Abstract: A tubular plastic body of a neon tubing support has a bore terminating in a lower opening and in an opposite internally shouldered upper opening. A helical spring is installed in the bore through the lower opening and retained by a plug in the lower opening at one end of the bore and by the shoulder at the other end. A stem unit includes a shaft having a tubing engaging element on one end, and extends into the bore coaxially with the spring and terminates in an integral bulbous portion. The bulbous portion is axially slotted to define legs which can flex toward each other for clearing through the undersized top opening in the body. The bulbous portion has a shoulder and passes axially through the spring to compress some of the convolutions for developing a force causing the shoulder to engage with the convolutions intermediate of the ends of the spring to create a bidirectionally resilient neon tubing support.

Abstract: A sign has slat panels mounted for sliding laterally on one side of a base plate and bars having cam followers mounted on the other side. Each bar has a pin, some of which project through slats in the bars and all of which project through slots in the base plate to terminate in a hole in the panels, respectively for driving the panels laterally in response to sequential lateral shifting of the bars. A first driven gear has axially extending cam pins of increasingly greater lengths to engage successive followers and shift the bars and panels to present a series of pictures. A second commonly driven gear has one cam pin which orbits in the opposite direction for periodically engaging all followers simultaneously and driving said bars back to initial position to start a new display cycle.

Abstract: The segments of several 7-segment character displays are defined by elongated light distributors in the form of slots or a series of holes which are in a panel. A large area light source is located on the rear side of the panel. Rotatable opaque disks are interposed between the light source and characters. Each disk has an array of holes for transmitting light to predetermined ones of light pipes which lead to slot segments in one embodiment and which lead to the holes that define segments in another embodiment. When a disk is rotated, different groups of holes in the disks become aligned consecutively with the light pipes where they are used or with the panel holes to thereby illuminate selected character segments so they define a sequence of characters such as the numbers zero to nine. In a digital clock application, a synchronous motor drives a first disk in angular steps to define minutes at their rate of occurrence.