On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 02:56:28PM +1200, Jinx wrote:
> 
> > A souped-up toaster oven could reach 450C I think...
> 
> I'm sure you could knock up a mini-kiln with a few fire bricks
> and an old bar heater. Something I'd thought of but never got
> around to for making decorative ceramics
> 
> Is there any reason you couldn't use acrylic or polycarbonate
> for nixie-tube type things ? As long as they didn't get too hot....
> A pluggable LED nixie tube ?

Heat wouldn't be an issue with proper spacing. However my understanding
is that the gas inside the tube needs to be very pure neon, I'm assuming
that most plastics would outgas too much to achieve that. Aparently one
of the manufacturing steps to make neon tubes is to heat the tube to
just under the melting point for glass to vapourize any contaminents,
which are they pumped out.

Looking at google results for out-gassing polycarbonate though... Looks
like I may be wrong. Found a research paper essentially saying that
polycarbonate itself outgasses very little, but does pick up deeply held
impurities from the atmosphere. Multiple vacume baking cycles could
clean it enough to be used however.


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pete@petertodd.ca http://www.petertodd.ca
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