Compressed Air Vacuum Cleaner - An easy DIY project

Description

Need a small vacuum cleaner for tight spaces? Have an air compressor handy? In this episode of the #HouseOfHacks, Harley shows how to make a DIY compressed air vacuum cleaner out of some junk parts and a couple fittings from the hardware store.

Skip to the project build.

Related videos:
Make your own manometer.
Dishwasher replacement.
Why a new air compressor.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Compressed Air Vacuum Cleaner - An easy DIY project

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Rocket"

Transcript

Do you ever have a small mess in the shop that you need to clean up?

Something that may be in an out of the way place where a big shop vac can't get to?

Or maybe a big shop vac is too much power and you something that doesn't have quite as much suction?

Well today at the House of Hacks we're going to make our own DIY vacuum cleaner.

That uses compressed air as a power source.

[Intro]

Hi. Harley here.

Today at the House of Hacks, we're going to make a DIY vacuum cleaner that runs off compressed air.

Now, compressed air may not necessarily be the most intuitive thing to use to make a vacuum cleaner with.

So, we're going to first talk about the physics of how this operates and then we're going to get into the making of this vacuum cleaner with just some surplus parts that I had lying around and a couple fittings from the hardware store.

If you're not interested in the physics and you want to get right into the build, there's a link in the description below that will take you directly to that part of this video.

Now, let's take a look at the physics.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, there was a family named Bernoulli that had a number of prominent mathematicians and scientists who contributed to our better understanding of the natural world.

One of these people was Daniel Bernoulli who recognized that in a fluid system, as the speed of the fluid increases, it's pressure decreases.

He published this discovery in a book on hydrodynamics in 1738.

This principle is used in many of our modern devices from airplanes to computer disk drives.

Later in the 18th century, along came Giovanni Venturi.

He was a man of many accomplishments and among his achievements, he applied Bernoulli's principle to a device consisting of tubes that demonstrated the effect of pressure differentials.

In 1797, he published a treatise on hydrodynamics wherein he described this effect that was eventually named after him, the Venturi Effect.

This picture illustrates what happens.

When air goes through these tapered tubes, as the cross section of the tube decreases, the speed of the fluid must increase. And as Bernoulli's principle indicates, the pressure must correspondingly decrease.

When a U shaped tube, known as a manometer, is connected between the slower moving fluid and the faster moving fluid, the pressure differential causes the gauge's fluid to rise on the low pressure side and drop on the high pressure side.

This low pressure can be used in many applications, from the gas furnace that heats your home to the hose attachment to drain your waterbed to the vacuum cleaner we're going to make today.

OK, to make this, I have some scrap tubing I scavenged off the old dishwasher that I replaced.

Here's some water line and some drain line, I think. This might be water supply line. I don't remember right now off the top of my head.

I have an old T-shirt that was in the scrap bin.

I've got a blow gun for my new air compressor that has a nozzle on it.

I've got an old 2 liter pop bottle.

And I've got a T fitting and an L fitting.

So let's get making this.

OK, the way this is going to work is we have the blow tube that will connect into the end of a piece of flexible pipe.

The flexible pipe will have the T connector on it.

The bottom of the T connector will have this black pipe that will we'll use as the vacuum hose.

And the other side of the T will be the discharge that everything that is picked up by the vacuum will go through as well as the compressed air as it is escaping.

That will go through a tube that has the L bracket on it and the other side of the L bracket will have the bottle on it with a hole cut out to let the air come out so it doesn't escape and all the debris will collect in the plastic bottle.

That's the theory anyway.

[Time lapse of build]

[Example of use]

If you like workshop related projects, like making vacuum cleaners out of some trash and a couple parts from the hardware store, or other things made out of wood, metal, electronics, photography, things of that nature, hit the subscribe button down below and YouTube will notify you next time I upload something.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

How to start a classic car that has been sitting - 1965 Buick Skylark - Preparation

Description

In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley prepares to start a classic car that has been sitting for some time. He'll cover a couple things to consider when you go to start a car that has not run for years. Today he takes the first steps to start a 1965 Buick Skylark convertible after it has sat for a number of years.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to how to start a classic car that has been sitting - 1965 Buick Skylark - preparation

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

Twenty-two years since it's been driven.

Ten years since it's been started.

The question now is...

will it start?

[Intro music]

Hi. Harley here.

In the last video, I got everything cleared out from around this car.

So, today, we're going to try getting it started.

I need to change the oil.

I need to drain and put more fuel in it.

And I need a new battery for it because the old one went dead and is long gone.

But first I need to get some supplies.

[Incidental music]

I've been so focused on getting the convertible accessible and cleaned out around it that I forgot about this corner back behind the coupe.

It's been a long time since I've pulled everything out of here and cleaned it out and there's just a lot of dirt and dust that had blown back in the corner.

A lot of spider webs that had kind of glued everything together and so I spent a little bit of time today to clean this out because I needed space for a new toy that I picked up.

While I was out getting the oil and oil filter and things like that I also got a new air compressor.

I've been wanting a new air compressor for a while but didn't have the place to put one or a project to justify getting one before.

And so today with this project and now having a little bit of space in the garage, I went ahead and got one but I didn't have a clean spot to put it.

So, I went ahead and cleaned out behind the garage here because I think it'll fit here temporarily for right now back here.

But, I've got these jack stands that have been sitting on the floor for years.

They have a tendency to collect dust around them.

They have a tendency to get spider webs around them and it's just a pain to always keep them clean, and so they never do stay clean.

I realized I have a perfect space.

It's right here between the corner of the garage and the garage door.

To put them, they should be able to just hang right in here like this.

I think that'll get them up off the floor, make them easier to get to, and leave more floor space in the garage.

So, that's the intermediate project between cleaning things up and getting things going.

There's always something, isn't there?

[Incidental music]

OK. The new toy has a new home.

All nice and clean.

Ready to get put to use.

[Incidental music]

So, I got the oil changed. The fuel siphoned out. The air in the tires. And I kind of ran out of steam for the day.

You can check out other videos in this project, continuing in this series, up here in this playlist.

If you're interested in videos covering everything from woodworking to electronics, photography and working on old cars, I encourage you to subscribe and I'll see you again in the next video.

Until then, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

DIY Sequential Turn Signal Block Diagram

Description

Want more in-depth design information about the sequential turn signals circuit presented in a previous video? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows a high-level diagram and a simple voltage conditioning circuit to convert a switched 12 volt on/off signal to a 5 volt logic signal. This is a follow-up to a question asked in a comment on this DIY sequential turn signal circuit video.

Resources:
Block diagram images and memory layout (GitHub)
Pulse generator circuits (Google search)
Voltage regulator circuits (Google search)
Binary counter data sheet (PDF)
Buffer datasheet (PDF)

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to DIY Sequential Turn Signal Block Diagram

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

A couple days ago on this sequential turn signal video, JTinnon asked if I could share the schematics for this circuit.

I put this together a couple decades ago and honestly cannot remember if I made a schematic for it or not.

I looked in the couple places where thought I might have them stashed and couldn’t find any so I drew out some block diagrams.

