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Old 5th Feb 2018, 9:33 am   #61
jamesinnewcastl
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Default Re: Weird experiments as a beginner in this hobby

Hi

At 14 I once built the entire RF section for a colour television from a Mullard circuit diagram from varicap tuner to video output. Not so weird perhaps but I had nothing else, no test equipment, no idea and no way to test it and generally no hope. But it was great fun!

Never solder the mains lead onto a transformer while watching TV. If you do and find that you have soldered it to the 7.5V winding and not the 250V one, don't reach under the chair to plug in the soldering iron while still watching the TV. Don't plug the wrong plug in and perhaps don't be holding the transformer in your hand......

You can quite easily melt solid caustic soda in a small metal tin on Mums cooker, you can use dads power supply to make Sodium metal by electrolysis but watch it almost instantly turn back to the hydroxide because you need an inert atmosphere. You can try to pour the molten hydroxide into a bowl of cold water but it will refuse to stay in said bowl and will instead cover the ceiling in caustic splatter. (This one on my list to recreate!)

Set up your Lego town with toy soldiers engaged in battle - make home made gunpowder - smash many of Dads valve collection and extract heater wires, push heaters into strategically placed piles of gunpowder, wire everything back to a lancaster bomb release panel. Then just enjoy!

Cheers
James
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Old 5th Feb 2018, 11:05 am   #62
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I filled a few glass pop bottles with hydrogen by electrolysis of salt-water using my train set transformer and carbon rods with binding posts attached from Ever Ready 126 batteries.

Electric match detonators for my H bombs used my endless supply of nichrome wire from heating elements.

I never made sodium, but my sister has a good story about that.
She used to teach in an old exclusive private girls' school in London They were having some building work done, and the builders found a boarded up door that lead into a long forgotten room between what used to be two science labs.
Amongst other stuff they found a large quantity of gray shiny "rocks" not quire covered in oil, Fortunately someone had the sense to realise what it likely was, and I believe the fire service was called to dispose of it. They too had the good sense not to squirt water at it.
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Old 5th Feb 2018, 3:27 pm   #63
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Originally Posted by jamesinnewcastl View Post
Hi

At 14 I once built the entire RF section for a colour television from a Mullard circuit diagram from varicap tuner to video output. Not so weird perhaps but I had nothing else, no test equipment, no idea and no way to test it and generally no hope. But it was great fun!

Never solder the mains lead onto a transformer while watching TV. If you do and find that you have soldered it to the 7.5V winding and not the 250V one, don't reach under the chair to plug in the soldering iron while still watching the TV. Don't plug the wrong plug in and perhaps don't be holding the transformer in your hand......

You can quite easily melt solid caustic soda in a small metal tin on Mums cooker, you can use dads power supply to make Sodium metal by electrolysis but watch it almost instantly turn back to the hydroxide because you need an inert atmosphere. You can try to pour the molten hydroxide into a bowl of cold water but it will refuse to stay in said bowl and will instead cover the ceiling in caustic splatter. (This one on my list to recreate!)

Set up your Lego town with toy soldiers engaged in battle - make home made gunpowder - smash many of Dads valve collection and extract heater wires, push heaters into strategically placed piles of gunpowder, wire everything back to a lancaster bomb release panel. Then just enjoy!

Cheers
James

Pleased you were not My Son, in my house !


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Old 5th Feb 2018, 6:35 pm   #64
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I filled a few glass pop bottles with hydrogen by electrolysis of salt-water using my train set transformer and carbon rods with binding posts attached from Ever Ready 126 batteries.
I used zinc plated roofing nails dipped in hydrochloric acid to get the Hydrogen which I then transfered to 2 litre lemonade bottles and fired along the road.
I had to move my hand quickly after ignition as the exhaust gases were very hot indeed.

Other fun included Sodium Chlorate weedkiller which is supposed to contain a fire depressant which didn't seem to supress anything, filled in a foot long 15mm copper pipe and squeeze the ends shut tight with grips then put it half in the ground then light it with a blow lamp. The copper got hotter and hotter until it blew a mass of green melted copper into the air.
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Old 5th Feb 2018, 9:56 pm   #65
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So I had my own shed when I was about 11 onwards, I’d wired it with sockets and lighting with proper light switches and sockets all in 12v running of a big back up battery ‘borrowed’ from a familiar telecommunications company. All worked fine and meant I just had to plug my 12v stuff in- car radios and the like.
Even had a main control panel with indicator lights and switches.

One problem, I had yet to learn about cable load ratings and fuse protection!

I had wired it in telephone cable, you know the really thin stuff they use to connect things up in telephone exchanges!!!

One day, something caused an overload and smoke started filling the shed to I ran out legged it to the house and grabbed the massive fire extinguisher that dad kept by the front door. Crying my eyes out I desperately tried to sort it out. Dad just disconnected the battery, all that had happened is that the insulation had melted on the thin cable. He rewired it using something much thicker and an in-line fuse. This taught be a big lesson!

Then there’s the time I was up in the loft, similar aged, and found the old control panel off an old fridge freezer, decided i wanted that in my shed so couldn’t get it out as the thermostat sender was tangle round stuff so I just cut it free. I got stratospherically high! It was filled with freon gas and it scared the living s**t out of me and I thought I was dieing!!
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Old 5th Feb 2018, 10:22 pm   #66
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It was a messy job getting the carbon rods out of old batteries.
There must have been many telling off sessions about that construction project.
I put them in a tin can of boiling water on the gas ring and eventually the rod just rose out of the cell.
Used a couple of rods to make arc lamp (can still see ok).
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Old 5th Feb 2018, 11:14 pm   #67
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Default Re: Weird experiments as a beginner in this hobby

Hi

Bit off topic but I made a mercurous compound that 'unsticks' the thin oxide layer on aluminium. It didn't seem to work but after an hour the grill runners on mums cooker were 'rusting' away in a manner like the Giants Causeway, columns of oxide an inch high!. Took a lot of working with a file to stop it. Dad saw the flattened runners but couldn't imagine that I would just file the cooker - got away with that one by looking innocent!

