photo blog of recent D.I.Y. happenings in and around my workshop
After a number of years since my last attempt at making a wire-feed welder, I had spare parts lying around and decided to take another shot at it. It’s made from a cordless drill motor, bits of brass tubing, jumper cables and such. The nozzle is a Hobart ceramic for flux core wire, and the contact tip is ordinary tweco-compatible (US-Forge brand if I may be exact). It works surprisingly well connected to my homemade AC welder. (more…)
This wood-burning, electricity generating wood cookstove is inspired by the BioLite. But it isn’t lite or light. So I call it the BioHeavy. It utilizes three thermoelectric generator modules, two of them borrowed from this project. Also I modded a 12v computer fan to run on as low as 3 volts, so that the fan draft will still operate the stove at low starting temperatures.
Here is a few ways that I organize my growing collections of junque. Pictured above is a wooden rack I build to accomodate Avery “Crack-n-peel Plus” label boxes that I collected while employed at American Speedy Printing back in the 90′s. The boxes are approximately 8 1/2″ x 11″ x 2″, to hold a standard letter-sized ream of label stock. This is in response to an “Ask Hackaday” post. (more…)
This is my cheap soldering iron controller for the benefit of hackaday readers in response to this post.
It is simply a cheap lamp dimmer, wire nutted to the cord about 8″ back from the plug. It works very well. It was borne out of a need to solder thin paper phenolic boards without causing them to delaminate. The iron is only 30 watts, well below the dimmer’s rated 600 watt maximum.
This is the details of my wood-fired water heater, converted from a natural gas water heater. Sounds dangerous doesn’t it?
Here is a wheelbarrow concrete mixer I made as my spring of 2012 project. All except for the drive belt and minimal hardware, the materials were “recyclables.” The tumbler is made from an old poly pickle barrel. (more…)
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new HTC Droid Incredible 2 smartphone, but one thing I’ve been wanting is a way to secure it on a tripod. Well this morning I got one made. I made it out of cheap heavy guage stove pipe steel. (I think it’s 16 guage.)
ATX Computer power supply as benchtop power supply. These are quite common around the net, but this is mine with my favorite twist.
I just discovered these handy voltage regulators while trying to get an LM317 circuit to work. These regulators are switching type, which means they do not regulate by wasting the excess voltage in a resistive manner as do the LM317 regulators. Rather, they turn on and off rapidly, and use an inductor to store and release energy for theoretical 100% efficient operation. (more…)
This is a little report on running the blender3d burster plugin in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit. It runs, but has an annoying flickering problem.