Apple 2 in an ammo tin.

This was a follow on from my Tardis MAME console. The idea was to build a small portable MAME machine. My idea, not an original one it turns out, was to build a PC into a .50 cal ammo tin. I bought a tin from Kiwi Disposals on K Road, the local army surplus place. Apparently this was some time in about mid 2008 but I can’t be sure. I know I took loads of pictures of things but I can’t seem to find them!

Ammo tin.

Ammo tins are made from steel and they are very solid. They are also waterproof, have a solid catch, a carry handle and the lids can be detached. They make great tool boxes (I have one in the back of my MGB) and they have been used in the past for making other ammo tin computers. I think mine cost me about $25NZ. Apparently it heldM728 artillery shell fuzes not actual .50cal rounds.

To go inside it I wanted an older motherboard. I specifically wanted one with a joyport, the old 15 pin D ones. The idea was that I would use this machine with my ancient but excellent Thrustmaster F16 FLCS joystick. I had a look on TradeMe and came across an older motherboard for sale. It was a Gigabyte GA-8LD533 with a 1.7GHz Intel Celeron processor. I had to look in my TradeMe history to see I bought this back in June 2008 which is how I dated when I started the project!

To fit the computer into the ammo tin I made a metal sub frame to mount everything too. I am sure at the time I took pictures of all this but I can’t find them at all now. I did get everything finished and I think it was all working but I never actually used the machine for anything so it is been sitting on the floor under my computer desk for the last 3 years gathering dust. All the pictures here are new ones. I can’t remember if I actually got the thing running. I think so?

You’re probably wondering why I dug it out now. Well, that is my colleague Grant’s fault.  I know several Grants. The first is old beardy from my Zeacom days. He gives me old engines to play with. The second is artist Grant who helps me with car things. The third is author Grant at my current job. He got me addicted playing Taipan on our Android phones. It turns out this isn’t a great port. So I started looking at the original versions. The one I remember is the Apple 2 one.

Now the Apple 2 is a computer I remember very fondly. It wasn’t my first computer, that was a Commodore Vic 20. The Apple was my second computer. At first I had an Apple 2 plus, bought by my parents second hand from the computer shop that used to be over the road from the old Farmers building on Hobson street in Auckland. Oddly enough I now work less that a km from there – doing computer stuff! We eventually upgraded that to an Apple 2E enhanced.  Recently I discovered at my parents house my old Apple 2 folder. In 1986 that computer cost my father $1864! And that was at a discounted price since he worked at the university so got an educators discount. I was 13.

Original 1986 receipt.

That was a lot of money then. Still is now! I guess it paid off, computers is what I do and now it pays for me to be able to spend money to recreate what I had way back then.

It’s kind of circular really.

Anyway, Grant got me into Taipan and we both fondly remember the Apple 2 version. Grant has an idea to build a PC into an old Apple 2 disk drive. I remembered my old ammo tin project and decided to turn that into an Apple 2 emulator. I had previously tried out the AppleWin emulator and knew that worked well. The latest version is now here. I decided to try Taipan on the ammo tin.

When I tried to run it the damn thing wouldn’t boot. It seems that somewhere along the line the 120GB drive in it failed. I found it wouldn’t boot up and I wasn’t able to reformat the drive to reinstall Windows XP on it. I did find an old 1.2GB drive and was able to get the machine up and running on that. Unfortunately 1.2GB is far too small for an up to date XP installation. But it was enough for me to get the machine running and AppleWin installed to make sure it was going to work.  Once I confirmed that author Grant came to my rescue with an old 20GB drive I could use.

So I set about rebuilding the machine.

In the original box I had made the basic fame and mounted the motherboard, power supply and hard drive. I had bought a small PC power supply to fit inside the tin. I am not sure what the wattage on it is but it is tiny. I am using the on-board video port and have no peripheral cards at all so I should need too many watts.

Basic box.

The basic fame is made from aluminium sheet with aluminium extrusions in the corners.

Front panel.

The front panel is another sheet of aluminium with appropriate cut outs. I used two drawer handles on the front to provide an easy way to pull the chassis out of the ammo tin.

The motherboard is mounted with four brass screws fitted through the bottom of the chassis. To keep the screw heads flush I used countersunk screws. I drilled the holes for them then put the screws into the holes and hit the heads with a hammer. This indents the aluminium to fit the screw head so they fit flush with the chassis. I used a plastic sheet under the motherboard to ensure it wouldn’t short and used rubber power cord grommets cut in half as rubber spacers to hold the board off the chassis.

MB mounts.

The motherboard was mounted into the chassis. The front panel provides cut-outs for the connectors on the back of the motherboard, the power supply and for switches, LEDs and USB ports.

MB and supply installed.

The MB sits in the base of the chassis. The power supply sits above it attached to the front panel. The hard drive, in this case a 5 1/4 drive, is attached vertically to the back of the chassis.

I used a missile switch as the main power/reset switch. I added two LEDs for power and HDD indication. All of this was basically how the box was as I built it in 2008. The front panel had a large hole in it which I was going to use as storage. I never actually got around to making a liner for the hole so I made up a new aluminium panel which isolates the motherboard from the rest of the tin. This panel, forming a neat cubby hole, is held in place by the LED bezels and provide useful storage space.

Cubby hole.

With this in place the chassis was finished and it ould be slid into the ammo box. It is worth nothing that if you need to reinstall Windows or need the use of a CD/DVD ROM drive you can simply slide the chassis out and temporarily attach a drive. All the cables are present in the chassis already.

DVD drive.

You can see how when the chassis is slid into the box the cubby hole is separated from the rest of the box.

Chassis in box.

If you look carefully you will see the third USB socket is upside down. This is one I added with the update to the build. I had two spare USB cables floating about inside the box so I made one available on the panel. I put it upside down since I have found you sometimes come across some USB accessories that won’t fit into the socket in a sensible orientation. They need to be inserted upside down! This way I have all bases covered.

Well, that’s my excuse anyway.

Everything is very snug in the box. After running it for a while. I discovered several thing. 1) it gets very hot and 2) it would be handy not to need to connect external speakers.

For the first problem I added in a second (well third) fan. The CPU already has a fan as does the power supply. All the air was being blown out of the holes on the front of the power supply and this seemed rather hot. I added in a fan to the side of the cubby hole to blow air through the box. This made a massive difference to the temperature of the box and now it runs very cool.

  Fan vent in cubby hole.

I also decided since all I was trying to emulate was very simple Apple 2 sounds I should add an internal speaker. The Apple 2 used a simple, small, single channel speaker. I added one inside the case held to the side of the power supply with industrial strength Velcro. I added a switch to the front panel that switches the output from the internal speaker (wired so both channels are going into the one speaker) to the normal rear (in my case front) line out socket. I did this using the front audio output socket on the motherboard. This way I can plug external speakers into the box if needed but most of the time the Apple sounds are sent to the internal small speaker, just like in an original Apple 2.

Front panel with speaker switch.

With those in place I slide the chassis into the box.

Chassis in place.

The cubby hole is used for storing the cables and mouse. I am currently using a wireless mouse with a large receiver that I got when I originally started the project in 2008 . I modified the receiver by opening it up and hot gluing a rare earth magnet into it. I can then stick the receiver to the outside of the steel ammo tin.

Storage and magnetic mouse receiver.

I will probably replace the mouse with a modern Bluetooth one to save some space. I also had a USB folding keyboard that would fit into the cubby hole. Unfortunately that broke so for now I am using conventional keyboard. I have bought a new folding one that will hopefully fit into the case.

And that is the box basically finished. Even though it is an old motherboard and CPU it is easily enough to run the Apple 2 emulator. So far every single game runs fine.

I can attach the box to a external monitor or, through an interface box, to my old tellie (yes, will get an LCD one day). Everything (hopefully including the keyboard soon) fits into the cubby hole when the box is being carried. It is all pulled out and set up to run the machine. The cubby hole is left free then so the fan is unobstructed although it does provide handy storage for temporary items.

The toggle switch is used to power the box on and off. Flicking it off will cause the box to shut down nicely rather than just killing the power.

AppleWin allows you to run the screen either windowed or full screen as well as simulating colour or monochrome screens.

Next is to download as many old games as I can. So far all of them seem to run well. It’s a real trip down memory lane for me. All the old games: Below the Root, Wings of Fury, Captain Goodnight, Rescue Raiders, Choplifter, Loderunner, Conan, Drol, Bolo, Dungbeetles! We got ya!

I also need to build the equivalent of an old Apple joystick. AppleWin allows the use of a PC joystick but I want to build a PC compatible joystick in the style of the old Apple 2 ones. I have a plan to build a small one using the analogue stick from an old Playstation controller and a couple of buttons.

This is an emergency parasitic bike pump which is basically an air hose that lets you inflate a presumably flat bike tyre from a handy inflated car tyre.

Make in turn got it from the original Instructable which is here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Automatic-bicycle-pump/

If you look at the comments in both of those you’ll see there is a bit of discussion on this. On the Instructable there are some very odd assumptions being made about what car tyres and bike tyres pressures actually are. The maker guys are more concerned about the morality of it all (me included).

One thing that annoyed me was people seem to think that a car tyre inflated to 30PSI would be able to then in turn inflate the bike tyre to 30PSI. That’s obviously wrong as the air has to come from one tyre (at 30PSI) to the other flat tyre (at 0PSI) so you’ll end up with them both at some pressure in between. I assumed they’d both end up at the same pressure.

In the end I decided the easiest way to see if this works was to try it!

So off out to my garage I went. I knew I had one old air hose (red) off a dead foot pump so I dug that out. I also knew the air hose (black) on my air compressors tyre inflator unscrewed. Some rummaging in my junk box produced a brass 90 elbow. I cut the end off the junk pumps hose and pushed that over a hose barb screwed into the elbow. The air compressors inflator hose happened to match the thread on the elbow so, with a bit of teflon tape, that just screwed in. This was handy as I needed to keep unscrewing it between tests to re-inflate my car tyre.

Air hoses on manifold. The blue thing is the air compressor tyre inflator.

Now I don’t actually own a bicycle. But I have something close. It’s a small mini bike project I started about 10 years ago and haven’t finished (yet).  It was to be powered but a small 2 stroke engine and vaguely resemble an old Norton Manx racing bike. The car tyre is on my MGB.

The test subjects – a mini-bike with bike tyres and an MGB.

On the car I run at Yokohama C-Drive 185/65-R15s at 32PSI on the front tyres. This is a fairly typical sort of pressure for a normal car tyre to be at. The mini-bike uses small wheels from a kids bicycle. I replaced the tyres that were on it with some Hookworm 16×1.95 tyres since those were what looked most little mini motorcycle tyres to me. A label on the side of the tyre says to inflate them to 110PSI! I don’t actually know what typical bicycle tyre pressures are but I am fairly sure it is more than a car tyre.

Bike tyre says inflate to 110PSI.

Hose connections.

To measure the pressure I used a normal pen style tyre pressure gauge. Now this isn’t any kind of rigorous scientific study. I’m just some bloke messing about in his garage on a Sunday afternoon so I did it with bits of junk and what I had on hand. Don’t go worrying that I didn’t use the right kind of gauge or I didn’t have a proper bike or I should have used a red MGB instead of a green one. I just wanted to see if this idea actually works.

Pressure gauge.

So, here is what I did. I inflated the car tyre to 30PSI. Seems like as good a pressure as any and representative of what you’d get on a normal car. I made sure the minibike tyre was fully deflated – no pressure on the gauge. I hooked one end of the hose onto the mini bike then I hooked the other end onto the car tyre.

What happened next is the air could be heard hissing down the hose and the bike tyre would inflate. I would wait a while till the hissing stopped (5-10 seconds) then quickly remove both valves at the same time.

Not that last point is important. You must remove both hoses simultaneously. When you disconnect one tyre first the other tyre is still connected to the hose so all the air will leak out of it. The car and bike tyres both use what is called a Schrader valve. These have a small pin in the middle of them that, when pressed, opens the valve. With the with hose connected the pin is depressed and the valve open.  You could probably design the hose with a one way valve in it so air can flow from the car tyre to the bike tyre but not the other way. Then you could detach the car tyre end first without worrying about the bike tyre deflating again. It’s not too hard to detach both at the same time with minimal air loss though.

I did this 10 times and recorded the results. Between each try I had to unscrew the black tyre inflator hose from the manifold and use it to re-inflate the car tyre back to 30PSI again.

I also did one test at 35 PSI and another at 40PSI. I didn’t want to inflate the car tyre more than that so I stopped then.

Results.

