On Friday 28 February 2025 11:35:52 am wn4isx via groups.io wrote:

A friend and fellow idiot sent me this link

Insanity!

I am impressed and bow down to this guy. [and I'm glad I live nowhere close to him.]

Ditto. When I became more aware of some of the higher-powered LEDs out there I ordered some. I got 10 10W units, the kind with 3 rows of 3, and so far I've built 3 lamps using these, one of which is over my desk. I've not been overall very impressed with the failure rates of the higher powered ones. I'm running these at 3 watts or so, so I guess they'll last a pretty long time.

I gave up bicycles when I turned 16 for motorcycles with the logic "Now I can outrun cars...."

Heh,

They still don't see you, even at night with your headlight on drivers will cut you off with frightening regularity. I gave up on motorcycles after seeing two young riders get splatted by a 'queen mary' [any large car] while driving down the road. The bikers were in their lane driving sanely, the cars just ran them down.

A guy who used to work for me back when I had my shop came in late one day. When I asked him why, he told me about some lady in a caddy that tried to make hamburger out of him. I started that battery store gig in January, and the guy who trained me had to ride his bike for a bit. He had a truck, but for some reason the brakes kept on locking up on him. Turned out the culprit was an apparently symmetrical hose that contained a proportioning valve, he'd put it in backwards. He used to hell me about some close calls as well. My brother has a couple of what he refers to as "scooters" (smallish bikes) and when he rode was constantly bitching about what people in cars were doing...

I used to ride a 10-speed, but gave it up for that same reason.

Anyway, the light from a Honda CA-77, CB-350, CB-360 wasn't anything to write home about and it was easy to outdrive your headlight, outdrive refers to driving faster than you can see ahead. [perhaps one shouldn't drive 80MPH on narrow back roads.....]

I am hardly driving at night at all these days, that being a part of the reason.

Now this headlight would let you see far enough ahead to be useful....but blind the poor sod coming at you so he'd probably splat you.

While I've kept my motorcycle endorsement, that's more because I'm stubborn then practical. There is no way I'd ride a motorcycle unless my life depended on it. I suspect my artificial knees would be most displeased.

Consider the project as proof humans can do amazingly stupid things....I'm proud to be a member of such an inventive species. Worry about our long term survival chances, but what the heck, we can have fun in the mean time.

Yup!

--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin

On Friday 28 February 2025 09:12:20 am Mikek wrote:

I have taken the carbon rod from Carbon/zinc batteries for different projects. The last time I did, they were built different.
No single carbon rod down the middle. I don't know when they started this, as it had been a long time since I opened one.

I used to do that when I wanted to do electrolysis, the ones out of D cells made dandy electrodes. And of course the black stuff in there was a handy source of manganese dioxide, I forget what that was useful for.

If anybody's interested, "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" is on my site at , lots of fun stuff in there.

--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin

On Friday 28 February 2025 08:54:16 am wn4isx via groups.io wrote:

Wiki has an interesting article on batteries

I am not sure I'd bet my life on the accuracy of the information, but it is informative.

Yeah, lots of details in there. I'd forgotten about how many screwy camera batteries I used to deal with back when, I think that our last film camera (not used in ages) used one of those. And in my earlier recollection I'd forgotten about the N cell, I have a couple here still in the package, and my even have a holder for them, but I'm damned if I know what I might do with them. There's another one that's real closee to that size but it puts out 12V (!), last place I saw one of those used was in a doorbell, for the outside part. Too bad that "No. 6" isn't still available.

The only place I've ever seen AAAA being used was in laser pointers. And you can get 'em by siassembling a 9V, cheaper than buying them as AAAA...

--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin

On Friday 28 February 2025 08:50:13 am wn4isx via groups.io wrote:

Note: "Battery" sizes, "D", "C", "AA" "AAA" have nothing to do with function.
There were "B" cells at one point. I think with the introduction of the "AA", the "A" and "B" cell went away, this would have been the late 1950s.

I've wondered about that, never saw an A or B cell.

(...)

In the good old days, 1960~1970, US lantern batteries consisted of 4 "F" cells. A "F" cell was the same diameter as a "D" but longer. Today most US lanturn batteries use "D" cells

I remember those, REAL bright light. You could get those batteries with springs on top for contacts, or screw terminals. Didn't know if they were still made or not, I haven't looked.

An "AA" and "C" are the same length, I've wrapped tape around an AA so it's work in my wife's wall clock.
I didn't feel like running out and buying a "C" cell. Hillbilly Engineering at it's finest. The "C" cell lasted about a year, the "AA" lasted about a year.

I have exactly *one* device around here that uses a C cell. Had one in it when I got it, corroded all to heck. It's a Heathkit transistor tester, and the short leads that plugged into it tended to touch each other and drain the battery if you weren't careful. I remember lots of "transistor testers" in magazines and such, can't say I've used the thing in many years.

Almost everyone is familiar with the rectangular 9V battery, at one time, 1960ish, there was a round 9V battery about the size of a "C" cell. It had more amp hours [ok mA hours] then the rectangular one but transistor radio design improved to where the extra capacity wasn't needed and the single double contact snap was easier for people to use.

I remember those, and also some bigger ones with rectangular cases, 9V and other voltages.

Heath offered a 100mW superheterodyne CB HT that used the round 9V battery. I was at an air show in 1964 or 65 [or 66 or 63] and a CAP member had to change the battery in his HT.

I wonder if you can still get any of those?

