Trying to save a Nixie counter before it's Nixie tubes getting used in a Nixie clock.
Last week found a Philips counter with Nixie tubes on our local auction site and bid slightly over the asking price before the Nixie tube clock salvagers get their hands on it. Still it was not that expensive, I paid €60 including shipment.
Seller posted a picture in working condition measuring 200 MHz, but the unit was badly in dust.
Same Nixie counter but than 6 digit version is posted by @
david77 here, there is one difference between the counters besides the digits, I will explain that below.
I am looking for some documentation for this unit, I asked already couple manual sellers here in the Netherlands, who are known to have documentation for this unit, but they didn't reply yet.
This is how I got the unit, covered in dust all over:
Inside:
Ovenized Oscillator:
The Oscillator is the other difference between 6 digit and 8 digit units, 6 digit unit does not have Ovenized one, the only article I could find of this unit was an old dutch electronics magazine from February 1970 and it basically explains where it's needed and some specs and explains about the difference, here is a screenshot of it (it is in Dutch)
Taken apart:
Checked all caps and only found 2 bad axial 16μF 16V caps, the caps on the unit are not easy to find, in our local electronics store I could find axial Vishay 15μF 63V caps, there is 5 of these capacitors on this unit, I replaced them all, the one in the picture below needed a lot of work to remove, so I decided to cut the leads and solder the new ones on there, otherwise I had to remove a lot of parts and wires to get behind, and I didn't want to risk that, other 3 caps where easily removable.
In total, there are 20 electrolytic capacitors in this unit, 5 are already replaced, so 15 to go. But the other capacitors measure good, so I will leave them for now til I got all of them, just weird values to find, but it still can be found I think, I just don't want to change the values much.
Here is the list of the capacitors which needs to be replaced:
2x 5000pF 250V (tested 500VDC) Type OPA-1-6-619x Safety Capacitor
2x 320µF 6.4V
5x 16µF 16V (replaced)
3x 4000µF 25V
2x 125µF 16V
2x 200µF 10V
40µF 16V
32µF 16V
10µF 300V
80µF 24V
Power supply board was dusty:
Cleaned the board, and you can see BY126 diodes created a lot of heat, maybe change these for other diodes which don't heat up this much? Which diodes will be good replacement here. BY126's are rated for 1.2A and 650V:
I cleaned a lot more, but don't have pictures of those yet, I will take some pictures when I put it back together.