The results are fairly consistent given my very unscientific method and they are quite interesting. As I thought the bike tyre doesn’t go to 30PSI of course. But the two tyres don’t end up at the same pressure either. I averaged the 10 attempts at 30PSI and here are summarised results below:

Start pressure: 30PSI

• Car tyre end pressure: 27.75PSI
• Bike tyre end pressure: 25.1PSI
• Difference: 2.65PSI

Start pressure: 35PSI

• Car tyre end pressure: 31.5PSI
• Bike tyre end pressure: 28.5PSI
• Difference: 3PSI

Start pressure: 40PSI

• Car tyre end pressure: 37PSI
• Bike tyre end pressure: 32PSI
• Difference: 5PSI

So, what does this all mean? The hose does sort of work. Air will go from the car tyre into the bike tyre re-inflating it somewhat. But the bike tyre will be at a lower pressure than the car tyre and both will be at lower than the starting pressure. If the bike tyre needs to be inflated to 110PSI as it says on the side wall of even the little kids one I have you’d need a car tyre that’s at a pressure greater than that.

Interestingly my tyre pressure gauge only goes to 50PSI so you’re probably out of luck finding a car with pressures that high! I think you’d need to find a handy aircraft to steal air (actually more likely nitrogen) from. Chapter 6 of this Goodyear Tire PDF shows the difference between aircraft and passenger car tyres and indicates aircraft run at 200PSI and cars at 35PSI.

Maybe someone would like to do a more rigorous test with better equipment and method and graph the results to see if there is some kind of trend happening. What I don’t understand is why they end up at different pressures? Is it just leakage when I remove the hoses or is there good scientific reason behind it.

The other thing worth mention is you really shouldn’t go stealing air from other peoples car tyres. One, it could be dangerous and two, it’s just plain rude! I would be very, very unhappy to discover someone had been messing with the tyres on my car without my knowledge.

I took Vicky the MG and since Dave wanted to see her I gave him a lift. I made a special exception to my ‘no guys in the MG ’cause it looks a bit gay’ rule because Dave has long hair so if anyone saw us they’d assume he was a girl. He did question that and said wouldn’t the beard and AC-DC t-shirt give it away but I said it was fine since I was picking him up in Green Bay so everyone would just think ‘Westie chick’.

Anyway, we toddled along and parked near the showgrounds. As soon as we got out of the car some bird came over and said cool car and asked if she could take a picture of it and of me ‘in my costume’.

I wasn’t wearing a bloody costume! I don’t know, you dress better than the usual standards around here (and in NZ, the land that fashion forgot,  standards are LOW) and everyone thinks you’re fancy. Anyway, she got her picture and off we went.

I’ve never actually been to one of these things before. It was an experience! Lots of people had made some effort to dress up. There did seem to be quite a few young ladies one or two sizes bigger than they should be in costumes one or two sizes smaller than they should be wearing! Everyone seemed to be having fun though. People kept asking about Bender’s head and wanting to take pictures. We spent most of the time there in queues waiting to get the things signed. After doing that we had a quick look around but the rest didn’t really interest either of us much.

I think John DiMaggio liked the head. Unfortunately it was too loud there for him to hear Bender (himself?)  speak. We had to wait a little while for the Dr Who guys to sign things. Just as I was next in line they went off to do photos so I had to wait half an hour or so. But they came back and all signed them. Sylvester McCoy signed the TARDIS ‘Simon. Again, Hi.’ since he’s already signed it once before! I said later to Dave I should have asked Paul McGann if he felt like the George Lazenby of Dr Who since he’d only been in one. Next time!

Maybe next year I should see if they want to borrow the TARDIS?

Anyway, here are the pictures.

Miele S5210.

It’s a Miele S5210. It’s a very, very good vacuum cleaner. Well, it was until the point that it broke! Actually I was somewhat responsible for that. For a little while now I have been restoring a car (OK, almost 6 years but I am nearly done – www.asciimaton.co.nz/pics). After weeks of filling and sanding of filler I finally sent it off to the panel beaters to be painted. This left me with a garage full of sanding dust. I swept up what I could the used the vacuum to clean up the rest. Unfortunately your average house vacuum isn’t really designed to handle lots of very, very fine filler dust. I ended up clogging it up and the motor stopped running smoothly and instead started stuttering. I needed to take the vacuum cleaner apart to clean it and remove all the dust so it would run properly again. What follows is the procedure I used to take the vacuum cleaner apart. I imagine the process is probably similar to other Miele vacuum cleaner models.