Technobable nonsense. If you reversed the receive and transmit crystals for US CB channel 10, the HT would be on the CAP 'channel.' You'd have to retune the RF stages for optimal performance, but it was an inexpensive way for CAP members to get on the air. I had a Lafayette HT with a blown TX stage and reversed the CH 10 Rc and Tx crystals so I could listen to CAP. They were extremely active for a few years in Lexington, then sort of faded away.

No experience with CAP for me, excepting maybe I ran into a guy once who was into that stuff. I never had any CB gear that used a whole mess of crystals like that earlier stuff did, the first one I used was synthesized. I at one point modified that with a small toggle switch on the back of it to give me some "extra" channels below the regular ones, some guy down the road was on there a lot with a very dirty signal that would splatter up into the conversations I was having on channel 7. Got one rig now that I was given a while back, I think that part of the electronics is in the base of the antenna, which is a mag mount. Tried it here, and got nothing, but I don't suppose that there's anybody using CB anywhere around here anyway. Never bothered to try it elsewhere.


--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin

On Thursday 27 February 2025 12:55:16 pm wn4isx via groups.io wrote:

I'd have to dig through my "lab notebooks." All in 3 photocopy boxes filled with notebooks and sheets of paper. I'm recovering from bronchitis, my wife would have called 911 last Friday night if she hadn't had her knee replaced on January 31 and isn't quite up to managing alone, so don't want to breath the dust.

So, going from a 60 year old memory, something like shown

I don't much care for that site. They'd had a couple of my pages on there, and got takedown notices from me because of it. They want you to sign up to download, but taking a screenshot was good enough.

Note: This is not the way to do it today. Use CMOS chips to drive MOSFETs, lower loss from collector to emitter.

Good idea. I probably have more of those around here anyway. And a bunch of UPSs to acrap out, maybe I'll try and see what they're doing in one of those...

Tripplite used a similar design with heavy duty germanium power transistors in their 150W 12>120V inverter.

Hmm.

My unit almost certainly didn't produce anything near 60Hz, but it worked.

I'm not sure how important 60 Hz is for a lot of applications.

I'm amazed at how well a lot of my projects worked when I was somewhere beyond clueless. Of course a fair percentage were total failures. I tried to build a FM wireless mic....with a germanium transistor when I was 9. I didn't have a clue about Ft.

I never tried to build one of those. Closest I came to that was a device that was supposed to generate a signal that would be helpful in doing some TV adjustments, basically a few oscillators and a couple of monostables to move the lines around. The RF part was a lot of hassle. I had bought this thing as a kit, and ended up going to the place in NYC that was selling it, and the guy there was nice enough to fiddle with it some but eventually I just gave up on it. Not done much RF stuff since then.

Now the FM wireless mic with a pair of tunnel diodes did work, range about 500 feet. Yep, certainly violated Part 15 of the FCC rules.

I have a vague recollection of buying some tunnel diodes way back when, I might still have one, I'm not sure.

And my Tesla Coil got me in trouble when it sat the wallpaper on fire.... My mother disassembled that unit with a frightening amount of anger....

Heh.

I needed 90V one night RFN to check a surplus 6M military radio.

I was in Eastern Kentucky between Jackson and Hazard.

Sort of limited on options....but the grocery store (IGA) had 9V batteries.

I used 10 9V batteries, snapped the positive from one to the negative of the next. Ugly as sin, delicate as a ...er flower, but it worked.

I've seen that done before. But 9V batteries aren't as cheap as they used to be.

I've been told I think out side the box.

There are boxes we are supposed to think in?

Not that I'm aware of. :-)

--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin

BTW, your URL is missing a DOT after www.

Here is the "corrected" URL.



Ken W7EKB

I rode/drove/almost-died-more-than-once on motorcycles for awhile when I was much
younger and a bit more stupid than I am now.

I have an over-worked guardian angel.

Harley-Davidson. Almost big enough to damage a car if it hits one. Their wheels are big
enough to act as gyroscopes, making it difficult to turn or lean at high-speeds. Ask me how I
know this. Did you ever drive one by simply lightly pushing on the ends of the handlebars with
your index fingertips? Ever hear of precession?

In Italy, motorcycles are called "The Doctors' Friend".with good reason.

Ken W7EKB

开云体育

On Thursday 27 February 2025 10:03:09 am wn4isx via groups.io wrote:

Hey it was a lot cheaper then a 600V battery!

I remember running into stuff that used various batteries whose voltage tended toward higher than flashlights, 15V, 22-1/2V, 30V, 45V, 67-1/2V, and 90V. Some projects in sixties Popular Electronics actually used 90V batteries. I was dealing with some garage door openers that used the 15V ones, but that situation involved a lot of constant downward price pressure and I eventually walked away from it.

Back when I was doing the battery store gig, a guy came in with a portable flourescent ilght and wanted to know if I could get him a battery for it. I can't recall exactly, but I think it was something like 130V. Unobtainium at the time...

Given a transformer with a center-tapped winding, say 12VCT to 120V, how would you make an oscillator that would work with that? I have plenty of salvaged transistors of all sorts, going all the way back to TO-3 germanium parts, though I'd be more inclined to go with TO-220.

I remember a guy (sadly no longer with us) who described a setup he had with a couple of germanium power transistors in an oscillator that was powered by a couple of dissimlar metal plates that were buried in his yard. As long as there was at least some moisture in the soild that setup actually generated some usable power, on a very small scale. I never did get the details of that from him, unfortunately.

--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin