A male and female nixie pair? Perhaps…
The male is taller and slimmer, the female smaller yet plumper. Maybe it is just me, but I cannot help seeing this pair of clocks as a human couple.
How this pair were conceived was as a result of me experimenting with the most compact slim PCB layout I could devise with home-etched PCB material. I was using surface mount transistors and so it was that I ended up with a pair of boards I could either place side by side or back to back.
I made up one clock using the two boards side-by-side and one with the pair back-to-back. They stayed this way for some months until I decided I really should make some cases for the clocks.
The two clocks from paired boards
Settings are by means of two discrete holes in the clocks’ sides. The switches are quite near the fairly lethal power components, which are not isolated from the mains, so I would not advise sticking any hairpins in there, but so far I have avoided any shocks by using a small rod of plastic to set the time with.
The cases are built from sections of plastic pipe, acrylic sheet and polyester resin based filler to smooth off the curves. All sprayed to a satin black finish.
Maybe the female is a Dalek? The back-to-back male design is more economical on space, but the female is rather more stable and less prone to falling over.