I was inspired to do this page after I found the following page online for a different Miele model (a Miele s300): http://www.sannerud.com/house/miele.html

You don’t need many tools to take the vacuum cleaner apart. Just a Torx T20 driver and a small flat screwdriver to push on the plastic clips that holds the parts together. All the screws used to hold it together are the same. The Torx bit shown here is actually a tamper proof Torx bit with a hole in the middle but it works fine on the screws. Click on any of the pictures for a larger view.

Torx screw and T20 Torx driver bit.

First unplug the vacuum cleaner and remove the bag and all the filters. The small silver honeycomb filter just clips in place. Remove this so you can then remove the lid.

The clips holding the lid on.

The lid just slides onto the hinges and two small square clips hold it in place as shown above. Depress the small squares and then slide the lid off the hinges.

Large honeycomb filter.

The large honeycomb filter is also just clipped in place. Carefully push back the two clips shown circled above and the filter should come out.

Rear plastic piece.

The plastic piece at the rear between the two buttons is also just held in place by clips. Brute force will remove this. Just yank it upwards and it will pop loose.

Removing the speed selector.

With the rear cover removed you should see two screws holding the speed selector part in place. Remove these.

Clips holding speed selector in place.

With the two screws removed the speed selector can be removed by pushing in the small clips that hold the front of it in place and lifting it off. This piece just contains the knob that controls the speed. The knob has a stalk that sticks down underneath it that fits into a selector switch on the electronics board.

Top cover screws.

The top cover is held in place with four screws shown, two at the front and two down deep holes in front of each button. Undo these then the top cover should lift off.

Top cover removed.

Electronics board plug.

With the top cover removed you can see the electronics board. It’s pretty simple really and doesn’t have much on it. The board should be free to pull off now. The only thing holding it in place is the connector shown above. Simply unplug this connector and the board will lift off.

Inner cover.

With the electronics board removed you should be able to see the screws holding the inner cover in place. There are three at the back and one in the centre as shown above. Remove all these screws.

Clips holding inner cover.

As well as the four screws there is a clip either side of the cover on the sides of the vacuum. You can simply pop these apart by hand then the inner cover should lift off. There is a small rubber hose that goes between the cover and the cord retractor mechanism which you also need to disconnect from the cover (it will probably just fall off anyway).

Inner cover removed.

With the inner cover removed you can now remove the motor (which has a foam pad over it) and the cord retracting mechanism. The only trick here is to unplug the connector that joins the two together.

Motor connector.

The motor and cord retractor will simply lift out. I gave everything a good cleaning to get all the dust out. I used my air compressor to blow it all clean. With all the dust removed from the motor I sprayed it’s brushes with electrical contact cleaner. I didn’t go as far as dismantling the motor itself (March 2010 – OK, I did eventually See below!).

Contact cleaner for the brushes.

The brushes are either side of the motor and I simply sprayed cleaner into the hole at back of them.

After letting the contact cleaner dry I put the motor, cord retractor and electronics boards temporarily back in place the tested the vacuum. You need to be VERY careful doing this as nothing is properly attached and there are exposed mains connections that will bit you it you touch them (don’t ask how I know). Also the vacuum motor is extremely loud when not encased in plastic!

Once everything was cleaned and working again reassembling the vacuum cleaner is basically the revers of taking it apart. Make sure you reattach the small rubber hose and also make sure the cord and plug are free and don’t get caught when screwing all the pieces of the case back together.

After my cleaning and spraying the motor with contact cleaner the vacuum is working nicely again. I know now I should really get a nice shop vac for cleaning the garage and leave the Miele for purely domestic duties!

I can really recommend these vacuums. They are good value for money and very powerful. And now, having seen how they look inside, I can say they are very nice quality too.

Update March 2010.

I have had a few people comment that this page was useful so I decided to post the second part of my vacuum cleaning story in case people find this further detail helpful.

My cleaned up vacuum worked well for a little while but then the motor started stuttering again until eventually it stopped running altogether. Another tear down was in order. This time right down to the motor itself. Again the nice design of the Miele made this an easy job to tackle.

First you need to remove the motor from the vacuum as described above. Then carefully tap off the metal shield on the end of the motor exposing the blower fan. Next remove the nut holding the blower fan in place. Now it was a few months ago that I did this but from memory the nut is a reverse threaded one, i.e. turn it clockwise to undo it. This allows you to pull off the aluminium blower and the flat spacer washer.

Nut and blower removed.

Next you can lift out the two carbon motor brushes. These are simply held in with spade connectors so you can just pull them straight out. In the picture below you can see the female spade socket on the face of the stator housing.

One brush already removed. The other still in place.

The brushes are nice and long so should last a very long time.You can see the long male spade connector on the bottom of the brass housing. You can also see how despite my previous cleaning this brush is still covered in sanding dust. If I didn’t mention it above I should say don’t sand filler off a car (http://asciimation.co.nz/pics/page18.html) then use this vacuum to collect the dust!

Nice brush. Boom! Boom!

With the brushes removed (and cleaned up with electrical cleaner) you can remove the stator. There is a metal spring clip that holds it in place. If you press this down the stator should then slide out.

Spring clip holding stator down.

The electronic controller is attached to the stator and will come put with it. You can see the top of a TO220 type device sticking out of the top of the plastic housing. We get to that in a minute. The inside of the stator and housing were both covered in the sanding dust so I cleaned these up as well.

Stator removed. Note the electronics are still attached.

Next you can carefully pull out the rotor. This has bearings on each end and the lower bearing is a press fit into the housing. You need to carefully pull this out. The rotor will come out in one piece. Be careful not to lose the little flat spring washer though.

Rotor removed.

The observant of you will probably have noticed one of the problems with the motor. The commutator on the end of the rotor, that ring of copper strips the brushes rub against, are filthy and scored. To fix this I carefully mounted the rotor in my mini-lathe. You only need to grip it very lightly in the three jaw chuck. I made sure it was running true and turned it on. I then used some fine wet and dry sandpaper folded into a long strip to carefully sand down the commutator.

Rotor mounted in lathe.

I didn’t try to get the commutator perfectly smooth as I didn’t want to sand too much away. It still has a few small scores around it but it doesn’t need to be perfect. The deep scoring is actually where the edges of the brushes are in contact with the commutator so the brush is in contact with smooth copper on most of it’s face.

Commutator after sanding.

Next I cleaned up the aluminium blower which was quite clogged with dust. A bit of electrical cleaner and a poke around the fins with a long cable tie did the trick.

After doing all this and cleaning everything to remove all the dust I reassembled the motor. Since I had given it a good clean with electrical cleaner I left the motor on top of my dark coloured garage roof to make sure it was fully dry before trying to run it again. I wanted to make sure all the cleaner had evaporated out of the motor and windings.

Unfortunately after putting it back in the vacuum cleaner and reassembling everything (with a little Loctite around the rotor bearing where it pressed into the housing) the motor was still dead! I had to take it apart again. This time I removed the motor, opened that up and removed the motor electronics. Again thanks to nice design this module just unclips since it is held in place with spade connectors.

Motor electronics.

The electronics on the motor are incredible simple. Basically it’s just a TRIAC and what I think is a thermal cutout device.

TRIAC and thermal cutout thingy?

About now the problem was pretty obvious. This TRIAC was burned out! A close inspection and a little prodding showed that TRIAC was burned out. Two of the legs were not even connected to the body anymore.

Well there’s your problem!

I am not sure why this happened. I am guessing a combination of a badly connecting and arcing commutator and a motor clogged with sanding dust ended up cooking things. The TRIAC itself is a T2550h 600T which is a 25 amp TRIAC. These are available in NZ but not from the easy places like Jaycar or Dick Head Smith (who don’t really do electronics anymore despite their name). You can probably get them from the bigger suppliers like Farnell or RS but they would cost a bomb and you might not be able to buy just one. So I looked on eBay and found someone in the UK sells them for just a couple of quid. I ordered one of them.

This is the data sheet for this particular part: http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/stmicroelectronics/6697.pdf

Once that arrived a week or so later it was a simple matter to unsolder the dead part and solder in the new TRIAC. I reassbmbled everything again (after this many time apart you get good at this bit) and finally everything was working again!

