Mounting tube to perf board?

[mth5044]

Anybody come up with any good ways? Perhaps there are PCB's that you mount the tube to that put the pins into a 0.1" shape? I can't really drill a hole through the perf at the moment.

[station]

It's not pretty, but in the past I've drilled the hole closest to the socket leg just big enough to fit it. Do that for all the legs and then bend and solder using adjacent pads if you have to.

[blooze_man]

IMO, It's best to use a PC mount tube socket and bend those legs to fit the perf. No harm to the tube, and you can switch it out for another if you need/want to.

[defaced]

To add to Blooze's posts, even the point to point style tube sockets can have legs attached to them and bent.

[mth5044]

So you can actually take a PCB tube and bend them so far to fit onto a perf? Do you by chance know what dimension/shape that they can be bent into, for layout purposes?

[nexekho]

A tube socket.

[markeebee]

I used Nixie pins, like these:

http://www.kosbo.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=71&Itemid=79

They were pennies each on Ebay.  They're a little bit more fexible than the pins on the tube, and longer than the pins on a socket so that you can get a bit of a bend on them.

Tubes with even numbers of pins are easy to deal with, odd numbers of pins need a lttle more persuasion.  Here's a nine pin valve I stuck on breadboard, so you can see how it'll fit on perf or vero:

[frequencycentral]

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=84832.0

[Zipslack]

For prototyping/testing, I just use cheap and ugly old-school phenolic sockets with jumper wires soldered to the lugs.