DIY Techno-hacksOld hard drive platters make wonderfully good drinks coasters - they look dead smart and expensive and you've stopped people reading your old data into the bargain.
Have you taped all your remotes together, peep-show-style? Have you wired your doorbell to the toilet? What enterprising DIY have you done with technology?
Extra points for using sellotape rather than solder.
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chthonic, Thu 20 Aug 2009, 12:30)
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String is the answer.Anyone remember that TV sketch (made by the Goodies, I think) which used the actual presenters off Tomorrow's World to show how string is the future?
It certainly was for me. Like many here, I too strung up the rotary on/off switch of an old telly in my bedroom so that I could switch it off without the sleepiness-breaking routine of actually having to get up to do it.
But my tour-de-force was its application in my Mini (named the Bruise for it was black and blue - the blue being Crown Gloss). The windscreen wipers would stick and the motor didn't have enough ergs to get past a certain point and so string was attached and brought in via the drain hole in the roof gutter and through the door. Should rain commence, a flick of the switch and a tug on the string to get past the lump was all that was needed to get them going. They'd run OK after that initial stall. Didn't pass it's MOT. Apparently pop-rivets are insufficient security for the structural floor pan (better than seeing the road rush by, though).
There are that many lash-ups in this house that I think I should write an owner's workshop manual for it before I sell it. The light switch in the bathroom looks like it shouldn't be there but it is actually only 12v - hooked up to a relay in the loft that then connects real mains to a hunking great big transformer that they were chucking from work. This sucker hums like sub-station so badly that I have had mount it on rubber washers.
Though not a very technical kludge, my brother did once fix a dent in a car he was about to sell, with mud. Painted over it looked sorta OK. He got a call a couple of weeks later from the bloke he'd sold it to. Apparently there had been some rain and the damm thing had sprouted a dandelion.
(, Fri 21 Aug 2009, 9:31, 2 replies)
Found it...7 minutes 40 seconds into this clip.
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Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Sat 22 Aug 2009, 9:24,
closed)
That is bloody brilliant! - I cannot thank you enoughI remembered that it was Raymond Baxter that did it but I could only remember the electonic circuit part. The rest really did show what a good sport he was. Fantastic! - Thanks again.
(, Sun 23 Aug 2009, 11:08, closed)
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