I’ll show these right now at the House of
Hacks.

[Intro]

Hi! Harley here.

If you’re interested in workshop projects made out of things like wood, metal and electronics, consider subscribing so you won’t miss a
thing.

In the previous video JTinnon commented on, I discussed the philosophy of design for this project and displayed a couple partial diagrams, but I never showed the whole thing.

In this video, I’ll show the complete, high-level diagram.

And everything I show today can be downloaded from GitHub at the link below.

There are also links to other resources that might be helpful in understanding this circuit.

First, here’s a block drawing of all the functional pieces.

I go into this in more detail in the earlier video, but again in brief, there’s a pulse generator whose output is fed into the input of a binary counter.

The pulse generator can be any circuit producing regular pulses that can be detected by the input of the binary counter.

In my case I used a 555 timer in an astable multivibrator configuration with a variable resistor in order to be able to control the speed.

Two sequential bits on the output of the binary counter are fed in to the least significant bits of the address lines on the ROM.

The output from switches indicating right, left and brake are fed into the inputs on address bits 2, 3 and 4 of the ROM.

The 12v signals coming from the switches are conditioned through some voltage shifters.

Address bits 5, 6 and 7 are unused and tied to ground.

The data outputs from the ROM are fed into the inputs of a buffer chip that is subsequently used to drive display circuitry.

Next, let’s look at the schematic for the voltage shifter since it’s a little bit unique.

The issue is the signal coming from the switches is either 12 volts or nothing.

12 volts is too high for the 5 volt logic circuits.

And the logic gates can't cope with the floating, non-connected switch when it's turned off.

So the 12 volt on/off signal needs to be converted to 5 volts that is either a voltage or ground.

To do this, I used a 5 volt zener diode in a voltage regulator configuration.

This changes the 12 volts to 5 volts.

Next I put in a resistor to ground in parallel.

This ensures that when there’s no connection, the signal goes to ground instead of floating at an indeterminate value.

The voltage for all the logic circuits comes from a 7805-based regulator.

There are lots of schematics for this on the web.

I've left links in the resources section below.

But if I were doing this again, I’d probably use a buck converter for better efficiency.

And here’s how I programmed the memory.

Given there are 5 address lines being used, that means there are 32 memory locations that need to be programmed.

Since the bottom two address bits vary by time from 0 to 3 and address lines 2, 3 and 4 represent switch states that can be from 0 to 7, the whole thing can be thought of as 8 groups of 4.

Each group represents one combination of switch settings and the 4 items in that group represent what lights are on at four points in time.

I hope that gives some additional insight into this circuit design.

I’m thinking about doing a similar circuit that uses an Arduino.

Leave a comment below if this is something you’d be interested in.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey that we’re both on.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection’s not required.

Fun is!

How effective are moving blankets for sound deadening?

Description

They're cheap but are they effective? Today at the House of Hacks, Harley investigates if it makes sense to use moving blankets for acoustic treatment. People have tried different sound absorption techniques to remove room echo from recording spaces. Acoustic foam panels and a sound blanket are two popular items. Moving blankets appear similar to sound blankets and are considered DIY sound absorption materials, but how well do they work in a recording studio for sound absorption? Today we're going to measure the difference between having them and not having them actually makes.

Affiliate links:
12 Moving blankets
1 Real acoustic blanket

Resources:
How to measure echo in a room

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Workshop Organization Systems - Quick and easy overhead bins

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

[Door bell]

Oh, FedEx. Thanks!

Do you need to reduce echo in a room for recording?

Today, we're going to look at these moving blankets and measure how well they actually work for this application.

[Introduction]

Hi! Harley here.

I'm down here in the workshop which is in the unfinished portion of our basement.

It's got concrete walls, concrete floors, and from this app we can see we've got 0.65 seconds of decay time.

To try to get that down, I got some moving blankets from Amazon, very cheap, and I want to see if this is actually going to make a difference in the echo in this space where I can hang them from the ceiling, drape them around the workshop, as I'm recording to try to get the echo down.

Let's open it up and give it a try.

[Opening package]

There are twelve blankets for less than $60 from Amazon.

I'll leave a link in the description below.

By comparison, you can get an acoustic blanket that's marketed as such for $75 for just one.

But the question is: does this inexpensive option really make a difference?

I haven't spent the money to compare the difference between the moving blankets and the one that's really designed for the purpose, but I can compare the difference between with and without these moving blankets.

First, I installed an application on my phone to actually measure the echo.

And as we saw in the opening, without the blankets, the echo is 0.65 seconds.

I'm going to use some spring clamps to hang the blankets around the workshop.

[Hanging and draping blankets]

So, I'm really impressed!

Depending on the test, it was between 0.19 and 0.43 [sic] seconds delay after adding the blankets.

That's between...

...about a third on the high end and not quite half on the higher end.

So, yeah, these blankets really do make a difference.

How that compares to an acoustic blanket? I don't know.

I'm not going to spend that much money, but they do make a difference.

That's a good thing.

I'll certainly be using these in the future when I'm recording to reduce the echo in here.

I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark.

If yours leans towards marking things and you're interested in future House of Hacks workshop related videos, hit the round House of Hacks icon over there and then hit the bell notification and YouTube will let you know next time I upload something.

And down below are some videos YouTube thinks you might be interested in.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

Workshop Organization Systems - Quick and easy overhead bins

Description

Today at the House of Hacks, Harley shows the overhead bin storage that's part of his workshop organization systems. This is a quick and easy do-it-yourself system, taking advantage of scrap materials, to use under-utilized area for shop organization of small items in overhead bins.

Here are the bins I used. (Amazon affiliate link)

Here are some other shop organization tips.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Workshop Organization Systems - Quick and easy overhead bins

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

In the comments of a previous video, STLABC requested that I show the overhead bins that are part of my workshop organization systems.

We're going to look at that today at the House of Hacks. Coming at you.

[Introduction]

Hi. Harley here.

Today we're going to talk about one of my workshop organization systems that I use here at the House of Hacks.

STLABC noticed that I had some overhead bins and requested some more details on that system.

My workshop is down here in the unfinished basement in our house and I've got joists for the floor above me that are exposed because it's unfinished.

One day I noticed that the distance between the floor joists is a little bit larger than the width of one of these plastic shoebox sized storage containers.

It reminded me of an idea I'd seen somewhere as I was wandering around the internet.

So I went down to Target and picked up a couple of these containers just to see if it would work.

I had, fortunately, in my spare wood pile, some of this tongue and groove paneling that was left over from a remodel project.

It's the perfect width to just be able to tack into place underneath the floor joists and the handle will rest on each side. I didn't have to do any cutting.

Now, depending on your application, if you have some scrap wood, you can cut it to width after measuring to see how much you need and it's a real easy to put in place storage system.

Using this is really simple.

All you do is lift up, tilt it, and it drops right out.

To replace it, it's just the reverse operation.

Push it up at an angle and it drops into place.

