This likely won't surprise anyone who knows me but I took some stuff that wasn't supposed to be put together and put it together... again. This time I didn't even bust out the angle grinder or welder! Just a knife, a little screwdriver, and some tape.
Today's project was one of curiosity. The picture below basically illustrates the thought process in my brain:
What you see there is my little s107 micro chopper being mentally added to an "808 keychain video camera" (google it or check eBay out). I could go through the whole process with you in text but I'd rather just let the video take over from here:
Christmas has finally come and gone. Santa (my in-laws) brought me a cute and completely unexpected toy this year. No, not one of those. No, not one of THOSE either, good lord! The toy in question is a Syma s107 mini R/C helicopter and it's fantastic.
Seriously, if you're a little nerdy and like toys you should probably go to eBay right now and source one up (for about $25cad shipped to your door). Go now. I'll wait here for you.
I had never flown an R/C chopper before this thing arrived so naturally I was expecting mass amounts of carnage and possible injuries. Nope. This thing is as tough as nails and even easier than the super-easy cheap R/C plane I augered into the earth a couple years ago. That was sort of on purpose... I'll tell you that story some other time.
In true YouTube nerd fashion I have hand-crafted an organic, free range video of the included kit and some airborne footage of the wee little chopper for everyone (mostly me) to enjoy:
I'll accept the fact that I'm basically just another video blogger in the interweb sea of millions of video bloggers... and that fact combined with the fact that my spare time is very slim right now means that I'm going to be going pretty light on the written blogging that usually accompanies my video releases. I'll keep updating the word-blog when I do a video because anyone following me here deserves fair warning like that... but I probably won't do as many big elaborate write-ups for a while.
C'est la vie.
Hot off the harddrive platters today we have a care&feeding video about lawnmowers for all of my fellow turf tamers out there:
Nestled in the middle of a bunch of farmland and forest just 15 minutes from my house lies a very interesting bit of tarmac, namely a racetrack. Atlantic Motorsport Park(AMP), to be exact. Most of the time this track is dedicated to motorcycle riding and racing which doesn't particularly interest me. For a few weekends of the season, however, the track gets very interesting when it becomes home to Performance Driving School. When this happens the track turns into a car show better than most other car shows. It's a car show where you'll find assorted Porsche and BMW sports cars by the dozens as well as a random smattering of other interesting cars from the Subaru Sti and hot Audis to performance Volvos and Lexuses (Lexii?)
The reason this is a car show better than most others is that the cars are NOT polished to perfection and kept behind velvet ropes. The cars are fetteled and tuned and the owners are learning how to push them to, and sometimes beyond, their limits. It's truly refreshing to see performance cars having the balls driven off of them in a nice controlled environment.
AMP has a website here: http://www.atlanticmotorsportpark.com/ that you can check out for their schedule and other relevant informations.
Here is a video I cut together from bits taken back in august on my super cheapo chinese micro video camera (hence the crap quality):
I've always been fascinated with boats. They're big and they're heavy and they float anyway. They also aren't confined to roads like cars. Overall, pretty neat things. This fascination, of course, crosses over to my R/C hobby as well. So much so that I've had a couple R/C boats over the years. Well last year I started getting the itch for an R/C boat again. This time I thought I'd go bigger, louder, and home-built.
The boat I'm trying to build is my homage to the Zippkits EasyVee deep vee wooden boat kit. Smart people among you who want to build one of these things... just buy the kit. Doing it really from scratch like I am is stupid and time-intensive. The EasyVee boat is a wooden construction thing about 46 inches long and intended for 2stroke weedeater-sized engine power. The people building these boats "correctly" also use the "correct" R/C-specific engines in them... but those cost money so my intent is to use a real weedeater engine and invent the driveline parts for it. That will take a long time but will save me hundreds of dollars if it works.
For once I had the foresight to get a camera set up BEFORE building the whole project. I have smooshed the pictures into a video so you can really see the progress of the boat from sheets of plywood to a fully formed and resin-sealed hull. That was the easy part. Now I've got some real inventing to do to make her seaworthy. Someday I'll have another update for you. Here is the first video:
As your friendly neighborhood IT Guy I often find myself in charge of doing away with old hard drives. These are drives that might be bad or that are too old and small to use anymore or what have you. Since your hard drive contains traces of everything you do (even after some software methods of erasing them) it makes sense to me to physically damage drives before recycling them. This helps to ensure no prying eyes go snooping around your data for juicy identity-thefty tidbits.
If you are really very concerned about your data I suggest you software-wipe your drive first with something like Boot&Nuke or any of dozens of similar drive formatting jobbies BEFORE physically trashing the thing for disposal... Well I guess you could try doing that after destroying the drive if you really wanted to. Let me know how that works out for you.
