Vito’s Legacy Workshop

Sometime early last spring, I impulse bought a totally gnarly, steampunk-inspired Nixie Tube clock from that bastion of truth in advertising platform, Facebook. I bought a clock; I received a kit. Not right away, mind you. Oh no, it took eight weeks for them to send me the tubes, circuit board, and a ramshackle pile of assorted parts. 

“No problem-o,” I thought. “I’m a handy guy; I can still salvage this purchase and assemble the clock myself.” After all, it was at the peak of the quarantine, and I was itching for a good project. If only I had received any form of instructions, schematic, weblink, or hieroglyphic. Heck, I’d have even settled for one of those cryptic Ikea guides. Assuming there must have been an oversight in preparing my clock for shipment, by not assembling the damned thing in the first place but also for not providing any instructions, I reached out to the store in earnest, fully prepared for them to stand by their product. It would NOT be that easy.

The shipment came from China. Customer support based in China. The average email cycle time was two days. Messages to Mars are answered faster. After much poorly translated back and forth, they eventually conceded they had no plans, no plans to find the plans, and furthermore no plans to send me an assembled clock. Instead, they promised to refund me the purchase price though I’d be responsible for shipping the kit back to them. Happy to pay the shipping just to be done with this mistake; I followed their shipping instructions and off the package went into the great unknown. 

Fast forward eight weeks. In one of those fevered moments of clarity that always strike just as I’m waking up, I remember that I had never followed up on the refund. A quick check of my PayPal account confirmed my suspicion as no reversal of charges showed up. Attempts to contact the seller proved futile, and just days before the grace period lapsed, I opened a claim with PayPal. By October, they completed their research, confirmed that the vendor was unreachable, and issued me a complete refund. Yeehaw! 

That brings us up to this past Monday, March 29th, when what should arrive in my office mailbox but that very same package that I had shipped to parts unknown nearly a year ago. There it was…back in my life, having experienced “lord knows what” on its whirlwind tour of the Orient. It’s at this point, with absolutely nothing to lose, that I embarked on my quest to assemble the clock. I was beginning to feel like HG Well’s Time Traveller or Doc Brown constructing the time circuits in the DeLorean, coming at the problem with only a vague sense of what the final product should look like and even less idea whether it would work or not. 

I dove in with the reckless abandon of a man with nothing but time on his hands, trying different configurations until I settled on what felt right. After more than a few frustrating setbacks, I finally had what I believed to be a workable solution. With all wires connected, I dusted off my father’s 60-year-old Weller Model D440 soldering gun, a relic of a long-forgotten era, along with my equally dusty soldering skills, and set to close all 66 circuits. The old three-pound workhorse D440 performed the task admirably, albeit a bit clumsily given the delicacy of the circuit board and soldering points, but in the end, the solders cooled, and I was ready for the moment of truth. 

As the smoke from the soldering iron lingered, my brow soaked with sweat, and my eyes stinging from the strain, I steadied my hand, gritted my teeth, and moving my face as far outside the blast radius as possible, snapped the power cord into place. A few crackles of electricity sparked forth and the cyan hue of the Nixie tubes blazed to life, assuming the default starting position of 12:00:00 before proceeding to tick off the seconds in that very satisfying digital progression. Something about assembling this retro clock from a ragtag pile of unlabeled parts, with no instructions, and with tools straight from the Vito Legacy Workshop felt immeasurably gratifying. It’s as though I conquered time itself, transcending the limits of physics and arriving somewhere back in 1954, to a dimly lit shed where a 22-year-old first-generation Italian-American labored over a wonky radio with only the tools of his trade and his curiosity at the ready.