My wife got me an amazing gift for Christmas, a kit to build a nixie tube clock. I've been wanting one of these for years, but was unwilling to pay the high cost for an assembled one. The kits looked way too complicated and intimidated the hell out of me. Given that, I had come to accept that I would never own one until I had more money than sense.
Apparently my wife had way more faith in me than I do. I was shocked to open my gift and find this kit from tubeclock.com. The box included everything I needed to put the thing together: Printed Circuit Board(PCB), nixie tubes, chips, resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc. In spite of instructions which are very thorough, I was feeling less than confident. There was a lot of little parts that needed to be soldered onto the PCB and that's something I had never done.
The first thing I did was read the instructions cover to cover. The big scary disclaimer telling me that I was dealing with potentially lethal voltages didn't scare me, but the first dang step sure did. The first thing to be soldered onto the board is a tiny chip about the size of a dime with 44 leads coming off of it. *gulp* For the next couple of days I watched a handful of youtube videos showing how to solder components onto PCBs and decided to give it a go. If I could get past that first chip, then the rest of it would be easy.
Up to this point in my life, I had only soldered wires to other wires messing around with my truck. Take two wires, twist together, heat with my cheap soldering iron, add solder. The videos I watched revealed that my crappy iron with giant tip wouldn't cut it for this project. I spent another day researching soldering irons and stations. Not wanting to spend a ton on a soldering station to do a project I wasn't sure I could even do, I purchased this one along with the extra tips which seemed to have okay reviews.
The night my soldering iron came I got started with the hardest chip. The hardest part of this was getting it lined up with the leads on the PCB. It was really tiny and my big clumsy fingers kept bumping it off the leads. I tacked it into place and made sure it was lined up just perfect. I decided to follow the instructions and just bridge the connections and then use the copper wick to remove the excess. That worked well and things seemed to check out on the multimeter.
Ugly, but seems to work.
That was all for the night. When I woke up the next morning I was feeling empowered, so I got back to work. The rest of the components have leads which go through the board and then you fill the hole with solder. This was MUCH easier than the chip above.
Getting Started
I stopped for a few hours and took care of some stuff that actually needed doing and then got back at it. The rest of it pretty much fell together.
Almost done, tubes are on (backside).
Tubes are attached.
The next step is to attach the power cord and test it before stuffing it all in the case. I was expecting to have to troubleshoot, but it worked first time!
Success!
Finally, all that had to be done was to put it all together in the case. This proved to be more challenging than most of the soldering. I ended up having to file the holes where the nixie tubes pass through to get it to fit.
Done
I'm fairly proud of myself for doing this. I'm not sure this was an ideal project to learn to solder on, but it turned out okay I think. I'm sure those of you who actually know how to do this stuff have some criticism for my soldering job. I'm just happy that I didn't electrocute myself, didn't burn a hole through the PCB and didn't catch anything on fire. Now I have a sweet glowing clock.
Subscribe
Comments(2) 