Anyway, to accomplish this sort of mindless physical destruction of computer hardware in a safe and tidy way I decided I would need to create a device. Such a device basically appeared to me in a daydream one day and I got to work as soon as time permitted. The device which may or may not be named The Hard Drive Penetrator is constructed out of the following basic ingredients:
- half of a broken punch (sharpened) - a hydraulic bottle jack (about $9 on sale at Princess Auto) - some old steel bed frame rails (pick these up for free at roadside on recycling day or cleanup day. - a couple hours of cutting and welding
In another stroke of workshop luck I'm fairly pleased with the way my drive killer turned out. It's quiet, clean, easy to use, and does a real number on a hard drive. For your info-tainment please enjoy my video about this thing:
Here's the deal: I busted the flywheel key off in my weedwhacker. Not sure how, but I did. I'll admit it. For those of you not in the know of small engines the flywheel key is what keeps all the inner gubbins synergizing correctly. Without the key the engine will do undesirable things such as: not start, remove skin from your knuckles, and create anger.
This leads to yet another DIY repair by the workshop nutjob himself, me. Naturally the weedwhacker in question was dredged from the garbage and repaired initially... and the spare parts engine was also garbage-picked so this was a no-cost endeavor. No-cost is the best cost.
I'm not going to walk you all through the repair in detail because I suspect most of you don't care and just read my blog by mistake or to humour me. The crux of it is basically that you remove the driveshaft side of the plastic housings to expose the flywheel and then swap it out. This requires the removal of roughly 400 screws for which I definitely lost the proper driver bit some time ago. In the included video I'll show some of the finer points of the swap out as well as say stupid things and make unnecessarily loud noises. Let's go!
Hey, I see a lot of useful stuff getting thrown out. Maybe it isn't useful to the original owner anymore but I find use in some of this stuff. One such happenstance occurred the day I found an 8gal. sized air compressor tank with a busted wheel and missing compressor. The tank itself was solid and undamaged (important for a pressure vessel) so I took it home hoping to make a portable air tank out of it one day. Months passed... no progress. Such is life. Then I found a second smaller discarded compressor thing that had some more interesting parts on it so I took that home as well and the brain-gears started turning.
I had to drop about $3 at the hardware store for threaded pipe fittings and $5 for some tacticool looking flat OD green spraypaint so I did end up spending a little money on the project but it's still pretty low budget.
Long story still long I sanded and painted the tank, pulled the (busted)wheels off it and added the 4 rubber feet off the smaller tank. Then I cut and welded the handle at a more jaunty angle(towards the centre of gravity) to aid in balancing the tank by the handle. I used some teflon thread tape, my hardware store threaded pipe bits, and my straight-out-of-the trash gauges and bits to plug the holes in the tank and add... well... functionality.
I'm pleased with the result. I now have enough portable air to do a little air-nailing, inflate some stuff, even air-out a computer fan or something without busting my hump trying to drag my big compressor around.
I have included a video for my own enjoyment... but you're welcome to have a look as well:
Hey, I've got a confession to make. I like beer. I like it a lot. I'm not much of a drunkard, however, because I like the tastes and textures of beer more than the alcoholic content. I'd rather nurse a good beer or two over an evening than pound back watery pissbeers one after another all night. For whatever reasons I've settled on liking dark beers and have taken to comparing them mentally for ages. Just recently I've decided I should review them out loud just in case anyone else wonders what I think the beer is like. This more public approach to beer reviewing is made simple with this new fangled invention called "the internet". I don't know if this internet thing is going to catch on or not but I rather like it.
Annnnnnnnnyway, the beer in question this time around is Alexander Keith's Dark Ale. As far back as I can recall this is Keith's first foray into dark beers. I think it's great that these big breweries like Keith's and Rickards are getting into the dark beer scene. That should help drive competition in that segment and perhaps lower prices or bring more products to market. All I know is that I want to try them out and I'll let you know what I think of them as I do.
I've decided to take a sort of disgruntled/violent IT Guy approach to the beer video making. Mostly because I get a kick out of it. I hope you do as well. If you haven't already seen it, you should check out my Rickards Dark review in my YouTube videos. Without further futzing about here's the Keith's Dark video:
First and foremost, a disclaimer: NOBODY DO THIS. There that should cover that.
Okay, Here's the backstory: My cordless drill was great for a few years till the batteries tanked out and it turned into an ugly paperweight. After spending my usual too much time on the internet reading about such things I decided I'd juice the crap out of my battery packs with my mig welder to see if that helped.
Initially I did one pack months ago and was so pleased with the result that I saved the other pack to share the experience with you fine folks of the intertubes. You should feel honoured. Or at least less offended than I usually make you.
According to my limited understanding of how the guts of batteries work here is why nicad cells stop working: think of the cell as a bucket of chemical juices with two chunks of metal suspended in it (these connect to the positive and negative terminals). The chemical juices react with the metal chunks and give off magic... or electricity or something. The reason I think they crap out sometimes is because after a lot of this chemical reaction happening a buildup of some byproduct bridges the gap between the metal bits and shorts the sucker out.