Now, I'm standing on a step stool to be in frame and demonstrate this on camera but because my ceiling is a couple inches shy of eight feet, it's easy enough to do this while standing on the floor normally.

To easily tell what's in each box when I'm standing on the floor, I just have a label that I made with a label maker on the bottom of each container.

I hope that gives you enough details for this particular storage system.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

There's another video up here where I talk about other organization tips that I use here at the House of Hacks.

Down there are some videos that YouTube thinks you might enjoy.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Jack stand storage - An easy afternoon DIY project

Description

Wondering about an easy jack stand storage solution? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows garage storage ideas for an easy afternoon DIY project about how to store jack stands.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Jack stand storage - An easy afternoon DIY project

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing
Incidental: Rocket

Transcript

Today at the House of Hacks, we're going to figure out a better storage system for jack stands.

[Introduction]

Hi. Harley here.

I've been cleaning out the garage and as part of that project, I realized I have some jack stands that I've been storing on the floor and I've got a perfect place right here in the corner of the garage, between the corner of the building and the rails for the doors, to put them.

They'll fit in here perfectly if I can hang them like this.

So the plan is to put a piece of 3/4" OSB in this space because the drywall's really not strong enough to hold the weight of the hooks very securely, I don't think.

And it'll be easier to screw into OSB, plus then I don't have to worry about the jack stands messing up the drywall at all.

So, I'm going to fill this space with some OSB and put some hooks on it and I think...

There's some supports in the bottom here, some braces, that I think should be able to hook onto hooks real easily and they should be able to just hang on the wall like that and just lift right off without any problem.

I've got another style over here that has a triangular base and has a triangular support at the bottom of it that I think will also be able to just have some hooks that hook into that triangular support and I think we should be good to go.

I got the OSB securely attached to the wall with grabber screws into studs.

I picked up some #8 hooks and now I'm just going to drill some pilot holes and screw them in.

The size on mine are seven inches apart. Yours may vary depending on the size of the base of your particular jack stands.

[Drilling]

[Installing hooks]

That's going to work great I think.

Now I just need to get more hooks in for the other jack stands and I'll be done.

That's been a real quick garage project this weekend. It kind of interrupted some other things I was working on but this will be a whole lot nicer going forward.

I've really needed to get these up off the floor where they collect dust and spider webs and everything and take up floor space. This will be a real great addition to the garage.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey we're on.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

1965 Buick Skylark project car build - Preparation

Description

In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley starts to pull a project car build out of mothballs. He has plans to do a rebuild and restoration on these classic muscle cars.

Playlist to other vehicle related episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWmDBD9Srrwn4ctIXDE3nfJDSlCUrJ9Er

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to 1965 Buick Skylark project car build - Preparation

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing
Incidental: Backed Vibes and George Street Shuffle

Transcript

Hi. Harley here.

I'm out in the garage today for what's probably going to be a prequel for a much longer, probably multi-year, series.

If you look over here, I've got, underneath all these boxes, there's a car buried and back in the corner behind that car, there's another car buried.

Both of these are project cars that have been sitting on the shelf for way too many years and it's time to start working on them.

I want to primarily start working on the one that's back here in the corner but in order to get to that one, I need to get the one in front to be moveable.

So, the purpose of today's episode is to get this unburied and get it runnable. It hasn't been driven in a number of years since the battery went flat and wouldn't start it.

So I need to get a new battery. I need to change the oil in it.

I should probably check the gas in it; put some fresh gas.

Put air in the tires. That sort of thing.

I just need to get it so I can move it around the yard.

I may end up selling it at sometime in the near future.

But right now, the goal is to just get it moveable so I can get access to the one in the back.

So, let's get started.

[Intro]

[Time lapse]

OK. I got the first level of stuff off there and see, there really was a car under there.

You couldn't really tell before, but I've got a convertible and a coupe.

I don't know if anybody else organizes this way but the way I do it is I tend to move things into piles and then shuffle the piles around and progressively reduce the number of piles I have and get each pile organized individually.

So, over here, I have something to go to the basement.

I've got a pile of trash that goes in the trash can.

I've got a whole pile of cardboard that for some reason had been getting saved and needs to go in the recycle bin.

I've got a pile back here that goes to the garden shed and a pile that goes to the garden storage.

I've got a pile here that goes... I don't know what to do with that yet. That stuff from the old truck that we used to store in there that we don't have room for in the new truck, which is a project in and of itself, try to figure out better storage in the new truck.

And over here we've got stuff that should go in the back of the Jeep for emergency preparedness stuff.

And over here is project things that need to go down to the basement. And I've got a vacuum pump in there, so that needs to go to the basement too.

So now the next step is to start organizing these individual piles.

[Time lapse]

OK. So I got a good chunk of things done.

Those are my wife's projects back here in the background. I need to talk to her about what we want to do with that stuff.

But I got all the cardboard off and got piles sorted.

Some of it was just a matter of moving piles to other places for future... to deal with in the future. Still need to figure out what to do with some of that stuff.

I do have quite a few things now to deal with down here that are stacked underneath the vehicles and around the back. So I need to figure out what to do with that stuff but that's going to be for some other time.

My wife's home from the activity she was working on and we're both hungry so we're going to go get some food and I'll probably tackle this either later this evening or tomorrow or next weekend.

A couple days ago it was 85 degrees and sunny. Now we've got drizzly and 55. Typical Utah spring.

Anyway, last week I didn't get as much done as I was hoping to which you know is pretty typical when you're working on projects.

But I did get all the boxes off the top of the car here, so we can see there really are two cars here and today I want to try to get all the stuff that's around underneath these things so that I can get to them and work on them and have space to actually get the project going here.

[Time lapse]

This is some of the stuff I had stacked around the car. It's track lighting that I was able to get out of a building that was being changed. It was a strip mall and one business was moving out and left this behind, the new business coming in didn't need it and so I was able to go in and scavenge this material.

I'm going to be using it for project lighting for videography in the basement so I really need to get this put together and in use.

[Time lapse]

And I've got the obligatory cute cat picture as Smoke is out here trying to help me.

[Time lapse]

So this is kind of an interesting little device that was given to me.

It weighs well over a hundred pounds I'm sure once it's all put together.

But it's got a motor in here, and a drive mechanism here that's chain driven with gears and a power supply.

It runs off 110 and it's got these tracks that go on each side of it.

It's designed to carry refrigerated vending machines up and down stairs. So those vending machines weigh 12 to 14 hundred pounds and so it's really, really heavy duty.

It also has these kind of outriggers on it that slip into these ports on both sides for additional maneuverability.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with this. If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments below. I'd love to hear them.

One interesting thing is it does not steer. It's designed to just go up and down stairs, as I mentioned, and so it only goes straight. There's no steering mechanism on it. So, in order to use it for some other application, it might require some engineering.

I'm not sure if it's worth trying to salvage anything off of this or what I'm going to do with it.

So, like I said, leave a comment below if you have any ideas.

[Time lapse]

These cardboard tubes are another thing I could use some help with. If you have any ideas what they could be used for, I'd love to hear them down below.

