Thrift store find

[Kludge]

In one of my "pushing my limits" trials, I went to a thrift store today. The goal was distance and not to buy anything but I managed to find something anyway, a silverware case thingie for $2.99. It has the flip-top lid like normal ones do but underneath is a drawer for the things (serving spoons etc) that would usually be attached to the lid via elastic or something. It needs a little TLC (So do I but that's another issue. ) but basically what it comes down to is two felt lined areas useful for keeping tools out of harm's way.

Among the purchases planned for March is 1/4" basswood & hardwood (oak?) to make dividers for the two sections and some velvet to cover/replace the somewhat dingy brown felt. I can use February to figure out precisely what it will be used for along with a few other wooden boxes that have yet to be made shopworthy.

I may remember to take pics but don't yell if I don't!

BEst regards,

Kludge ... who is darned proud of his triumph

 

[speakerme]

Hello Kludge,

Necessity, and the male imagination are all that are needed for a successful "tool" grab at the local discount shop. I find that the better the imagination the more potential the "find" has. Sometimes I'll store something away that I clearly needed, and later look at it, after an appropriate time (1-2) years, and say, what on earth did I buy that coffee can of bolts for? Then it is clearly time for re-invention, and the necessity to procure some other items to go with the newly found coffee can of odd bolts to make something entirely usefull, and justify the first purchase, until a suitable amount of time goes by......

By the way my current project is an electric beer can crusher, where did I put those flange bearings....
and that bucket of bolts.....?

best wishes

chuck m

 

[itowbig]

ok how about those plans for the beer can crusher sounds like something i need. ha ha
i need to go treasure hunting too i need a crank from a large engine so i can hack it up

 

[Kludge]

Necessity, and the male imagination are all that are needed for a successful "tool" grab at the local discount shop. I find that the better the imagination the more potential the "find" has.

I find my imagination tends to go places not related to machining dependent on who's in view but, getting back on topic, I agree. There's yet an amazing collection of toys out there waiting to be discovered and repurposed to (for?) our ... ummm, purposes. Repurposing stuff gives new life to what might have otherwise wound up in a landfill so it's also the Green Thing to do. It's also fun when you get right down to it.

At the moment, I'm looking at a bunch of steel golf club shafts (still on the drivers - I haven't converted them to carbon fiber yet) and thinking about ways to use them other than as more canes. I made a few into walking canes earlier - not keeping one for myself, of course - which turned out to be pretty popular. Now I've got a dozen more to convert and the shafts are going to pile up.

Side note: My own driver isn't among them. It's a wonderful old club with a wooden head and shaft that I got at a thrift store and shall never part with. I've been looking for more of them to build a complete set of woods (which goes up to a 5 although a 6 wood has been spotted here & there, for those too much into irons) and a short set of irons plus a couple wedges & a putter.

That coffee can of bolts? If nothing else, they can be turned down to make other things.

Best regards,

Kludge

 

[Mark-One]

I like the dollar stores for finding odd bits: cheap steel mesh for burners, little stainless sauce cups for whatever. Best item was a crappy plastic circle cutter that is just perfect for making the teflon sheet sight glass gaskets for my Jensen engines.

I work in IT, and I've started parting out what I'm throwing out, be it old inkjet printers (motors, springs, some nice heavy steel rod), hard drives - magnets and platters, tape drives - springs, rollers, ball bearings. If I've got the right screwdriver bit, and some free time, I'll pull it apart.

Those hard drive magnets are by far the strongest I've ever seen. Bolted a bunch to a board last summer to drag the lawn for nails after the roofers had at it.

 

[Kludge]

I like the dollar stores for finding odd bits

They also are an excellent source of goodies capable of being repurposed (or, as a friend of mine called it: perverted) to our will and requirements.

I work in IT, and I've started parting out what I'm throwing out

I've got some optical and 3-1/2" floppy drives sitting waiting to be recycled as useable parts. Three printers have been so treated with one more to go once I get it out of storage. (Why do I keep dead things like that? To part out! ) I'm weak in hard drives at the moment but I'm sure some will show up eventually. The new import computer cases are made of sheet metal thin enough that it's easily worked and power supplies can be re-used with a little careful rewiring. Computer fans can be used for any of a number of really cool things and heatsinks can be used as heatsinks for various things (motor speed controllers come to mind) or for aluminum stock to melt down ... I think. Everything not used can be shipped off to any of several recyclers so, unlike pigs, even the squeal is used.

