Zapping a cordless drill battery into submission!

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:

This weather is bullcrap!

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 :)

First Person Awesome

G'day faithful reader(s?),

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.

The Beer Wall of Fame

Howdy Gang,

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!

Video:

Relax, have a beer.

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:

Little Big Projects

Howdy,

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.

Anyway... video:

We got a not-big convoy!

Howdy,
When I finished my bike trailer project I had some comments and requests in regards to seeing the trailer in action underway and under load. Well to keep all two of my faithful viewers happy I can certainly do that. I did a shot rip up the street and back and made a few mental notes about the trailer:

1. when loaded with heavy stuff, the trailer is heavy.
2. the brakes of the bike work but you need extra time to stop with over 100lbs(trailer+cargo) of extra weight strapped to the bike.
3. on a level bit of road the trailer isn't very noticeable.
4. I get funny looks from people when I leave the garage with any of my contraptions.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the little video. I've got the raw footage shot for a couple other little videos already as well so hopefully I'll have time to process those soon.

Video: