jimvandamme

Sometimes I take a movie of taking something apart. And sometimes I drop a screw on the floor and it just vanishes.

I use one bristle out of a steel brush to get the dry paint out. Also, I have a stash of "good" nozzles.

No. Sometimes I puncture the can to release the propellant, then drain the paint out and apply with a brush or airbrush. But don't try this at home, kids, I am a trained professional cheapskate.

We've never had cable TV (since 1974). We have cable internet, which is the only option out in the boonies. Spectrum, which hounds us constantly to get TV and phone bundles. (Our deluxe VoIP phone line costs $5 a month).

Yes, you need a balun to match your unbalanced amplifier & cable to the elements on your antenna. Especially if you want deep fringe area reception. A homemade antenna might not do it unless you do it by the book.

Beware of TVfool. Their database got corrupted and they lost a bunch of stations. They were the best because you can put in your antenna height and exact address and it figures out the power level you get, and shows you the obstructions if any. I hope they come back.

You're not missing much in the programming department, but the quality is much improved with a digital TV.

Liberate yourself, especially if you're in a large metro area.

He already had the welder, and it's good practice. Not only is it cool that he made his own wrench, but it's actually useful, unlike a lot of stuff on Instructables. .

Follow the manufacturer's instructions. Nowadays they tell you not to use antiseize goop, just tighten according to the specs. I've never had one fall out.

Say you were building an audio amplifier. You might use a switcher to feed the output stage, then use a linear to feed the preamp. The switcher gives you high efficiency, the linear smoothes out the fuzz. Usually you don't need as high a voltage on a preamp anyway. I've had to use this two-step regulation on sensitive RF circuits. Newer switchers are much less noisy than in the olden days, though, and a filter is simpler.

I'd call it an unbalanced random wire. It will pick up .. something, but nowhere near what a carefully designed antenna will. There's no coax to balanced feed, so some of the cable radiates somewhere.

You don't need connectors. Just twist the wires together so they make contact or solder them.

Be careful of current ratings. Measure the peak current of the pump as it turns on, and the steady state current. You need to pick your triac for both conditions. The instantaneous current rating will take the starting current, then the heat rejection will deal with the steady load. I'd think that the 15 amps is probably the inrush current rating of the motor, so the 12 amp continuous rated one might work. Don't expect a fuse to protect your triac. As a rule, solid state blows in nanoseconds "to protect the fuse". At least use a spike protector (MOV, a LC filter, or both) to keep voltage below dangerous levels.

You can use a linear regulator on the output of a switching regulator to smooth it out. Set it to minimum dissipation by minimizing the input to output drop.

A weak cell phone signal will not generate enough power to light a LED. Use your phone to indicate the signal strength.

The radar card doesn't have a very directional antenna (70 degree beamwidth). If you can narrow that beamwidth down you can get much better detection range. Hard to tell just looking at the photo but I'd try a short pipe in front of the radiating patches (those square thingies). Doesn't have to be long or sturdy, maybe a tin can would do.

I needed a shallow bend in 3 inch drain pipe once, so I heated it up over the gas stove. Don't expect to make pretzels with that technique.

Fusion doesn't work on Linux, so I registered my disapproval with Autodesk.

Increase the voltage (and the ratings on the switching devices) so that you can run directly off the power line, eliminating the power supply except for the diodes. But then you have to carefully insulate it for safety.

Those wheels looked like the hubs from 3-1/2 inch floppies, which I am always looking to recycle on something. Never throw anything good away, I always say.

I have lights that have a built in dimmer and I run the wire through the wall into a 12 volt power supply in the cellar.

Some vibrators had output contacts that would rectify the output voltage. They moved in synchronism to the input switch waveform. Those vibrators lasted a long time, considering. But they were designed to do that.

Don't worry, the relay won't last long anyhow.

I built one 30 years ago and it worked fine as long as the air and all the equipment is dry. It produced a 1/4 inch spark every few seconds. If you get a film of water on everything, it shorts out. It won't work at all in the summer. But I didn't try it with a neon bulb instead of a spark gap.

Neons fire at only 70 volts, and give a nice light, so they're ideal for this application. It takes thousands of volts to get a spark.

Yes, central NY in the summer can be humid. In Aridzona, probably no problem.In the winter, when the cat runs away when you shuffle towards her, she knows you're going to zap her nose. That's good conditions for running a high impedance high voltage generator. We can get all the pure water we need by melting some snow. Come get all you want, free. Shipping not included.

I leave stuff on a board until I need it. I've used the propane torch idea out in the garage. I've also used a $1000 rework station. But pulling parts off boards is something I hardly ever do anymore.

I'll see if my dad has any.

A nice mod would be an adjustable current so you had several power levels. Then a cheap wall wart charger, using another regulator module as a current regulator.

You can substitute Chryslerite instead. My dad worked at Dodge Truck in Warren, and has a bunch of the stuff somewhere. He prefers agates or Petoskey stones, though.

