I practiced neon making a bit, too.

Different glasses are used. Mostly soft glass of COE9. May be lead glass or specialty strontium based lead free, or even generic soda-lime. Sometimes colored Italian glasses. French and probably Spanish neonmakers use Pyrex COE3.3 too. Colored Pyrex (Boro) exists, but is rare. I have some.

Dumet for lead-ins in soft glass, tungsten rods for Pyrex. No need for DIY, ready-made electrode assemblies are available for purchase, still.

Mercury is usually added by so called mercury traps. A small drop of mercury (circa 100mg) is placed by a syringe in a small bubble blown in a middle of 'tublulation', 6mm tube connecting the lamp to vacuum manifold. A disadvantage of this is if lamp cracks when pumped, mercury may get sucked into the manifold. Usually, some arrangement is added to the manifold to catch most of it in this case.

Some safe methods were tried, but did not generally survive commercially:

- Small glass capsule at the electrode dosed with mercury and having a dumet wire melted in. Opened by brief application of the discharge to this dumet wire after the tube was pumped, sealed and aged a bit.

- Small metal balls filled with mercury which are opened by a small specialized induction heater.

- Small rods of specialty amalgam (said to be zirconium amalgam) decomposed by heating briefly by again, applying a discharge after the lamp is sealed off.

I don't like working with mercury at home and when I need an UV emitting fill I use xenon as a substitute.

Neon making stuff is very cool, sure!




 

So far, I have tried shippn.com and they seem to be very successful whenever it comes to getting lamps and lighting equipment shipped overseas. In my case, I have purchased some Sylvania SPX Eco Arc 69/108W high pressure sodium retrofit lamps from a German Kleinanzeigen seller and shippn helped me get the lamps shipped across the Atlantic without a hitch. Interestingly, for Japanese lamps and lighting equipment, I have used proxy shopping services like Jauce and Buyee to assist me with getting Japanese lamps and lighting equipment shipped across the Pacific for me very reliably.

I just found this cool piece of history.


In the 1930s, there was a person named Alonzo Billups, and apparently, one of his relatives got hit by a train at an open crossing. So, he made a giant board, which had neon tubes, and used a siren instead of bells. It was robbed of the neon tubes during WW2 and had to be constantly relamped. Also, many said that the siren would be stuck on for hours after the train passed, due to the relays getting stuck. It was removed in the 1970s, but the concrete base is still present.


Semi-Accurate animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGhFHKtDhns


Most animations get the lights wrong.
The skull on the top was lit up by a normal incandescent fixture above it. The words were made from red neon tubes, and the dashes in between were blue coloured neon tubes. There was also a neon tube, surrounding the outer border of the sign, in unknown colour.
An interesting feature was that there were two neon arrows below, that would show the direction where the train would be going.
There were also a normal set of crossing lights below the neons, which were meant to flash only when the neon system failed.
The siren was a Federal Signal Model A.


I just thought this would be an interesting find

UV-transparent glass not necessary have to be a quartz. Very pure silicate glass (called Uviol) does this too. In a regular soft glass major offenders are metal impurities, ever-present iron atoms usually. Main advantage of Uviol glass is easy processing compatible with regular soft glass by coefficient of expansion, hence you see red dumet lead-ins. Disadvantages are still some UV loss and compared to quartz it loses transparency over time relatively quickly. I bet because of UV-induced decomposition and also by surface reaction with mercury. Still, such glass is commonly used in germicidal tubes.

Also, for example, usual borosilcate glass passes a bit of UVB.

UPDATE: As of today, she went to a cardiologist and they can officially help her! She is going on 3 meditations, seeing electrophysiology, and then she’ll be getting a pacemaker.

Hello, yes this wouldnt be difficult at all for me to do, Another favourite of mine is filling a tube with neon and mercury then running it on DC to make it red and blue

I totally forgot about that!!! I have only ever seen one picture of this effect but it looks super cool. I wonder what that would look like with a phosphored tube, but that is a project for a different time lol!

Also: What the heck kind of glass is used for neon-making? I hear conflicting things. What material is used for the wire feed-through?

Also: How do you put mercury in the tube? Do you just pipette the some in there, or is there some sort of safer way of doing it? Do you just have a big bottle of mercury layin around?

This stuff really fascinates me! Let me know if you are looking for other ideas of stuff to do because I have drawn out just about every idea under the sun. I hope I’m not being annoying…

@Multisubject: Why you want half-coated and not clear tubes? Clear tubes are better for your use.

I think it would be cool to see the different gasses affect the color the phosphor illuminates. You would still see the pure gas color in the clear part.

My tracklight have a Philips HID-PrimaVision PV C 70 /S CDM electronic HID ballast, and being Philips and electronic, I expected it to have high pulse energy and also higher frequency pulses than a regular superimposed ignitor.
Despite this, it restrike my Osram NAV-TS 70W Super 4Y HPS lamp within approx 30 secs instead of instantly, like the same lamp on a magnetic ballast and a VS superimposed ignitor, which have low energy pulses.
Why this is happens?

@Multisubject: Why you want half-coated and not clear tubes? Clear tubes are better for your use.

Hello, yes this wouldnt be difficult at all for me to do, Another favourite of mine is filling a tube with neon and mercury then running it on DC to make it red and blue