Nixie tubes in slot machines

[daveslot]

Hi John, this is the one I would like to test. Any advice or should I just plug it in and stand well back I have seen one of these bulbs fitted to a machine in the past.

[whoop-john]

Wow! That is fantastic. What a lovely looking device. Let me get some advice from some better experts before you plug that in. I suppose it must be neon! Does it have a high voltage transformer or anything. Or is it just mains?

I thought we were talking about the Osglims, this is absolutely gorgeous.

Was your other display like this? What happened to it?

[whoop-john]

Your Siemens tubes are neon but I doubt the plasma trick will work on such a large item. They will probably use in the order of 50-100 mA each with that much surface area.

The tubes appear to be wired in parallel. Thus they can be tested individually. The old cloth covered wiring should be replaced as it can go lethal. Sometimes there is a rubber inner sleeve which perishes leading to shorts.

I'd work with one tube at a time in isolation.

I assume they were meant to work off 240v. 120v is not enough to light neon which needs 170-180v to ionise the gas.

Put a 1K range to start with in series with your supply to the tube at one end. I think there is just one connection per end.

240v -----/\/\/\/-----[ | =SIEMENS= | ]----- 240v

It will have to be at least a 5-watt resistor to keep it from melting. If the glow is not reasonably bright, then reduce resistance by half. You can join two resistors in parallel to halve the resistance as long as they are both of the same value resistor.

Maplin do a range of 7-watt or 10-watt wirewound resistors for 19p each. Anything 5-watt or over is good.

These will at least let you test the tubes cautiously.

If the unit has all original wiring and matching vintage mains plug with no resistors hidden anywhere in/around the cabinet and sockets, it is likely that each tube has its own built-in resistance inside one of the end caps. In this case, it should be safe to remove the extra resistor entirely.

The glow may not cover the entire surface of the words, even when the resistance you added is reduced or removed. It could be a case of "sleeping sickness" (cathode poisoning from long-term storage), which may clear itself up if the lamp is left on for a few days.

Or worse it could be a poor connection to the series resistance inside one of the end caps. Those connections are often just 2 solid copper wires twisted together, prone to failure from oxidation over time.

I have asked a friend at Siemens if he can dig anything out about these tubes for you.

[pennymachines]

More nixie tube stuff.

[whoop-john]

Ah, well Hans Summers is well known to me and lives not far away either in the south west London, we keep meaning to meet up for a beer.

Any pics of the complete Crompton football machine yet?

Best wishes, John.

[emslots]

I thought it was a great machine but nobody else thought so! I think it had a spare nixie tube with it

I can remember this machine, or one very much like it, in an amusement arcade in Hemsby, Norfolk, in the 1960's.

At the time I thought that the NIXIE tubes were very unusual, as most fruit machines had mechanical reels at the time.

I can also recall some huge floor standing fruit machines, with tiny projector screens instead of fruit reels, but that's another story.....

[whoop-john]

Please tell me what you remember about these projector displays, as a Swedish friend of mine Marta has recently bought some on eBay. They are the same as featured near the bottom of this page:

http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/count.html

...and are made by IEE and use #44 lamps as used in pinball machines. Like Mike Harrison of electricstuff, we thought they had been used in Spanish machines to get around the gaming laws there. But Marta's devices are definitely English made, NOS.

[emslots]

From what I remember, the projector displays were hard to see in certain levels of ambient light, that's why they were usually located beneath a small viewing hood. I only ever saw one machine which used them, it was a floor-standing fruit machine, with a push-left-or-push-right handle to start the symbols spinning.

They occasionally appear on eBay, so it's always worth checking the Coin Operated section of that site.

[cheeky]

Take a look at this on Ebay. Is this what you are looking for?

Item number: 6253178140