Now... that being probably mostly kinda true, here's why the welder helps: My welder on high outputs a little over 30v DC but massive amperage or current. This huge wallop of current blows apart those bridges of crap built up between the internal battery parts and allows the normal chemical reaction to resume in a more appropriate manner. I'm sure there are more qualified people to give proper explanations of this but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
After seeing a few writings about how to do this trick it seemed like a handful of short, evenly paced zaps was the agreed on methodology so as you'll see in the video I zap the battery in that manner. I arbitrarily decided to zap it 10 or 12 times because that "seemed about right".
Long term testing: As I mentioned before I repaired my other drill pack months ago and it works really well. Not as good as brand new, no, but very usable and much better than doling out the green for new stuff. So that's your lesson in DIY for today.
And now for the sure-to-be award-winning video of the battery zapping event:
That's what I think, anyway. Oh well. it can't stay this cold much longer. Luckily it was about 25 degrees warmer last weekend(not even joking) and I got outside to do some mixing of hobbies. I recommend combining some hobbies thusly:
1 garbage-parts rebuilt mountain bike 1 home built bike trailer made mostly of garbage-parts 1 bag of R/C tools, battery packs, etc and finally 1 stonking big R/C F150 4x4 model.
Through the miracle of the internet I've got one here to show you that I had prepared earlier:
At this point you could probably take a picture, send it to all of your friends, and then unload the gear and go inside for a beer. That's basically cheating though... mostly because I didn't think of it earlier.
My next step was to bike my lardass and my trailer full of gear a few km down the road to the part of the local recreation trail that is all torn up for rebuilding. That tear-upedness is what makes it great for R/C trail driving. Note all of the logs, uneven ground, stumps, etc:
I had a great time moving my camera around my adjustable outrigger mount thing and taking different angled footage of roughly the same path through the terrain over and over. Sadly my uber-cheap chinese knock-off video camera's battery didn't last a terribly long time. I suspect it needs longer charging than I think it does. Before it quit, though, I managed to get a few good runs in and had enough footage to slop together the following bit of video. WARNING: this is not very stable video on account of the camera and my mount. If you get motion sick really easy or you're generally a wimp you might want to go easy on watching this. For everyone else: Don't worry it's only just over a minute long :)
Once in a while I get the itch to impulse-buy some kinda gadgety thing. This is completely counter to my usual tendency of being tighter than two coats of paint with my money. Thankfully the good people of China seem to churn out bajillions of electronic devices at next to zero cost and sell them on eBay. I recently decided to try a mini digital video camera on a whim and found this little gem for about $19cad shipped to my door:
I think the camera I got is actually a knock-off of the pictured "md80" one but we're not here to judge... especially at a price of $19.
Anyway I wanted this camera to do on-board/FPV video with my R/C trucks and things so today with the help of my buddy, Christian, I took a few R/C truck video clips and I did a little super-amateur video editing to slap them together into this:
Hope you like it. I actually really enjoyed both the making of and the watching of this little movie. I think it shows great potential in the area of cheap on-board video making. I shall pursue this more in the future.
Until next time, Keep yer feet warm and yer beers cold.
Another short blog entry due to the video doing most of the explaining. For some time now I've been hanging onto beer bottles from beers that I've really enjoyed. Both to honour the beer and also to cater to my hording-stuff nature.
The beer shelf itself is constructed from nice plywood shelving that was bound for the landfill. I've re-purposed this shelving material for use as... shelving material by cutting it to length and ripping it to width. I don't know sweet FA about carpentry or shelf-building so I just used some simple glued and nailed blocks to hold the ends up. I love my air-nailer so very much. To anyone who doesn't have one... get one. You'll find all kinds of uses for it I'm sure. Hell, just nail a bunch of scrap wood together for fun!
Sometime in the variably near future I've got an interesting radio controlled / welding project coming up. I've started work on it but need some supplies to continue. Stay tuned for more beer and beer-fueled projects!
Hey gang, The weather has been kinda Nova Scotia Wintery so I haven't been doing much outside or in my unheated garage lately. What I have been doing, however, is watching Olympic hockey and drinking beer. This gave me an idea and after I got another beer to drink I had another idea! Why not share some interesting beers with my friends in the intertubes? So here we go, my maiden voyage beer review:
I've been neglecting my blog. I think that's how blogs are supposed to work. Anyway, here's what's up:
We (mostly my wife) had a baby. A little boy named Daniel. He's terribly adorable and growing at a grand pace. At the time of writing this he is just under 6 weeks old. Since he's largely immobile at this stage I've been taking advantage of any wisps of spare time I can find to do quick little arts and crafts hobby projects. One such project is my newest large-scale radio controlled truck.
Let's call it the "Hemipede" because... well because I feel like it. The ingredients of this one are pretty simple: one huge toy truck body salvaged from the garbage, one working but unloved R/C truck, a pinch of ingenuity, and a hacksaw.
I didn't really photograph this project much along the way so this is how it works: lop the working R/C truck in half in the middle, add a bunch of length to match the wheelbase of the body, nail (or in my case rivet) it together again and adjust the position of the body mounting posts. That's really about it. Even with a great deal of bumbling on my part I knocked this one out in about 3 or 4 hours. The unheated garage at -5c slowed progress somewhat.