I though about maybe a telescope project with a little bit of it, but that's only going to use probably not even a whole one of these and I'm not sure what else I'd use them for.

They're too good to be thrown away though. You know how that goes.

They're smaller than the concrete forms that are used for fence posts and things like that. I think they're cores from something like carpet or paper rolls or something like that; that's about the size that they are.

Another idea I have for those tubes is to make some storage for all the long scrap metal I have in the corner of the workshop.

[Time lapse]

I got everything cleaned up from around this thing.

I'm ready now to try to start getting it running. That'll be the next video.

If you're interested in this series or other car related videos, there's a playlist up above.

And until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

See the AMAZING difference shock absorber replacement can make

Description

Are you wondering what difference new shocks can make to your vehicle's handling? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to replace them and graphs the amazing difference from before and after shock replacement.

Playlist to other vehicle related episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWmDBD9Srrwn4ctIXDE3nfJDSlCUrJ9Er

2005 Chevrolet Silverado shock kit: https://amzn.to/2HQwDiC (Affiliate link)

Step-by-step 2005 Chevrolet Silverado shock replacement videos:
Front shocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYGBTL_04tI
Rear shocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1WO2p5FkwM

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Before and after shock replacement: the AMAZING difference

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing
Incidental: Zap Beat

Transcript

When I bought this truck and I was test driving it, I knew it needed some shocks. At least that was the first thing I told myself.

I took it to my mechanic right after buying it and had all the fluids replaced and asked him to take a look at the shocks. And he said the shocks looked great.

Later I took it to get the tires replaced at a tire store and they also said the shocks looked great.

But in driving it around since I've bought it, I don't think the shocks are great.

So today, we're going to replace these shocks, great or not, and see what difference they make.

Let's get started.

[Introduction]

Hi. Harley here.

As I said in the intro, my 2005 Silverado has what I think are bad shocks. If it's not bad shocks, it's bad springs, but I'm pretty sure it's shocks since those typically go out much more frequently than the springs do.

But first we're going to drive through this intersection that's close to my house that for me is a real indication that the shocks are bad.

So we're going to put a fixed point here on the screen and as I go through the intersection there's a bump in the middle, when we hit the apex we're going to start tracking this and see what kind of rebound we have as we go through the intersection onto the main street and things level out.

So here we can see exactly how bad things are.

After the shocks are replaced, we'll run through the same intersection again and put them side by side so we can kind of compare and contrast the differences between the old shocks and the new.

OK, I've got two pairs of shocks. These are the fronts. They have a stud coming out the top.

These are the rears. They have two places where the bolts go through on top and bottom.

You always want to replace shocks in pairs: the front pair, the rear pair. I found a place on Amazon, I'll leave a link down in the description below, where they sell a kit of four: two fronts and two rears.

I've never run Bilstein's before but they come highly recommended by both my Uncle and my Dad who have used them on trucks and RVs that they've owned. They really swear by them.

The front Bilstein shocks have two bushings. This one's bigger around. It also has thicker... It is also made of thicker metal and all it is is rubber right here. This one goes on the bottom because it's thicker, it's holding all the weight of the vehicle on the shock and is taking the majority of the impact, so the thicker one goes on the bottom.

Then the thinner one has this little bushing in here and a spacer and this is used to keep the shock centered inside the hole for the upper control arm. And it's smaller around and thinner metal so it's the one that goes on top.

When it's all assembled, that'll go through like that, the shock will be going up through the bottom here and here in the middle the upper control arm will be sandwiched.

For tools, for the front on the top, we'll need a 9/16th inch wrench and locking pliers to be able to hold the top post of the shock from turning as we loosen the nut.

And then for the bottom of the front and both bolts on the back, we'll need either 21mm or 13/16ths inch sockets or wrenches, to take the bolts apart.

Hopefully that's all we need. If we need more than that, it means we've got a rust problem and it's going to take more force. Hopefully we don't run into that.

OK, this is the top of the shock: the body of the truck, the tire, the shock itself. The shock has threads on it with nuts that hold it to the body. In this case we have a jam nut and the main nut that holds it on. The new shocks just have a nylock washer so the locking mechanism is built into the nut itself.

So I'm going to hit it first with some penetrating oil. And we'll let that sit for a couple minutes. I'll hit all four shocks with penetrating oil, top and bottom, to hopefully make the job a little bit easier.

OK. I'm not going to go through everything step-by-step with every little bolt that gets turned and removed and everything like that for these shock changes. It's really pretty simple.

There's the bolt on the top of the front shocks. There's a bolt that goes through the bottom of the front shocks. Those need to come off.

There's two bolts that go through the top and bottom of the back shocks. Those come out.

Everything drops out. You put the new ones in.

[Good shock: note how hard it is to press down and how slowly it rebounds.]

[Bad shock: note how easy it is to press down and how quickly it rebounds.]

[Shocks should not be this easy to move by hand!]

Putting the new ones in usually is a little bit harder because they've got more tension on them since they're not worn. Also, the rubber bushings are new and sometimes take a little bit of finagling to get them in the mounts. But once you get them in, get the bolts put back on, it's really pretty straight forward.

This particular project took me about an hour for each of the front shocks and an hour total for the two back shocks. The back shocks, there's just more room, it's easier to get to, there's less things to work around with the front suspension and it just went faster.

The new shocks did have more spring tension in them and so I did jack the truck up a little bit to unload the suspension a little bit, make it easier to get the shocks mounted properly.

And here's the footage from going through the intersection after changing those shocks.

You can see there's just a huge, dramatic difference between the before and after images here. The before had a whole lot of rebound. It really took a while for the suspension to settle down.

The footage from after changing the shocks, we can really see that there's much more dampening going on. There's not all the rebound going back and forth and back and forth forever down the street. It's much more stable.

I have driven around a number of miles since changing these and it's a different truck. It has made a very dramatic difference getting the new shocks in and those old shocks were definitely just completely toast. It was almost as if the shocks weren't doing anything at all.

So, I'm really pleased I made these changes.

I did leave links down below for this particular model truck for another channel that does have very detailed step-by-step instructions on how to change both the front and the rear shocks on this particular model truck, if you need that information.

If you have another model truck or car, Google around, I'm sure you can find detailed information for your particular model.

I've got a playlist up here for other car related videos here at House of Hacks.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey that we're on.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Mini Maker Faire: Salt Lake City 2018 field trip

Description

The 2018 Mini Maker Faire in Salt Lake City is Harley's destination in this episode of the House of Hacks. Highlights this year include a paper making setup, a 3D printed surface grinder and some working Teletype machines.

Last year's video can be seen here.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Mini Maker Faire: Salt Lake City 2018 field trip

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

There's so much "making" going on out there.

Today we're taking a field trip to the Salt Lake Mini Maker Faire.

Are you interested in what peaked my interest at the Salt Lake City Mini Maker Faire this year?

That's coming up, right now!

[Introduction]

Hi! Harley here.

Welcome!

It's time again for the highlights from this year's Mini Maker Faire here in Salt Lake City.