Those hard drive magnets are by far the strongest I've ever seen. Bolted a bunch to a board last summer to drag the lawn for nails after the roofers had at it.

Neodymium (actually Neodymium-Iron-Boron) magnets are among the strongest known and that's what they are. They chip & shatter easily but can almost be a hazard if one gets one's finger between two particularly strong ones. One of my doctors told me about some magnetic therapy research being done and that's what they're using. This isn't alternative medicine but mainstream so it should be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Best regards,

Kludge ... who writes a lot more than is good sometimes.

 

[itowbig]

i like parting out hard drives they have vary small bearings that are great for something im sure.

 

[Kludge]

i like parting out hard drives they have vary small bearings that are great for something im sure.

They do in fact. They also have aluminum disks that could be make into some Really Strange flywheels.

Somewhere in the mists of time long forgotten, I posted something about using a HD as the basis for a grinder I found on ... hmmm ... Instructables? YouTube? Somewhere anyway. Since then, I've been pondering them as a means of honing tools, using them as polishing wheels and an assortment of other Really Strange Things. Since some SCSI drives go up to around 15,000 RPM, there's a wide range of cool possibilities to be had.

BEst regards,

Kludge

 

[Kludge]

In trying desperately to organize my shop, I came across a couple of forgotten cigar boxen that contain the bitzenpieces of some VHS camcorders. A good number are plastic (I know - Boo! Hiss!) but a few are Really Cool. Among them are brake bands and pads, belts, many much lots of gears, optics (for those who like optics), the little bitty monitors used as eyepieces, motors, and a whole lot more. Like the computers, everything else can be recycled somewhere so nothing is lost.

I love a throw-away society - so many cool toys!

BEst regards,

Kludge

 

[baldrocker]

Repurposing stuff

:bow:
Kludge you sure you don't have bureaucrats genes
somewhere. The gnomes of Brussels would love that one.
BR

 

[Kludge]

Kludge you sure you don't have bureaucrats genes
somewhere. The gnomes of Brussels would love that one.

Does spending time in academic administration count? :big: :big: :big:

Best regards

Kludge

 

[Mark-One]

I ripped apart one of two dead LTO drives the other day. Got a few ball bearings, a couple little motors that might make good generators for small engines, some shiny pulleys, and a lot more stuff that I'm not even sure I'll be able to use or not.

...Like all of those tiny torx head screws

I've never investigating repurposing the power supplies. Usually the ones I'm getting rid of have blown caps anyway. I've a few of the old AT style ones that I keep around. Nice to have a real live power switch.

I need to save some aluminum drive chassis for which to practice milling, since I've not tried that yet.

Interesting idea regarding using the old hard drives for grinding or polishing. I've never tried to hotwire the motor on one (though if the logic board is intact most will start on their own).

I can't see there being a hell of a lot of torque in those, though. Piles of momentum, certainly, but they're only meant to reliably spin the platters at a certain velocity. Probably work as well as my single speed bench grinder, though

 

[Kludge]

I've never investigating repurposing the power supplies. Usually the ones I'm getting rid of have blown caps anyway. I've a few of the old AT style ones that I keep around. Nice to have a real live power switch.

Heh, yep. I haven't seen an AT supply for a while but the ATX ones are plentiful and cheap (read as: free if you're in the right place at the right time.) They can be powered down using the existing power control logic but that only shuts off the DC side and not the AC side. They also require a fairly fat power resistor (10 ohm, 10 watt, IIRC) between Power Good and +5v so they stay on. On the other hand, they make fairly potent bench supplies among other things.

I need to save some aluminum drive chassis for which to practice milling, since I've not tried that yet.

Cool idea! I hadn't thought of that. Thanks!

Interesting idea regarding using the old hard drives for grinding or polishing. I've never tried to hotwire the motor on one (though if the logic board is intact most will start on their own).

I can't see there being a hell of a lot of torque in those, though.

