chrisys

You're totally right of course, I was very afraid of snapping those little guys off :)

The opening line of my blog post was almost a reference to this, then nobody I had proof read the post got it so I took it out :P

Thanks for the compliments, and I appreciate your eye for detail and nitpicking :) I don't even wanna think about how many hours I put into this thing. It was one of those projects when you've got some free time you just keep working on it, then eventually, one day, it turns out there's nothing else to do.

For the Dekatrons, it was simply a case of I had 50mm stainless steel bar already in the shop, but the biggest brass I had was probably 30mm diameter. I bought a whole load of bar stock offcuts from an auction years ago and pretty much everything I make is made from that lot. That being said I broke so many tools trying to work with M2 threads in stainless that I could have just bought some brass bar!

As for the dips/wrinkles in the case, those were caused by my use of an oscillating drum sander. There's a photo in the blog post where you'll see I used the drum sander to bring the lid to size. I foolishly let it mark the previously pristine planed surfaces, and didn't realise until I had coated it with gloss. This is definitely a lesson learned from this project, I won't make that mistake again.

I have no defence for the hand-filed gouges hidden in the openings, and not filling the grain - more lessons learned for next time there. :)

Thanks for the comment!

Thanks for the compliment Peter, if I can inspire others like yourself to get building, I'm happy :)

They are quite radioactive for a household item indeed. The dust is a good point I keep that one double bagged for that reason, although they aren't as fragile when they're new.

Thanks - it was so much work, but super rewarding as the thing looks beautiful on my desk. It's awesome to see it's appreciated :)

Thanks Greg, nice to see you here :)

Thanks for the inspiration!

PRs welcome - we could remove the 'UK' part of the project and make it work for more cities/countries.

For me, repeatability and ease of management - I used to be really demotivated by having to start from scratch with a Raspbian install whenever I built a project but all the prebuilt base images for different languages/OS and configuration as code due to Docker make the Pi so much nicer to use for stuff like this.

One of those is definitely on the cards for me, I have been meaning to get to that for a long time.