Timely Obsession David (“Westdave”) Weiner Los Angeles
David Weiner built his first clock in a shop class in high school in 1972: six Nixie tubes in a lovingly crafted mahogany case. It was the start of something big. In the 30 years since, he has built 100 clocks, he estimates, most of them with a Nixie display. His mantel clock [above, right] is a fine example of “out with the old, in with the new.” First he extracted the eight-day wind-up mechanism from an antique clock. Then he replaced it with an electronic circuit wired to a six-Nixie-tube display. The clock circuit, as in most of his creations, is based on a 10-MHz crystal oscillator, with ICs to divide the frequency down to 1 Hz.