Nope, not much at all. The original presentation was pretty much someone just fooling around but for situations where a light touch is indicated, they have speed and a lovely flat surface to offer. The really fast SCSI drives can be geared down to a more reasonable speed which also can help the output shaft torque quite nicely.

As to hotwiring ... they're servo (brushless) motors so the logic board is needed to turn them up and run them at a constant speed. Someday, I'd like to trace out the drive control logic for one and eliminate everything else but, until then, may as well just keep the logic board & motor together to make life easier. BEsides, for a SCSI drive, I think I have to.

Ah, the fun!

BEst regards,

Kludge

 

[Mark-One]

Thanks for the info about the resistor in the ATX supply. I knew how to jump start them, but not how to keep them up without having a drive attached (got one of those first generation testers that lights them up and gives you a single green okee-dokey LED to let you know it's working). Certainly handy if you need more than the 200watts that the average AT unit peaks at.

Out of ideas for now. Other than old network cable being a good source of hobby wire and old servers having some substantial sheet steel (I could dance on top of some of those brutes, not like the stuff you get today).

Base plate for my little project engine was hacked from an old DVD-ROM array. Must be at least 1/16"..

I'll cut another sheet to bolt to the plywood that the unimat is secured to, so I can stick a dial indicator on it

 

[Kludge]

Thanks for the info about the resistor in the ATX supply.

My pleasure. There are several sites on the web that show how to convert an ATX power supply to a bench supply.

Ahhh, but that's not all. I think I've mentioned my micro welder at least enough times to make everyone not want to hear about it again. The DC arc welder portion is powered by an ATX power supply, specifically the 3.3 or +5v outputs, which ever is good for more power. I'm pretty sure I can use the +12v output for charging a capacitor bank for a cap discharge spot welder. 2-3 farads at 12 volts should make a decent zap. Alternatively, it can be used to power a small compressor to air test engines or, for that matter, power electric engines or chargers for batteries that run electric engines.

By the way, I remember seeing a picture of someone who used an old computer case (I mean OLD ... when desktop cases were made out of serious metal) as a BBQ grill and another who managed to make one water tight enough to use it as an aquarium with glass sides. That is serious repurposing.

I hadn't thought of network cable for anything. Thanks for the idea! I know where there's some laying about unclaimed.

When I retired we still were running an IBM 3090 as a centralized server for a multi-campus net, each having not a lot of local power. That wasn't how I designed it to end up but was a transition stage where it got stuck a bit longer than it was supposed to. Academic politics at its worst held it up until someone actually read what I had written and figured out I knew what I was talking about. (The fall out from the political side is a separate story probably not for this forum.) I'm told it's pretty close to how I'd planned it ... except the fiber optics which are still dark. :wall: :wall:

Anyway, dragging this back on topic, the network connected arrays etc are post me but now I know of more places to look for toys. I wonder if anyone here is upgrading their systems. Thanks!

Best regards,

Kludge

 

[Mark-One]

A micro welder? That certainly sounds interesting

I haven't arc welded since high school, but I've been kicking around the notion for some time about possibly getting a small unit (and realizing I have no place to set one up).

I've got to use one of those hard drive magnets to test some of these cases I throw out. I'm almost certain a few are aluminum..

Fortunately my boss appreciates the need for solid infrastructure. For us it's both politics and a lack of money. But in the almost 5 years I've been around there have been solid improvements. It just takes time.

Okay. Here's a really lame item, before I rush off to work (so I don't go too far off topic): repurpose old SDRAM DIMMs as bookmarks

 

[Kludge]

A micro welder? That certainly sounds interesting

This may actually be a good thing to cover in another topic (I'm good for Really Strange threads ) but it started with a friend of mine who needed to reattach some condensor (capacitor to the younger members of the audience. ) plates to their mounting rails. He used a small 12v battery, some wire, an alligator clip and, for a welding rod, a piece of paper clip. I tried the idea and found it worked but replacing/recharging batteries got a bit old so I tried a computer power supply instead. After blowing out a couple of them, I put a resistor in series with the + lead so at a dead short the circuit wouldn't draw more than the rated current. This worked like a charm, especially with the lower voltage, higher current outputs.