That will depend on the impedances of the circuits involved, how much gain your amplifier has, and what noise source you put it near. Probably no reason to worry.

Caffeine is toxic to slugs. Three problems with that: fresh grounds are expensive, used coffee grounds don't have much caffeine left, and getting slugs to eat it is a problem. But you can try.

Or gravy and cheese curds, if you're a Quebecois.

i'm told yellow potatoes make the best frites. But it is essential you serve them with mayonnaise. Or vinegar, if you're Canadian.

I have an ulu that I use in the kitchen. Very handy, and could be made the same way. It's hard to find good ulus in the lower 48.

Note that an impulse goes right through these dropper capacitors, because the frequency is much higher than the 60 Hz they are designed for. There's nothing to resist the line spike but a small series resistor, and the high ESR, high inductance electrolytic. These lamps seem to have a high failure rate. I've also had a bad experience with chips that had bad wire bonds, and fail over temperature cycling or time (a year or two). Sometime the LED market will settle out and high reliability circuits and LEDs will prevail, but until then I'm only going to use reputable chips and electronic ballasts.

I need to find out how to make whole wheat bread rise. I don't want white bread.

Best I could come up with on April 1.

Buy a used TARDIS.

The LEDs run on 12 volts. To get a smooth dimming function, a PWM just chops the voltage going to the LEDs. They get variable width pulses of 12V instead of a varying DC voltage. The LEDs are non-linear and cut off around 7 volts, but the PWM is smooth down to a dim glow.

You can get just about anything on eBay. Search for a 12 volt PWM dimmer. I've used these in my kitchen, surface mount: www.ebay.com/itm/DC-12V-8A-Light-Dimmer-Brightness...Same for the LED strips; get a 5 meter reel. The power supply seems to be overkill....

I'd leave the plywood backing off it, and let air circulate off the backside of the aluminum plate.

I use a corning ware pot with a glass lid. Works OK, and the bread doesn't stick.

I sometimes use hot glue to bulk up the connector and protect the wires. You can put heat shrink over it.

I have never (in 50+ years) seen the sleeve of a jack used for anything but ground. In your schematic you identify this as the mic connector. Are you sure this is correct?

You can use one central power supply to run all your lights, and then use low voltage wiring to each fixture. It is a lot simpler and safer than running 120VAC to everything. You can use a backup battery, intelligent controls, motion sensor modules, 12V dimmers, and low voltage switches. The power supply can go in the basement where it's easily accessible. I'd put a motion sensor on those stair lights, with a parallel always on night light setting of barely glowing (or a different color).

Go to this table and play with wire sizes vs. current. http://www.rapidtables.com/calc/wire/voltage-drop-calculator.htmYou may find that the drop through the light strip is much more than the feed cable drop. You shouldn't run a 5 meter spool from one end because the far end is going to be dimmer. Note that to follow 120V code you'd have to use #14 or #12 wire anyhow, just to run ten milliamps to a light. So for light loads it makes sense to run #18 or 22 to a night light. I have a couple in dark corners that stay on. It took less current to run them continuously than running a motion sensor.

I have a lot of magnets from old hard drives. This would be great...

Sounds like an autoharp, a stringed instrument that clayed chords by letting some strings be plucked by hand, like a dulcimer, guitar, and synthesizer together. All you need is a phone, and some coding....I'm not volunteering...

I haven't seen anybody else answer this, but grid tie inverters need a 60 Hz reference from the power line to be able to run. If the power is off, they don't run. This is so they don't try to feed power back into the line. Safety feature, plus you probably can't feed the whole neighborhood without smoking your inverter. If you go off-grid, you just need a 60 Hz reference oscillator and you're good to go. A UPS does the same job. But you can't hook it up to the mains because the frequency and phase will be off.

I was confused that Unistrut wouldn't meet the "grounding" requirement, being steel and all; but I suspect it's more complicated than that. I see a copy of the UL code would cost $502 in PDF format, so I wasn't interested enough to find out. In Germany all this red tape has been standardized, and it costs much less to put in systems there.

Nickel-Iron is getting a new look, and you may see new products with updated materials soon. Utility scale storage will make solar viable, and if you care about longevity, cost, and toxicity, but not size or weight, Lithium doesn't look so good but nickel does.

I'd put a switch on it. I'd also run the low voltage wire down to the cellar where I have a 12V power supply that runs a bunch of other lights and gadgets. Having a wall wart running a wire into the wall doesn't look cool.

That looks like it has interleaved laminations so you'd have to take it apart leaf by leaf. If it's varnished together that would be a lot of work. Find a transformer which has the E laminations that separate easily from the I laminations, and the bobbin with the windings just slips right off. Solder wires to the terminals of the finer windings and you're done. Or, buy a small reel of magnet wire.

I have some chips that would be ideal for this. IPS6401. Temp and current protected MOSFET and driver, automotive grade. I sense an Instructable coming on.

