I recommend building from scratch if you want to design your own case. That way you can showcase the tubes however you wish; with a kit you're pretty much limited by the board layout regarding where the tubes will be. If you want something that will look *really* nice (why not, IN-18's are nice tubes...) then it wont be low cost. I probably spent close to 1000 USD ($300 for 5 PCB sets, $300 for tubes, about $300 on remaining parts, $100 for the case) on my big clock, but it turned out so much better than I expected that my wife basically insisted I put it in the most prominent location in the house (above the fireplace).
I'm almost done my third built-from-scratch nixie project in 4 years and wouldn't do it any other way. There's lots of free high-quality design software for PCB layout, schematic capture, FPGA development, Verilog simulation, SPICE simulation that I have used. None of my boards have blue wires: 6 of 7 worked the first time (7th board is still in bringup, no blue wires yet). After doing PC boards, I will never go back to doing circuits on a perfboard again. The amount of effort to do a PCB design is about the same as 1 breadboard, and from then-on you are ahead of the game for additional builds when using a PCB. Then there's the whole quality & neatness advantage of PCBs. Likewise, I probably wont buy any PCB kits, either. Years ago I built several Heathkits, and they were a great learning tool. But they are gone, and with the free PCB tools and plenty of inexpensive manufacturers, I've moved on. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/c92ed43b-9366-4e67-9bc7-5e151bb6d096%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