Last year I just kind of walked around and showed a little bit of everything that was going on at the show.

This year I thought I'd focus more on the highlights of what kind of caught my eye.

But if you're new here, generally we talk about things with a mechanical or technical bent to them.

Things made out of wood or metal, electronics, sometimes photography or computers.

If that sounds interesting to you, subscribe and hit the bell notification icon and you'll keep up to date on what's going on.

Like last year, this year's show had many people showing a broad range of really interesting things.

From sculptures that spit fire...

to hand drawn portraits...

to sewing...

and weaving where they talked about the automation of weaving designs and how that impacted the early computer industry...

to persistence of vision displays...

and of course 3D printers...

and drones.

One of the things I found really interesting was this paper making setup.

They first made a slurry out of old rags and recycled paper and then they used this homemade press to make sheets out of it.

And another one was this cool homemade surface grinder made out of square tubing, 3D printed brackets and and angle grinder.

And then there were these Teletype displays.

One was a pair of model 15s that were connected to an Arduino for control and then the Arduino was connected to a Raspberry Pi. This was configured so you could text messages to the Raspberry Pi and it would print out on the teleprinters. Really cool stuff!

And across the aisle from them, was a model 33 that was connected to a Linux computer running a bash shell on a console.

It was really interesting to learn how a motor, some relays, some solenoids and a bunch of mechanical bits could be configured to send electronic messages across the country.

And it was really interesting the mix of the new and the old technology being used together.

I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark. Sometimes this manifests through making things with a mechanical or technical bent to them. If this is you, I hope to inspire, educate and encourage you on your creative endeavors.

Usually this involves various physical media, like wood, metal, electronics, sometimes photography and computers.

If this sounds interesting to you, subscribe and hit the bell notification icon and I'll see you again in the next video.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey we're on.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Talent or Training: which is more important?

Description

Talent or training? Which is more important? How does hard work and practice interact with natural ability? Today at the House of Hacks, Harley talks about these issues.

AsapScience has an interesting take on this as it relates to athletics.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Talent or Training: which is more important?

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

On a photography related video, Hanz left a comment "You can't learn talent... You can only learn methods, but it will never look the same."

Leave a comment below and we'll talk about it today at the House of Hacks.

Starting right now!

[Introduction]

Hi. Harley here.

Hanz brought up an interesting idea: what's the difference between people that have natural ability or talent and people who have an interest in something without the talent and need to work, learn and practice?

Here's my take on it.

Let's think about this as lines on a graph.

On the Y-axis, we have the outcome of the activity where lower is worse outcome and higher is better outcome.

On the X-axis, let's plot the amount of work somebody does to work, learn and practice the activity. The left side will represent less work. The right side will represent more work.

Now, let's put two lines on this graph.

One line represents the person that's talented and has natural ability.

And the other line represents the person that doesn't have the natural ability but does have an interest in the activity.

This is not a scientific graph. There's no data associated with it. It's for illustrative purposes only.

As we can see, for the same amount of work, the one with talent is going to outperform the one with talent.

However, if we look at this from the perspective of the other axis, we can see at some point, the person without talent that puts in more work can have a better outcome than the person with talent that doesn't put in as much work.

So what? What does this all mean?

I think this has to be answered by looking at your goals. What's the purpose of the outcome?

Is the result of your activity personal satisfaction?

Then the level of output is really only important based on what you want.

So whether you're talented or not is not really relevant. You're just doing for your own satisfaction.

Is your goal to sell a product or service?

Then the level of the output needs to be consistent with what the market demands.

And the good news is the market is really large with a lot of price points.

The odds of finding a customer needing something where you're at on the outcome side is actually pretty good.

Now the higher you are on the outcome side, the fewer people you're competing with and so the more you can charge.

This means hard work can move you up in the marketplace even without natural ability.

What do you think? I'd love to hear in the comments below.

And as I was looking at this topic, I ran across a couple videos that I thought you might find interesting. I'll leave a link to them down in the description.

If this is your first time here at House of Hacks, Welcome! I'm glad you're here and would love to have you subscribe.

I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark.

Sometimes this manifests through making things with a mechanical or technical bent to them.

I hope to inspire, educate and encourage makers with this kind of creative bent to them.

Usually this involves various physical media like wood, metal, electronics, photography and other similar materials.

If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe and I'll see you again in the next video.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey we're on.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Lithium grease vs silicone grease: Which to use?

Description

Wondering about the differences between lithium grease vs silicone grease? In this video, Harley compares silicone grease vs lithium grease, explains the differences, applications and uses of each.

What is dielectric grease and why should I use it? https://youtu.be/GXyRYArHryU

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Lithium grease vs silicone grease: Which to use?

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

Are you like Jeremy and wondering what the difference is between lithium grease and silicone grease?

We're talking about that right now in this video.

[Introduction]

Hi. Harley here.

I recently had a comment asking about the difference between dielectric grease and silicone grease and also how that compares to lithium grease.

So let's talk about those differences today.

Lithium [grease] is:

• generally petroleum based,
• it adheres well to metal,
• it's non-corrosive,
• it's moisture resistant,
• it handles heavy loads really well,
• and it's resistant under high temperatures. It doesn't break down.

Silicone grease is:

• of course silicone based,
• it adheres to a wide variety of surfaces,
• it inhibits corrosion,
• resists moisture,
• and comes in various formulations.

A couple notable formulations are ingestible ones where it's safe to be used in dental tools and plumbing for potable water.

Another formulation is dielectric grease where it's used in applications where you have high current and you need something that has insulation properties.

Because lithium grease is petroleum based, it's not recommended for use around plastics and rubber where it'll cause these to prematurely fail.

These applications are better served by silicone grease.

Silicone grease, on the other hand, works better in low temperature, low stress applications around plastics and rubber.

Common examples around the house for using lithium grease might be for garage door openers and hinges.

Whereas applications for silicone grease might be sliding doors and windows, seals around waterproof flashlights and plumbing fixtures.

So I want to get back to Jeremy's question about using silicone grease for brake caliper applications. In this case, neither lithium nor silicone grease is really ideal.

Lithium because it's petroleum based will cause decay in the rubber parts of the brake system and silicone grease isn't really designed for that high temperature/high stress application.

There are actually specially formulated greases for brake applications that are designed to handle both the high temperature and high stress and also coming into contact with the plastics and rubbers in the brake system.

Thanks Jeremy for the question and for everybody else for joining me on this creative journey we're on.

If you're interested in making things out of wood, metal, electronics, photography or other things like this in the workshop, hit the subscribe button and then hit the bell notification icon and YouTube will notify you next time I release a video.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

How to design your own DIY sequential turn signals

Description

Are you interested in how to design DIY sequential turn signals? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows a unique design using a couple components to create a tail light sequencer circuit.

There's now a follow-up post with links to block diagrams for this project.

Are you interested in making things around the home and shop? You’ve found the right place. Here at the House of Hacks, we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to design your own DIY sequential turn signals

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

Interested in sequential turn signal indicators?

Today at the House of Hacks we'll be looking at exactly that.