Here's a circuit that works: Taillight Converter

Now you need a woofer. A sewer tile or glazed tile enclosure (sauerkraut crock?) would do it. You could use an offset hole and not mess around with the equalizer. To me the video just sounds like your room, or maybe it's the recording. Better to use a tone sweep and measure the SPL, so you can find the peaks. Caution people that using a different speaker or enclosure size invalidates the design and they have to do the calculations themselves.

Not too many people listen to bare drivers. The enclosure is part of the speaker system like a violin body is to the strings. You're going to need a woofer to go with these midranges, too. The last few seconds of his video, my sub just came alive .... oh, that wasn't his speakers, that was direct.

Open the back on that wooden mounting and you might get some bass out of it. Then use a bigger speaker. Then use a car tyre.

It's a lot easier to scrounge an old transformer and take it apart to get the windings. You can solder the two wires to an audio jack. It's mono, so use the two connections together, with the other wire soldered to the ground. Plug it into an audio amp.

This is pretty clever. But...I find it's just as quick to plug into the headphone jack to get full fidelity stereo, and you may have enough power to run passive speakers. If you have an amp, you'd get any amount of power you want.

I've zapped many a NiCd this way and got most of them to work. For a while.

If you cover blank areas with tape or big fat marker, you will use less ferric chloride. Connect them all and you'll have a nice ground plane for better shielding.

Small receiving tubes use barium getters, which result in that silvery stuff in the top of the tube that turns white when it goes to air. Not toxic, but don't eat it. Mercury tubes are industrial types, pretty rare. I had some ignitrons that contained pounds of mercury. Fluorescent lamp tubes contain small amounts.

I put strips into a U shaped channel used for mounting shelves. The shape shields your eyes from direct LED light. The other mod I did was to use a PWM dimmer box. They're $3 or so from China. I put an illuminated switch on the box so I can see the switch in the dark. I use a 12V power supply in the basement to power this and a few other gadgets and lights around the house. The only problem I've had is some of the segments have crapped out after almost 2 years of use. You get what you pay for. I over-lit it to begin with, but the gaps look silly. At least they're hard to see because of the shielding of the mounting strip.

You need patience to use solar power. Plus, you don't want to put too much current into a battery.

There are commercially available peltier cooler dehumidifiers. You could dry your cellar and get distilled water. However, the efficiency ratings tend to be vague. They should last a long time if made well, and the parts should be easily repaired (power supply, fan, cooler module) compared to a refrigerant based machine. Then again, I have a 30 year old dehumidifier that still runs like new.

Or, if you have a welder, zap it and there's no way it will loosen up.

I wrap colored tape around sockets and wrench handles. It cuts down the sorting by 50%.

I guess Mad Man Muntz was before your time, but he manufactured cheap TVs in the tube era. He'd go around to the design benches and snip out a component. If the TV still worked, it was off the parts list after that. So if it works for you without the damper circuit, with no radio interference, no problem. But the parasitic oscillation might intermodulate with the signal somehow; I've seen reports of high noise levels. Try it with and without the cap. You might look for a more modern chip. The NJM2113, for instance, has a push-pull output so no output capacitor is needed. Most chips today are class D, so they are more efficient. But so many are surface mount only.

I pulled out my 1980 National Semiconductor Audio/Radio Handbook for the answer to this. The LM386 has a tendency to oscillate in the RF range (5-10 MHz) on the negative swing when run into a heavy load. It's not a continuous heavy oscillation, but a little bit of fuzz on the bottom end. The solutions are to damp out the oscillation with the RC circuit, or to run a few turns of the output lead through a ferrite bead. If you run it at a lower voltage, or a lighter load, it may not oscillate. If it doesn't bother you or neighboring radio receivers, no problem.

Crawling in my beer can means war!

Yellow jackets are carnivorous, and feed on the bugs that are eating my garden. So I leave them alone now, as long as they don't build nests near the house.

I've found that they need another 10 dB of gain to run off a guitar. I use an effects box as a preamp. I also built a preamp in a box using a TL091 FET amp chip and a 9V battery.

My son's forester HAD the same issue, fixed it 2 months ago, similar method!

Do you need to control the speed, or just turn it on and off? You'll need a higher power transistor, and a FET would be easier to drive.

I suggest two substitutions:1. Use Gorilla glue, which sets fast, works with wet wood (requires it, actually), fills gaps, paints well, strong. 2. Instead of PBR, drink water because it tastes the same; or a dark Flemish abbey ale. I save the PBR for in-laws and baiting slug traps. (Just came back from Belgium so I'm spoiled.)

The regulator chip inside takes the 12V (more like 13.8 when the car's running) and regulates it down to 5V. If you feed it less than 12V it just dissipates less power, so that's good.

The regulator chip inside takes the 12V (more like 13.8) and regulates it down to 5V. If you feed it less than 112V it just dissipates less power, so that's good.

Answer: bad idea. If you have that much RF energy running through the house, you either live next to a radio station or need to be evaluated for dangerous levels of power. Unless you generate the power, it probably wouldn't be reliable. And if you do, it would be less effective than running wires. It would look cool, though.