All that was actually done several months ago and the vacuum cleaner is still working happily now. I know these things aren’t supposed to be customer serviceable but it is nice to see that they are engineered in a way that means a customer with the right skills can successfully get in there and fix things.

My house and separate garage.

One thing that always worries me about being in the garage is making sure no one goes into the house (and vice-versa). Locking the doors each time I go from one to the other quickly becomes annoying so instead I decided to make a little door alarm. Basically, when I am in the garage, an alarm sounds if someone opens the front door of the house and, when I am in the house, an alarm sounds when someone opens the door to the garage.

To build this I used two small boxes, some magnetic reed switches, some switches and LEDs (with current limiting resistors), a six volt power supply and four wires of the data cable I had run between the house and garage when I had it built.

Circuit diagram.

The circuit is really simple. Everything on the left is in the house, everything on the right in the garage. Basically each little box contains a toggle switch, an LED to indicate the alarm is on, a buzzer and a magnetic reed switch attached to the door.

The alarm works by sounding a buzzer when the opposite door is open. So if you are in the house and have the alarm switched on the buzzer in the house sounds if someone opens the garage door. If you are in the garage and the alarm is on the buzzer in there sounds if the house door is opened.  The toggle switch on each box turns off it’s buzzer (say you are in the house and you know the garage door is open and don’t want it buzzing). The LED just shows the alarm is on and will buzz when the opposite door is open. The reed switches are wired so that the switch is open when the magnet is in place. The reed switch itself is attached to the door frame and the magnets are on the door. When the door opens the switch closes and the alarm sounds.

The power supply is an old 6 volt wall plug I had lying about. To completely turn off the the alarm I simply pull out the power supply lead.

Garage alarm box showing wiring and reed switch.

Garage alarm box (the power was off so the LED isn’t glowing).

House alarm box next to normal home alarm.

Now I can work in either the garage or house and leave the doors unlocked (but closed) and know that if anyone opens a door I will hear it where ever I am.

The skin is completely dried and is very tough and all it’s internals seem to have dried to nothing. I want to somehow remove all the flesh and just leave the bones (don’t ask why, it’s just one of those things you have to do).

What though is the best way to remove all the old tissue? Since my poor pet newts died I have nothing to feed the white worms they lived off to. I was wondering if I put the worms in a container, soaked the rat in water then put it in with the worms would they do the work of eating away all the dead flesh?

I know there are special beetles used for just such a purpose but goodness knows if they are available in NZ at all. Either that or some sort of chemical treatment?

Today, I finally reached 1000 empty Tic Tac boxes!

Please note, this isn’t a collection (or a 3 dimensional array). I haven’t actually gone out of my way to collect empty Tic Tac boxes. I just haven’t thrown any away.

For about the last 7 or 8 years.

The question now is what to do with the damn things?  Anybody have any suggestions?

In that picture they are stacked 6 wide and 6 deep with 27 full layers and a further 28 boxes on the top layer.

With 5 empty Sakuma’s Drops tins for company…..

After cleaning up all the parts I spent a week or so painting them. It all got several coats of thick hammered finish green paint or satin black engine enamel. I find engine enamel is a great, hard wearing paint you can spray metal parts with without priming. After painting and reassembling all the parts I needed to finish off a few things. First was getting a new motor. As luck would have it one of my night classmates  happened to have an old motor lying about. I think this one might be 1/2 HP instead of 1/3 like the original but it fitted the drill perfectly. The base bolted straight into place and the shafts were exactly the same so the pulley fitted easily. The motor came to me bright red and since I had some bright red paint left over for my old MG I gave the motor a quick touch up and left it like that.

With the motor in place I needed the wiring. I got two heavy duty power leads from Surplustronics for about $3.50 each. One I cut the plug off to use as the lead to the motor. I used crimp terminals on all the connections. The switch is a 10 amp toggle. I bought one then discovered I have several at home as well. I fixed that through the existing hole on the left hand side of the drill body. I used a missile cover on the switch meaning you have to flip open the cover and flip the switch to turn it on but you can just hit the cover down to switch it off. Handy when the think you’re drilling catches and starts swinging about like mad! Generally you try to avoid that. The drill is earthed and I tested with a meter to make sure all the metal parts did have a good earth connection.