[Introduction]

Hi! Harley here.

I have a car that has three tail lights on each side and the manufacturer has those coming on all at the same time, for both brakes and turn signal indicators.

And I thought I'd be cool to change that so it would be sequential turn indicators. Kind of like the old Cougars and Mustangs had.

There's a lot of ways you could design a circuit like this.

I believe the old Cougars, and probably the Mustangs too for that matter, had mechanical switches that had a motor driven swiper on them.

And so as that swiper turned, it would have different contacts that would turn the lights on in sequence.

You could also use various timer circuits from RC circuits to 555 timers to anything else that you really wanted to to provide a timing mechanism and then use either transistors or logic circuits to control the sequence turning on.

And of course you could also use micro-controllers like a PIC or an Arduino to accomplish the same task.

When I first started thinking about this project a number of decades ago, a friend of mine, Robert Largent, suggested using an EPROM to store the different patterns in and just use a timer to increment the bottom two address lines and then use higher address lines to switch between Brake, Left, Right indicators.

I built the circuit and it worked great and I've had it sitting around in a box until I get around to rebuilding that car.

I'm a member of a Facebook electronics design group and somebody asked a question, in kind of an ambiguous manner, about LEDs and EPROMs and it reminded me of this project, so I went and dug it out of the box.

This is really just going to be a design overview. I'm not going to go into the details of constructing the circuit or the schematics, but I will talk about it on a block level diagram perspective.

Let's take a closer look at this.

OK. Let's talk about EPROMs for a minute.

There's two types of EPROM. There's serial EPROMs and parallel EPROMs.

The serial ones are designed for serial interfaces, particularly with micro-controllers and things like that and they don't lend themselves to this project.

This project uses parallel EPROMs which are characterized by having multiple address lines coming in and multiple data lines coming out.

Usually you have eight data lines out and any number of address lines going in depending on the size of the EPROM.

Typically we think about an EPROM as you give it an address and you get data out.

Another way of looking at it, which is kind of the same thing, but a little bit different, is you have status inputs and you have status outputs.

It's really kind of the same thing but it's looking at it from a slightly different perspective.

Instead of looking at it through a sequential address space thing like a computer would normally use it, you're looking at it from a input mapping to an output table perspective.

And that's how this project approaches it.

You need an EPROM that has at least five data lines. In this particular case I think it has eight for 256 memory locations.

(I'm not positive on that.)

And you also, for this particular project, need at least six data lines.

I think all of them have a minimum of eight data lines because that's just kind of the typical size of a byte for a computer, so you usually don't have to worry about the data output side, it's more the address input side, depending on the memory size.

The way I have this EPROM setup is there are multiple blocks of four groups.

The four groups correspond to the Off state, the 1 LED state, the 2 LED state and the 3 LED state.

And those four states are just replicated for each of the combinations of Right turn, Left turn and Brake that are possible.

OK, so let's look at the circuit itself.

It's really broken up into a couple different sections.

Power can be 12 volts in a car system normally and the logic circuit needs to run on 5 volts. So we have a little 5 volt regulator here to power the circuit with.

And then we have three input lines. Again, the car is typically 12 volts and it's easiest if we deal with 12 volts on the input side coming from all the switches so we don't have to have 5 volt regulation anywhere else in the car.

So we have red is Right, black is Brake and green is Left turn indicators. All those can be up to 12 volts and then we have a little bit of conditioning circuitry here to drop that to 5 volts.

That's going into the address lines for the EPROM, this large chip being the EPROM. Those are going into the A2, 3 and 4 lines for the EPROM.

Then we have a 555 timer here that is adjustable. It has a little rheostat that I can adjust the timing on.

And it's going into a binary counter. So the binary counter has a clock that's going up and down and it just counts the pulses on that.

So this will convert the clocked pulses into a number that corresponds to 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, it'll actually count up to... I'm not sure how high this particular chip counts, but it counts up to a certain point and then it rolls over and starts back at zero.

Since we're only dealing with two bits to count from zero to three, which gives us our four states for our three lights, we really only care about two of those output lines.

If you put it on output bits 0 and 1 and connect that to address lines 0 and 1, you'll run this clock at the same speed as the 555 timer.

If you change your output bits that you're using on your counter from the bottom two, every time you shift up one output, you're dividing the speed of your counter by two.

So it's easy to get divisions of two on your timer, but then you can also adjust your timer speed, so you have lots of flexibility in terms of how fast this thing cycles through your bottom four bits.

Then we have the bottom six bits of the memory going over to this other board which is basically just designed for high current switching.

It's going into a buffer over here which will eventually be connected to transistors so we're not driving the transistors directly from the EPROM but we're buffering it through a device that can handle that kind of switching more easily.

Then I also have the outputs of this buffer going to these LEDs with some current limiting resistors over here so we can just kind of see the status of that.

Ideally in the future I'll put some transistors along this section that will then control the incandescent lights in the car, if I so choose that way, or I might drive a high-current LED panel to get a little bit more modern look to it.

That's the basic overall system design.

You can see right now I have it setup with the Brake and the Left turn indicator going.

If I disconnect the Brake, now we just have the turn indicator.

If there's nothing going, we have nothing.

We can look at the right turn indicator if I connect that here.

We have just Brakes only, they all come on.

Then if I connect both the turn indicators, we can see the hazard conditions.

Now the interesting thing about this... most cars when you have hazards on and you have brakes, you get one of two conditions. Either it's designed so you get just the hazards and the brake is ignored. Or you get brakes and hazards are ignored. But you don't really have a state indicating both brakes and hazards.

Now with this design, you can actually put anything in those memory spots you want to get any kind of pattern.

In this particular case, I've set it up so that when you have hazards and brakes combined, you actually get all the lights blinking on and off, which is different than hazards or brakes, either one by itself.

So that gives you a little bit more flexibility in this design.

You could also have it setup so that the lights alternate back and forth or any other type of pattern that you want besides just this.

So I happened to choose all blinking like this for that case but you could do anything you want.

But the point being it can be separate from the hazard case and the brake case, which is a little bit different than standard sequential light circuits.

I hope you found this design overview interesting and if you're interested in electronics and photography, wood working, metal working and other shop related projects, I encourage you to subscribe and click the bell notification icon and YouTube will let you know next time I release a video.

Until then, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

DIY Valentines card idea 2018 - Magic hearts

Description

Looking for a unique DIY Valentines card idea in 2018? Today you'll see how to make a simple homemade card out of paper craft that will warm a nerd's heart.

Numberphile video that inspired this: https://youtu.be/wKV0GYvR2X8
Last year’s Valentine’s Day video: https://youtu.be/9X152YxYugc

Are you interested in making things around the home and shop? You’ve found the right place. Here at the House of Hacks, we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to DIY Valentines card idea 2018 - Magic hearts

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Audionautix at http://audionautix.com
Incidental: Alison

YouTube licensed
Incidental: Forget Me Not by E’s Jammy Jams

Transcript

Whether you're a math nerd, or your significant other's a math nerd, or you just enjoy making off-the-wall cool stuff, today at the House of Hacks we're going to make a Valentine's Day card out of a piece of paper and a couple simple materials.

