Drop -Tank sidecar

Current shed project is the conversion of a 1945 Hawker Tempest Drop Tank (used for carrying extra fuel) Into a useable sidecar body for my old Panther motorcycle. I have so far welded in a new nose section (as it was dropped on its nose) and made some cutouts for the passenger.

The cutout weakened the body considerably so I welded some 8mm round bar all round the aperture. This required considerable heating, which is when I discovered all the rivets and seams were sealed with lead! Interesting! Next stage is making brackets to fit the body to an old chassis I have 'in stock'

Bijoux Stomp Box

Saw this on tinternet and thought can't be that hard. Baccy tin with a fax machine speaker hot-glued to the bottom (the fax machine's unfortunate demise was one Monday morning when it refused to take the paper for the tenth time!!), soldered to a mono jack socket which was drilled and mounted in the side of the tin. Critical part is to stick a heavyish metal disc to the shiny dome thing in the middle of the speaker. this one is about 35mm. I reckon a smaller one would give a higher sound like a tom tom.

Well it works ok, lid down and tap it with foot, sounds a bit like a kick drum. Probably would sound great through a PA . I am going to attach it to a plank so I can boot it properly.

Quilted Coffee Pot Cosy

It's sad really but every now and then I get an inexplicable urge to make a quilted coffee pot cosy. Perhaps it's just that I like watching my ancient Singer doing its stuff (how does it grab that loop from the bobbin below?) or perhaps it's just that the simplicity of the cosy allows even talentless idiots such as myself to create something of profound beauty. Many there are that have knitted a scarf but few go on to "turn the heel" of a sock. The coffee pot cosy is the scarf of the quilting world.

I made this one for Angi Webb's coffee pot. Her pot is 8" x 4.5" rather than the industry standard 8" x 4" and so this cosy is truly a custom item.

There you go Angi - a present for your new house, from the Secret Laboratory...

Prawnvelope

How to cook prawns on a barbecue (little ones, not king prawns). You know the problem. If you pop them on the barbie individually then some inevitably fall through the bars and into the coals. Those that escape that fate must be turned individually - a tortuous exercise involving the loss of even more prawns and the burning of fingers. You could thread them on a skewer but small prawns are liable to be split asunder, leading to further prawn loss.

No more prawn loss with the Prawnvelope! To make your Prawnvelope you need a fresh mesh from a disposable barbecue (this might involve re-using an old mesh from a previous barbie so you can liberate a fresh mesh for this purpose).

Carefully fold the mesh in half. Don't crease the fold flat - use a former of some kind to get a prawn-sized radius on the fold.

Insert the prawns into the Prawnvelope. The mesh itself should hold them in place but, if you're nervous, use some food-bag "ties" to secure the edges of the assembly.

Now spray your prawns with oil, lemon juice, black pepper, whatever, and commit them to the barbie. You see how easy it is to flip them all in one easy action?

Another work of genius from The Secret Laboratory...

DIY-DI

This is really a re-visited project. Some time ago I built a little pre-amp to boost the signal from my passive mando pickup (it's in the archives somewhere - check if you wish). Misdirected ambition caused me to create a compact "belt-mounted" device. It was nothing but trouble. Never again will I take on the East in the race towards miniaturisation. I will stick to what the Brits do best: Big fuckoff industrial-looking boxes with hardly anything inside but good in the long run.

Above you can see the business end of the unit. The socket marked "In" goes in and the socket marked "Out" goes out, sort of. This means you can plug things in at any level and they come out at line-level.

I'm really pleased to have discovered the secret of switching the power via the input socket so you don't need a separate power switch. Install a stereo (three-pole) jack socket for the input and connect the neg of the battery to the ring (in the tip/ring/sleeve architecture). When you plug a mono jack into the stereo socket, the sleeve and ring are shorted, the neg ends up where it's supposed to be, and, hey presto, you've got power to the circuit (this is a trick used in most effects pedals). Don't forget to unplug your cable after use else you'll drain your battery.

At the other end of the unit we have the "Smugness" knob. Although one minor side-effect is to make things louder, the primary purpose of this control is to enable geeks of electronic persuasion to treat anyone within earshot to a two-hour explanation of the difference between "gain" and "volume".

For me, the benefit is that I don't have to carry my heavy back line amp to simple sessions. I can plug my mando or bass into anything. Need more signal? You've got it...

New clear energy.

Here at the tank, our top chap Neville has got a cunning new plan to extract the H2 from H2O.
As all you boffins will know, this would mean we could convert our infernal combustion engines to run on the stuff, with the bonus that the exhaust is only water vapour. The only details I am allowed to divulge are that this process will involve a pair of scissors, and a large polished rock borrowed from his mate Macca. Nev assures me that this process will be cheap and highly efficient, and that the patent will be worth quite a bit, and could result in a noble prize.
Neville also believes that this will eventually involve the use of so many buckets of water as to lower sea levels, allowing the reclamation of farm land, and the planting of his favorite trees.
The only predicted drawback is that some atoms may be split in the process, so you may hear some bangs. These will be contained within the tank where we have a very large pot of glue ready.

AP 12.42. 14.3.11.

Modding the Behringer - episode two

Welcome back. A quick update on the repair of the Behringer Ultracoustic ACX900:

One of the failed components on the Behringer was the switched 3-pole jack input on channel 2 which, being plastic, had sheared off at the base of the threaded bit. Our replacement (below) has a metal socket instead of a plastic one. Why this hadn't been fitted in the first place is a secret known only to Behringer. After all, channel 1 has a metal jack so why not channel 2?

Getting the old socket out was a nightmare. This is a double-sided circuit board with plated-through holes and lots of densely packed surface-mount components on the reverse (not visible here). The process of removing the old socket also removed some of the plating, so when we put the new socket in we weren't sure if there was anything left to solder the contacts to.

There are six miniature selector switches on this circuit board - four latched and two press-to-make. Two of these switches are shown below. Each switch is operated by a little button made of some kind of translucent plastic shit that fractures when you touch it (not a good quality in a button). Being custom-made to fit the Behringer console, these were not replaceable items (Maplin had never seen the like) and so we shored them up with glue from a hot-glue-gun. They won't fracture again, and they still transmit light from the indicator LEDs on the board. Bless the inventor of the hot-glue-gun. Get yours now and you will never regret it. A million uses.

The electronics sorted, the final step was to put the amp back together again. Below we are applying eff-off double-sided adhesive tape to secure the brown vinyl covering and to hide all evidence of our Great Hairy Leader's aggressive jigsaw-assisted entry. What you can't see in this pic is the wonderful new internal bracing behind the access panel, which is made of the finest seasoned Spanish oak, courtesy of Actreo Hardwoods (thanks Adam).



Rear view below. All done. You'd never guess we'd been in there, would you?

The moment of truth! We plugged it in and hired a crazy fiddler to take it through its paces. Sounds as good as new but we know it is technically sounder...

And finally - never a silver lining without diamonds falling out of his bum, our Great Hairy Leader made a beautiful bread board from the leftover Spanish oak.