Nixie Clock

Remember those old petrol pumps and calculators with glowing orangey red numbers as readouts?
Well some of us do!

Turns out the little "valves" full of numbers weren't valves at all but little doozies called nixie tubes.......
Nixie? - The name nixie comes from Numerical Indicator Experimental 1....interesting, no?

Anyway, nixies were widely used before the advent of fluorescent displays, LEDs, LCDs & the like and were made from the late '50s to late '70s.
I've seen clocks made using these bad monkeys and decided to buy a kit and build one for myself.....as you do.

Here's the circuit board

A few hours with a soldering iron and all the components & the Russian IN-8 nixie tubes were mounted.
There are even some blue LEDs to light the bases of the tubes, nice.

I'm proper impressed with this, here it is sat on top of some computer junk in a darkened room

The clock is controlled by a quartz crystal oscillator and some software on a PIC.
There are many operating parameters to tinker with, my favourite is the "slot machine" option - cycling of all numbers to prevent cathode poisoning of the tubes and increase their lifespan.

Check this out


Time can even be synchronised by an optional radio module or via GPS
All I have to do now is build a case to finish it off.....

How cool is that?
Fucking well cool I can tell you!

So what became of Matt's Baja?

All the while Matt and Man-John were coming over to help me weld the bodyshell they were beavering away with the previously welded floorpan back at home.
Every part was either replaced or refurbished, essentially creating a new floorpan - just waiting for the bodyshell.

We finally dragged Matt's bodyshell over to his gaff so he could paint it.
No fancy spray booths or owt like that, just good old-fashioned "spray on a fine day"- Old School!

Matt had already shot some primer on the 'shell during the week before I got there.


Here's Matt laying on a coat of John Deere green

He's doing quite a thorough job. Oh look, there's the floorpan over there - nice!

The finished job, 'shell is on its nice shiny refurbished floorpan and awaiting fitment of the freshly sprayed panels.

Pretty soon Man-John and Matt got the Baja MOT'd and road-legal, that was a while ago........

Here's the beast just the other day, sat next to Tom's car

Nice job, considering what we started with. Fo' Shizzle!

Work on Tom's new bug

Nice little car, but..........and there's always a but or three

The front sits way too high and looks proper rude, there's a hole in the exhaust somewhere and the brakes could be better.
These and (no doubt) many other fettling jobs will need sorting before we're really happy with the car.
Hmmm.

Opportunity knocks!
Man-John had grown tired of his patina'd bug and decided to sell the thing as a rolling project - shame, but it needed a lot of work.....
He said we could swipe anything we want from it before it goes as long as we put something in its place, to keep it rolling.
Now that's nice, considering John's car had a lowered front beam, GTi front seats and a few other cherry parts - ours for the taking! Cheers Man-John.

Tom's original beam was OK but it had been crudely repaired, it wasn't lowered and the steering box was worn.
Time to take Man-John up on the offer, a no-brainer really.
So we went over to Man-John's gaff to collect the new beam, took it home to strip, paint and fit.

Tom stripping the paint & surface rust

Found a small hole, which turned into a bigger hole when prepared.

No biggie - just cut out the rot, use a little hot-metal-filler and dress to finish

Two coats of zinc-rich, two coats of MIO and it's ready to fit.
Sarah was well impressed with her new garden feature, she didn't say much - I could just tell.
We've not touched the drums as they will be replaced with discs.

Beam fitted
Now that's much better

We took Tom's old beam to John and fitted it to his bug so it could be sold on.
Thanks again Man-John.

Tom's new Beetle

I found a nice '72 bug locally that's already had new heater channels and loads of other work done by the previous owner.
It's very solid and will make an excellent first car for the boy, he even likes the Citroen Dolly paint scheme....for now.

I took it for its MOT and it passed, now we can go through it and make it the best it can be.
Looks like the Baja will have to wait......

Has it really been a year?

No it hasn't, we did most of this work last year but I've just been too damn bone idle to actually post anything......
The heater channels are now fitted and as this is the second time we've done this I couldn't see the point of detailing it all on here.
They went in much easier this time round though, I can tell you.

Before we fitted the channels we removed the internal metal pipework to allow for installation of long coolant pipes inside the channels in the future...useful if we have a front-mounted radiator.
It's a Baja and will probably never have a back seat so if we stay with an air-cooled engine we can just route the heating into the car from the back seat area.

A small repair to the front inner wing area to finish things off and we got started on replacing the front bulkhead

The bulkhead was rank-rotten at the bottom so a new panel was grafted in, you can just see the light coming through where we cut out the panel

Here's Tom cleaning the cut edges with a bastard-wheel on Mr.Bosch.
He gets all the best jobs, lucky boy!

Bulkhead panel in position and ready for stitching up the sides

Old scrap floorpan being used to check fit of panel, none of the welds have been dressed at this point

Because I bought some cheap heater channels that, it turns out, are 1303 items there are no captive nuts in the ends of the channels to bolt to at the frame head. Oh...
This means we'll have to fabricate something to bolt through to secure the front of the car at the framhead area........oh well, it's all practice.
Having checked a "correct" set of heater channels I'm sort of glad we are going down this route as the original captive nuts are in a cage within the end of the channel which would be slap bang in the way of our proposed radiator pipes as they exit at the front of the car.

The plan was to finish of the welding over the last bank holiday but as usual plans change and no real progress has been made this year.

It's all Tom's fault, he managed to pass his driving test so we've bought him a (standard) Beetle for the road.......how cool are we?
The Baja will have to wait while we fettle his bug, it's not modified (honest) and is really cheap to insure.
In fact it's about the cheapest car for a new driver and it has the added benefit of being a 1972 model, registered "historic" and road tax-exempt - win!

Hopefully he'll be too busy with the bug, he'll forget all about the Baja and I'll be able to use it on the road.
When it's done that is :)