[Intro]

Hi! Harley here.

If you're new here, welcome!

I'm glad you're here and would love to have you subscribe if you're interested in a variety of things related to making things.

Things usually made out of wood, metal, electronics. Today we're going to be doing a little bit of paper crafts because it's Valentine's Day.

I got this idea off a Numberphile video talking about topology. I'll leave a link to the original video down in the description below.

This is real simple to do and easy to make.

All we need is a piece of paper. I chose red because it's Valentine's Day.

A pair of scissors. You could use a knife too I guess if you want.

Something to mark with. I've got a fine tipped Sharpie.

Something to measure with. This is just a blade out of a t-square.

And some tape.

OK. I'm starting here with an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper. It can really be any size, but we do need it to be square.

So, the first thing I'm going to do is take my ruler and on the long edge measure out 8-1/2 inches and then cut off the extra.

Now you can use a knife or scissors if you want a nice straight edge. Or if you want something a little decorative, you can just rip it like that.

The next step is to fold it into quarters so we're going to fold it once this way and crease it well.

We're going to be using the crease in a future step so fold it back on itself just to make it easy to see the crease.

And then turn it 90 degrees and fold it again.

And again, fold it back on itself.

And now on each of the points on the creases, we want to measure out 1/2 an inch. It can really be anything you want, but I found 1/2 an inch works well for 8-1/2 by 8-1/2 squares. Larger tends to not work so well.

So just pick tick marks on each one of these at 1/2 inch from the fold.

And now we're going to make squares on each of the corners. So, just draw some lines like so.

They guide you in cutting with the scissors so they just need to be as accurate as you need them to be for cutting.

The next step is we're going to cut out each of the four corners with the scissors.

You could use a knife if you wanted to use a knife on this also.

This is all preparatory steps. So you want to have this done before you actually want to present the card.

I don't know if it's a card or a gift. It kind of could be either one or both, but it's something you need to do kind of in person and talking to them probably.

It's something more of a demonstration.

So you could actually take this to dinner or something like this as long as you take along the materials you need in addition to the paper.

OK. So we're done with the ruler and the marker. This is all the preparation steps are done. We have the little cross looking thing.

We'll need scissors and tape now for the rest of it.

Now at this point you could make up a story.

I'm more of a teacher than a storyteller, so I don't know if I have any good stories to necessarily recommend but you could start something like maybe talking about how you met and your paths crossed or something like that.

I don't know. Maybe sounds a little corny.

But anyway, you want to proceed by making a loop and putting half a twist in one of them. This will make a mobius strip.

Now when you do this, you want to make sure which way you're doing your twist.

So I'm going to be twisting with my right hand overhand and then these get taped together.

So we're kind of making a mobius strip type of thing out of two of these.

And we want to tape the ends together but we also want to tape the backside so it has a little bit more support because we will be cutting this here shortly and it's much more stable if both sides are taped.

Now we want to do the same thing with this one.

Only now instead of... previously we twisted forward, now we need to twist in the reverse direction.

So I'm going to twist this underhand on the right hand side and this gets taped.

And maybe in your storytelling you could talk about how after your paths' crossed at some point you came to embrace life with each other.

Or something like that. Like I said, that sounds a little corny, but I'm not a good storyteller, so don't follow my advice.

So now we have this.

And the next stage is we want to cut along the fold lines. So we're basically cutting each one of these in half lengthwise.

Don't cut through the center piece though where they cross. Just cut the edges first.

And so we take the scissors and just cut along those lines.

The paper ripped a little bit so I'm going to do a quick repair here with a piece of tape on that center piece. The center part ripped where it wasn't supposed to rip.

So, I don't know, maybe you could talk about how you get busy after embracing the relationship and school and work and life circumstances make things crazy and you feel like you're getting torn apart.

And then you go to the other side and cut this edge also along the fold that we started out making.

Everything's cut apart except where we made the cross. Now we want to go ahead and cut the cross apart.

And this is where the actually the magic starts happening. So you want to be winding up your story pretty quickly now because once we snip these last two pieces you can tell them that through everything you've been through your hearts are now entwined together.

OK. That might be a little corny.

But you know, it's Valentine's Day.

So there's the entwined hearts for you to give to your beloved and show her how much you care.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey that we're on.

And until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Movable wall mounted boom arm (redesign)

Description

Need to wall-mount a boom arm? In this episode, Harley looks at a movable wall-mounted boom arm redesign. An overhead adjustable boom arm is a useful piece of photography studio equipment. Previously he showed a design for wall mounting a boom arm that didn't work so well. Today he will present a better design. Overhead boom arms can support many things in a photography studio: hair lights, soft boxes, overhead remote-controlled cameras and many other things. The Impact 7' wall-mounted boom arm has simple holes in it to mount directly to the wall. Harley shows how to mount it to a bracket that can be positioned in many places in the studio.

Horizontal toggle clamps used: http://amzn.to/2GIl2h8 (Affiliate link)
Heavy duty horizontal toggle clamps: http://amzn.to/2EdXX7K (Affiliate link)

Unboxing of the boom arm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-c8o-rsZ5I&index=1&list=PLWmDBD9Srrwl_aVNC0VjXj3uigC0-FxLo&t=1s
Video of the first design for the mounting bracket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgWHtRdMG4M&index=2&list=PLWmDBD9Srrwl_aVNC0VjXj3uigC0-FxLo

Are you interested in making things around the home and shop? You’ve found the right place. Here at the House of Hacks, we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

Multiplying binary numbers
Bits of Binary playlist

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Movable wall mounted boom arm (redesign)

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing
Incidental:

• Clipper
• Cool Blast
• Iron Bacon
• What You Want ver 2

Transcript

Today we're going to look at the failure of this moveable wall mounted boom arm bracket and look at the failure reasons and come up with a new design. Hopefully, one that works.

[Introduction]

Hi! Harley here.

If you're new and are interested in making things out of wood, metal, electronics and other similar types of materials, hit the subscribe button and then hit the bell notification and YouTube will let you know next time there's something released here at the House of Hacks.

You know, sometimes you have a great idea, but the execution of it just doesn't work quite right.

Well, that's what happened last summer. I made a video up here about making a moveable wall-mounted bracket for this Impact 7' boom arm that's used in a photography studio.

And the idea was we'd have a piece of metal that's mounted to the wall and this bracket could be mounted anywhere along that metal to provide adjustability for where the long arm boom arm is mounted.

The idea was there'd be a couple pins here that drop in to holes in the metal and there's a cam activated lock here that keeps it from shifting around while it's being used.

There were a couple problems with this design.

First, of all, the pins that were epoxied in place in here didn't have enough depth to them, into the wood, and so they fell out fairly easily.

The second problem is this cam lock is asymmetrical in the way that it was providing support.

The boom arm can swing to give you adjustability on your position of whatever you have mounted to it. And if you swung one way, this worked fine. But if you swung it the other way, the whole mounting bracket would have a tendency to tilt because it didn't have support on both sides.

