19" rack mount slots on these cases and so built some shorty equipment racks out of aluminum threaded rack stock and had it polished up nice and purdy. More to come..