Timely Obsession

David ("Westdave") Weiner, Los Angeles

David Weiner built his first clock in a shop class in high school in 1972: six Nixie tubes in a lovingly crafted mahogany case. It was the start of something big. In the 30 years since, he has built 100 clocks, he estimates, most of them with a Nixie display. His mantel clock [below, left] is a fine example of "out with the old, in with the new." First he extracted the eight-day wind-up mechanism from an antique clock. Then he replaced it with an electronic circuit wired to a six-Nixie-tube display. The clock circuit, as in most of his creations, is based on a 10-MHz crystal oscillator, with ICs to divide the frequency down to 1 Hz.

Weiner's test-board clock [above, right] is mounted on what is known in art circles as a "found object"—in this case, refuse from an aerospace contractor. It is an IC test board with several hundred contact points. His granite-base clock [right] is outfitted with B-7971 tubes, a large, later-model alphanumeric tube used primarily in stock-exchange boards. The hard part of building the clock "had nothing to do with electricity," Weiner recalls. "It was drilling the holes in the granite."

Some day, Weiner—who keeps six clocks in his bedroom—may run out of Nixies, but that day is distant. An ardent devotee of eBay, he has accumulated a cache of 450 tubes.

200 V at the Flick of a Wrist

Jeff Thomas, Mesa, Ariz.

A Nixie clock small enough to wear on your wrist? It was a challenge Jeff Thomas couldn't pass up [right, top]. The idea for the watch "came from the movie Brazil—a strange flick where technology had become stalled, distorted," he explains. "A friend had seen this movie and asked if a Nixie wristwatch had ever been made." Turned out it hadn't been done. After all, how do you produce, within the space of a wristwatch, the tubes' 200 Vdc?

"One day I was playing with a disposable flash camera," Thomas goes on. "I noticed that the circuit used to generate the high-voltage dc for the flash comprised only three components: a transistor for oscillation, a tapped transformer, and a diode rectifier. The circuit generated 200 V at 2 mA from a single AA battery. Ah ha!" The next pieceof the puzzle came to him at an auction of military equipment at Hickam Field in Hawaii, where he ran across 80 aspirin-sized NL-7977 Nixie tubes from National Electronics.

He used them to make 20 watches and gave most away as gifts. Once he was wearing his own in a shopping mall when a teenager asked, "Dude, is that one of those house-arrest thingies?"

Turning the recent economic dry spell to advantage (his company, Resonant Instruments, makes semiconductor wafer probing equipment), Thomas also put together a series of desk clocks [right]. He gave away seven and sold another 20 faster than he could make them. Still, the Nixie look isn't for everyone. Thomas's wife banished his own clock to a desk in his study.

The Long and Short of It

Mike Harrison, Loughton, Essex, UK

It was only a matter of time before Mike Harrison, who has long been interested in spark-gap tubes, thyratrons, and other exotic electronic glassware, turned his attention to Nixie tubes. When he did, the results were extreme: his habit of building ever larger clocks culminated in a unit adorned with rare East German Z568M tubes boasting digits 50 mm tall [right, top]. Sockets for the tubes are long gone, so he made his own, using a printed-circuit board and receptacles from a dismantled D connector. The time-keeping circuit is the sturdy, versatile one Harrison designed and posted on his Web site (http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~wwl/nixclock.html).