The final thing was replacing the handles. There were only two of the original handles left and they were in a sorry state.  The third was just a piece of 8mm or so threaded steel. I machined up some handled from 12mm diameter steel rod at my night class and planned to get some bolts to cut up to weld into holes I drilled into the ends of the rod to screw into the handle boss. Unfortunately after going to two different Repcos I couldn’t find the 3/8th UNC bolts I needed. Repco are pretty useless for such things. They have a display stand for them but no stock. Rummaging about at home I found I didn’t have any UNC bolts. With an old British car I do have a lot of UNF but had no coarse thread bolts. What I did have though were two grub screws. They were perfect. I brazed them into the ends of two of the rods. For the third I just chopped off part of the thread on the original mismatched handle. With them screwed into place the only thing left were end caps. Traditionally there are plastic balls on the end of the handles. 1, to give you something to grip and 2, so you don’t poke your eyes out on the damn things. I couldn’t find anything suitable to make nice, round ends so instead I used rubber chair feet. These seem to work well and certainly make the thing safer to use.

Finally I added a couple of rubber buffers ( rubber fuel hose slit down one side) over the lip of the cover. These just stop the top rattling about.

Now it is all done the drill works beautifully. It spins very true and is straight with no slop at all. It’s better than the cheap chinese one at my night class anyway. Changing speeds is easily done by flipping the top, slackening off the motor and then repositioning the belt. I’ve already been using it quite a lot doing various small jobs.  Here are some pictures of the finished item.

The finished drill.

The other project I have almost finished is the Wimshurst machine. I am just waiting for the drive belts. Already though it can make 50mm or so long sparks just turning the discs by hand.  Once the drive belts arrive I can test the machine, paint it then write it all up.

I also finished the housing for the GPS clock. I just need to finish the electronics off now (adding a time zone changing feature) and then make up a board for it and mount it in the clock.

So, since all those projects are now nearly done I started working on the car again.  But that’s described on another, non-blog page entirely!

Lamb Shankets!

That’s right! Lamb shanks wrapped in (a blanket of) bacon!

Obviously wrapping ANYTHING in bacon is going to make it better but the lamb shankets actually turned out pretty damn well.

Recipe to follow.

Dinner cooking.

As promised my secret (shhhhhh) recipe. My mum gave me the original and I adapted it a bit for the slow cooker and due to laziness.  I cook these in a slow cooker for 10 – 12 hours usually, on low heat.

Put into a plastic bag:

1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds or powder.

1 small, chopped, dried chilli.

1 tablespoon of fresh rosemary.

1/2 teaspoon of majoram.

1/2 teaspoon of oregano.

1 tablespoon of flour.

Place the (defrosted!) lamb shanks into the bag and shake until they are well coated.

Then brown the shanks in a frying pan with a little oil. Any left over powder in the bag can be added back to the mix later.

Take out the lamb shanks (I temporarily put them in the slow cooker while I do the next bit). At this point I wrap the shanks in bacon and pin it in place with wooden toothpicks.

In the pan put in a little more oil then add in chopped celery and chopped carrots. As much as you think you want to eat.

Leave these to soften in the pan. In a mixing cup add 100mL of dry white wine. I find the cheapest Riesling I can find works great!

Add 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar.

Add a dash of Tabasco sauce. A BIG dash.

Add water to take the level to 120mL or so.

Mix this up well then add to the saucepan with the carrots and celery. Put a lid on the pan! Add any remaining mixture from the bag at this point. Before you put the lid on stupid.

Let this bubble for a bit then add 1 400mL tin of whole, peeled tomatoes.  I generally chop the tomatoes a bit with a knife while in the tin just to make the chunks smaller.

Add three anchovy fillets. Don’t ask me why but it won’t taste the same without them!

Let this mixture simmer for a few minutes.

Then I put the shanks back in the pan rotating them to get them well coated in the mixture.

Leave to simmer for a few more minutes.  Good time to do the dishes.

After the mixture has simmered for a while I put the shanks into the bottom of the slow cooker then carefully pour the rest of the mixture over the top of them.

Cook for 10 or so hours. Anywhere from 8 to 12 seems fine. 10 works well for me since I start them when I leave home for work and they are done when I get back!

Serve with mashed potatoes or, if you’re feeling lazy or your potatoes have all sprouted like mine, on top of rice.