The next step will be to wire 2-3 together in parallel through some fairly fat diodes to ramp up the available current. The welding current will be controllable by switching power supplies on and off and using the diodes to isolate the power supplies so any switched off won't load the circuit. With the power supplies available today, 100 amps isn't a real problem even at 12 volts. OTOH, at that current, the "micro" part comes into question.

The box (an old computer case) also will have in it power supplies for the cap discharge spot welder, a resistance welder and a resistance soldering piece. If I can get the 1w laser working right, it will contain the power supply for it as well. The problem at the moment is getting everything in with plenty of cooling air to circulate around all the fiddly bits which is kind of amusing since the typical computer case is designed for precisely one power supply.

I've got to use one of those hard drive magnets to test some of these cases I throw out. I'm almost certain a few are aluminum..

Aluminum is good. Not a whole lot of magnetic at the temperatures we prefer but useful none the less.

Okay. Here's a really lame item, before I rush off to work (so I don't go too far off topic): repurpose old SDRAM DIMMs as bookmarks

Heh, heh, heh ... I've got a bit of DDR2 that decided to take a hike I use for the same thing. The SDRAM I have on hand is destined either for my G3/G4 Macs or my various ancient laptops & tablets. The Macs seems a bit picky but the others are more forgiving. I think.

Best regards,

Kludge

 

[Kermit]

Hey Kludge I saw a computer on the web somewhere that they had hooked up to run in Mineral Oil. All the electronics are immersed and a small aquarium pump is used to circulate the liquid to a radiator with a fan on it. Google it and see what you think. It doesn't harm the electronics and greatly increases the cooling effects.



Kermit

 

[Mark-One]

Your ideas boggle the mind, Kludge

I do remember in my youth fooling with an old DC transformer from a model railroad or some such, and doing the same thing with a paperclip and bit of metal. Best I could ever do was "arc" weld the paperclip to the opposite alligator clip. Considering I wasn't exactly trying to accomplish anything, I thought it was neat...


I remember seeing the oil cooled computer too. I don't know if that was the 486, of if the 486 was the one that they cooled in a beer fridge and supposedly overclocked to the point where they could play half life on it.

Overclocking was fun in the days when it gave results that you could perceive.

 

[Kludge]

Your ideas boggle the mind, Kludge

Okay, gonna be real serious here for a moment. A lot of my ideas, including things like what I've mentioned here, come from times spent chasing night demons by forcing my mind to engage in imagineering. They're persistent but I'm stubborn and usually I win. These demons are the products of nightmares, flashbacks and unwanted memories which can actually come at any time but are far, far worse at night. Combine that with a 180 IQ (I dropped out of Mensa due to terminal boredom.) and it's a recipe for Really Truly Strange designs/ideas.

Right now I'm living on a 100% VA disability pension and I don't like waste. I never did. As a result, I try my best to salvage everything I can that might have some future use. This sometimes gets into the realm of unintended consequences but not often enough to concern me.

I do remember in my youth fooling with an old DC transformer from a model railroad or some such, and doing the same thing with a paperclip and bit of metal. Best I could ever do was "arc" weld the paperclip to the opposite alligator clip. Considering I wasn't exactly trying to accomplish anything, I thought it was neat...

I did this once or twice (that I'll admit to ) building power supplies. To do a proper job of it requires a steady hand one of which I don't always have so I'm thinking about an attachment to one of my lathes to let me use the headstock spindle as an electrode holder and mounting the work on a cross slide milling attachment.

Kermit, listen up:

I remember seeing the oil cooled computer too. I don't know if that was the 486, of if the 486 was the one that they cooled in a beer fridge and supposedly overclocked to the point where they could play half life on it.

It was an early Pentium. Er, they were since several were built that way. The problems with these were twofold - keeping the oil inside the case yet having clear plastic sides and keeping the oil out of the drives where it wouldn't be a Good Thing to have. Some of the solutions were quite imaginative.

Anyway, the fastest overclocked machine I know of used liquid nitrogen cooling to double (triple?) the speed, although the cooling had to be partially shut down or the processer wouldn't start at all. Apparently, college students have too much time on their hands.

Best regards,

Kludge