So, in this redesign, I'm going to address both these issues.

OK. The new game plan is to replace the pins that fell out with some bolts that will go through the wood all the way. The bolts are longer than this wood and so the bottom of the bolt will drop into the holes in the perforated tubing that's going to be on the wall to hold it in place.

To hold the bolt in the wood, I've got some T-nuts that will just go in like so, so it'll be flush on the bottom where it mounts against the wood, or against the metal and it'll just be held in like so.

To lock it in place, I've got some toggle clamps. These are inexpensive. I picked them up on Amazon, a four pack for less than $9. I was really surprised that I could get some this inexpensively. And I'll leave a link to it down in the description in case you're interested in something like this.

They're rated at 100 pounds each. I'll have two, one on each side. So that should be able to hold it in without any problem. I'll cut a couple pieces of wood, this size, to mount on each side here to mount this to and I'll set the spacing such that when they're open, there's enough room to drop it into place and when it's closed, it will lock up tight against the metal on the wall.

So, let's start putting this all together.

[Project work]

OK. After I got the bolts in and tried test fitting it in the holes, the clearances were just such that there was a little bit more interference than I would have liked. And so I took the bolts off and put them on the lathe and just filed off the ends of the bolts.

(You can probably see it a little bit better with the contrast.)

So the part of the bolt that sticks out of the T-nut is filed off but the threads that thread into the T-nut are still there. So it will still go in just fine this way and, as this gets bottomed out and tightened up, we can see there's just enough extra room for those to fit in there just fine.

So now I'll go put this back on the mounting bracket and figure out where the toggle clamps go.

[Project work]

So, I mounted the clamp on the wood such that the fixed part of the clamp is fairly flush with the end of the wood. There's some adjustability in here so I wasn't looking for exact precision, just kind of got in the ballpark.

And the bolts that are coming out of the T-nuts, extending beyond, is less than the total throw of this bolt on the latch. So, the difference between the closed position and the opened position is a certain measurement. And that measurement is greater than the length of the bolts that are extending out the bottom of the T-nuts. So, in theory, I should be able to set one of these clamps in the locked position and put it right up here against the perforated pipe and mark the block's position here on the mounting bracket. And when this is mounted in, when it's closed, it should be locked and when it unlocks there should be enough movement to be able to pull the bracket up off the perforated pipes. That's the theory. We'll put it together and hopefully everything works out.

[Project work]

OK. I'm much more pleased with the way this works. It's much more sturdy. It seems much more secure. I think it's going to work much better.

As you may have noticed, I was making some adjustments to this. The way this works is there's a barrel that moves in and out in this bushing and in the end of the barrel, there's a screw that has a rubber tip on it and a lock nut, so you can adjust the length of the screw that's coming out of it with the rubber bumper on it and then you can lock it in place with the lock nut. And that's what I was doing with the pliers, was just kind of getting that tightened down and adjusting that. So now when you lock it in place, there's just a little bit of resistance before it locks in and so it holds it pretty secure. And I did that on both sides.

Like I said, these are rated on the web site at, I think, 99 pounds of force that they should take. So, both of them combined is 200 pounds and that should be plenty sufficient, I think, even with the leverage that this will have when you put a light on it.

But we won't know until we really get it in place in the studio. So, let's head over to the studio and see how it works in real life.

[Driving]

OK. That looks like it's going to work pretty well. It's a whole lot more sturdy than it was before particularly when it's out on the outer edges which is really where we had the problem last time. Like I said last time, it would have a tendency to torque this base sideways when it was out at the far angles and not having any problems like that now. It's really, really good and solid.

So, I think this is going to work. We'll now put it in practice here in the studio and let people use it and see how it works in the real world. Hopefully this will be the last time I have to address this issue.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey that we're all on.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Binary number division: how to divide binary numbers simply

Description

Binary number division is simple and easy! In this short episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to divide binary numbers. This is one in the Bits of Binary series on binary arithmetic.

Are you interested in making things around the home and shop? You’ve found the right place. Here at the House of Hacks, we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

Multiplying binary numbers
Bits of Binary playlist

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Binary number division: how to divide binary numbers simply

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

In this previous video, we saw how multiplying binary numbers is almost trivial compared to multiplying decimal numbers.

In this episode of the House of Hacks, I'll show how division is just as easy!

[Intro]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

Here at House of Hacks I hope to inspire, educate and encourage people who like to make things with a mechanical or technical bent to them.

Binary numbers are the foundation of much of our modern world and fall into the technical side of things.

This is one in an introductory series on binary numbers where I talk about how to read them, count in them and do basic math operations on them.

In this video we're going to be looking at division.

First a refresher for terminology.

Division involves dividing a dividend by the divisor and getting a quotient.

Remember in grade school how we had to memorize this multiplication table to know how to multiply and divide decimal numbers?

And remember how in the last episode we found out binary number multiplication was just these four elements of that table and how that made multiplication really easy?

Well the same thing holds true for division.

Let's get into this with some examples.

We'll start with 21 divided by 7.

Written as long division that looks like this.

Because our multiplication table only has two result values, one number can only be divided by another one 0 or 1 times.

This means a simple size comparison is really all that we need to look at when calculating the quotient.

Working through this, 111 is obviously larger than 1 so we start with 0.

111 is larger than 10, so we write down another 0.

111 is larger than 101. And again we write down 0.

Finally, 111 is less than 1010, so we write a 1 in the quotient, put the 111 under the 1010 and subtract.

The subtraction result is 11. Now we bring down the other 1.

And 111 is equal to 111 so we write a 1 in the quotient, put the 111 under the 111 and subtract.

Of course this is zero and we're done.

The resulting quotient is 11 which is three.

We know 3 times 7 is 21, confirming that the process works.

Let look at another example of 1011 divided by 10.

10 is greater than 1, so we start with a 0.

10 is equal to 10, so we put 1 in the quotient and 10 underneath and subtract giving us 0.

We bring down the 1 from the dividend.

10 is greater than 1, so we put a 0 in the quotient and we bring down the next 1.

11 is greater than 10, so we put a 1 in the quotient and 10 underneath, subtract, giving us 1.

There's nothing left of the dividend to bring down so we have a couple options that are the same as we have with decimal remainders.

We can either write the remainder as part of the quotient.

Or we can write the remainder as a binary fraction.

Or we can place a radix point and continue the division.

If we do this, we place a dot in the quotient and bring down a 0 next to our remainder giving us 10.

10 is equal to 10 so we place a 1 in the quotient and subtract the dividend from the working value.

The result is zero and we're done.

If the result was greater than zero, we'd bring down another 0 and continue expanding the radix part of the quotient, just like we do when working in decimal.

In the next episode of Bits of Binary, we'll take another look at subtraction by introducing negative numbers.

If you're interested in making things with a mechanical or technical bent to them, consider subscribing for future videos showing DIY projects, home and shop tutorials and other things related to wood working, metal working, photography, electronics and similar materials.

Thanks for joining me on our creative journey.

Now, go make something. Perfection's not required. Fun is!