Board coils discussion

[Tony]

Everything is mounted on the component side, the bolt heads make contact with the tracks through to the top of the coil formers.

[leedawg]

Thank you Tony thats sort of what I figured. So I have brass nut then washer and I pinch a couple of turns of the copper wire between the washer and coil former then goes through the board and tapered head of the screw makes contact with the trace on the opposite side of the board.

I am having a bit of a strange issue with the top left coil on one row down. I will take a You tube video of it tonight so its better explained. But basically this one coil is noticeably brighter than the other ones. I figured it was a winding issue so I swapped it with another one that was dimmer. Same thing brighter. SO then I placed two pieces next to each other and noticed that when a piece is on this brighter coil the coil to its right almost does not put out enough power to fully light the nixie tube on it. Depends where I move it around. Seems like more of the power is running through this one coil than the rest of them. Any way I will take a video tonight when I get home to demo the issue and see if anybody has any thoughts on it. Other wise things are moving a lot well just slow and steady progress. I tried taking one winding off the board coil and to be honest I cannot perceive any difference in brightness of the nixie tube between 55 turns and 54 turns. If I wanted to make them all significantly brigher would I need to step down to say 50 turns? Just a thought.

Thanks again lot of fun playing with all this stuff so far.

Lee

[leedawg]

Okay so here is a video of the issue I was describing in my previous post. Pretty much the pictures are worth more than I can say possibly some insight into whats going would be great Thanks again

Lee

http://youtu.be/rBW7Wl7R-Os

[Tony]

The driver circuits are very simple and I'd say the only faults that could cause that would be either incorrect number of turns on that coil or a faulty tuning capacitor. Try another cap (it's the green one).
The third coil on the top row is a little brighter as there's only one coil being fed through that 6r8 resistor. Once you add the 4th along it should be the same as the rest.

I have however found a problem with the PCB layout unrelated to this and will add that in another post.