Cheers
James
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Old 6th Feb 2018, 12:03 am   #68
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Heck yes, this is why Hg cannot be delivered as air freight! There are some youtube vids depicting this odd effect. The Luftwaffe made use of mercury in their anti-disturbance fuze, 3 tilt switches covering all possible directions of movement. 'Bad science'
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Old 6th Feb 2018, 12:24 am   #69
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As soon as I found you could melt wire wool with a PP3 battery, I made a 'firelighter' out of tinfoil, dad's entire stock of wire wool and lego. Unfortunately the lego started to melt so i chucked the whole lot into a cardboard box in the corner of the garden shed, locked the shed door and ran off. When I crept back 15 minutes later, I was rather surprised (children, eh!) to see smoke billowing out of the windows. Mum was called and we formed a chain gang with water buckets until the fire was out.

Had a stiff talking-to off my father for that one.
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Old 6th Feb 2018, 4:23 pm   #70
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Default Re: Weird experiments as a beginner in this hobby

Steel-wool was always fun to combine with electricity: a ball of the stuff with a couple of ex-U2-battery carbon rods pushed into it, then connected to a 12V supply, was always good for an impromptu firework-display.

[My mother was forever wondering just how she was using so many Brillo-pads!]

Also, the green-plastic-covered-iron wire sold for gardening purposes, wired across a high-current low-voltage source, behaves interestingly - first the plastic smokes, melts, then it catches fire, and finally - when the iron wire's been glowing red-hot for some time, eventually one part of it will melt through (I guess there are imperfections) and you get a fascinating but sadly only-lasting-a-few-seconds 'sparkler' effect at the point-of-the-break.
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Old 6th Feb 2018, 6:20 pm   #71
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I had quite forgotten about the wire wool phenomenon. I think it must have been a common stunt of kids of my generation when life wasnt so restricted for youngsters................ It can't have been good for the car battery I used.

A bit OT but the post about mercury reminded me of the Anschutz Gyro Compasses we had on board certain of the ships I was in. They worked by means of a gyrosphere floating in a solution, I am not sure what that was but possibly an alcohol of some kind? But there was an electrode at the top made of gold making contact with a small pool of mercury in the top of the sphere. My memory is faded, I should look my notes up, but I distinctly remember having the gyro serviced after a failure and the gold electrode had disappeared after being dissolved by the mercury. Which made me wonder why a German company with their experience used that method unless there was no other practical option?

I guess there has to be a member here with practical service experience of those Anschutz Gyros who could refresh my understanding?

Andy
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Old 7th Feb 2018, 1:02 am   #72
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Steel-wool was always fun to combine with electricity:
When remote control tellys became popular and we began to carry a stock of batteries in our toolkits, a memo came round warning us of the danger of mixing wire wool and batteries.
I always wonder if there might be a danger of fire breaking out in those plastic WEEE bins in shops.
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Old 7th Feb 2018, 3:32 pm   #73
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This thread is bringing back a lot of memories; one of my earliest memories is of my elder brother calling me up to the spare bedroom where he had found a pair of headphones.

He had separated them from the headband and plugged them into the lightholder using one of the adaptors common at the time (this is early 50s). He went to the wall and switched on leaving me holding one of the headphones. There was a very loud buzz, some smoke and so I dropped the headphone I was holding which was followed by a loud bang a flash and everything went quiet. When dad got home that night he found the lighting circuit fused. I can't remember the consequences of this experiment. It should have put me off electrics forever but it seems to have had the opposite effect!

As for chemicals, well I had a go at making gunpowder from ingredients which at that time were fairly easily available (mid 60s). There was also a very unstable chemical which you could put on steps which would make a sharp 'crack' when stepped on.

Getting back on topic, I experimented with light transmission using a torch bulb driven from the speaker output of my Philips EL3515 tape recorder and an OC71 with the black paint removed. It got about 100 yards or so in daylight.
I also experimented with earth transmission of audio but that only got around the garden.
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Old 7th Feb 2018, 5:51 pm   #74
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Regarding battery WEEE disposal bins and fire hazard, I mentioned this at work and a few months later (probably nothing to do with my comments) a directive came out which said all the batteries had to have the exposed terminals taped over. Now that has been relaxed and you can just chuck any old battery in the cardboard WEEE disposal bin. I dare say someone along the line did a risk assessment and deemed it low risk. I suppose there would have been a lot of fires by now if it was going to happen. A bit like the mobile phone and petrol station thing. The headphones thread reminds me of one of my mates at school vapourising his prized transistor radio by connecting the battery terminals directly to the mains when he ran out of batteries for it.
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Old 7th Feb 2018, 7:16 pm   #75
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There was also a very unstable chemical which you could put on steps which would make a sharp 'crack' when stepped on.
That would be nitrogen tri-iodide, I think. It is easily made, but I won't go into any detail for fear of attracting the wrong kind of interest....
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Old 8th Feb 2018, 11:39 am   #76
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I was shockingly mischievous at school but nobody ever snitched on me. At 15, I made an emulator for the end of lesson electronic 3 bleeps. It was joyful to play them five minutes before the end of our Spanish lesson- everyone ran out. That should have been a one-shot trick but another teacher fell for it, too, before word got round the staff room.

I also rigged up a couple of 1.5V C cell batteries with series toy DC motor and a reversed transistor radio output transformer for a crude switch-mode HT power supply. Thin strips of foil were attached to the teacher’s desk drawer so when he opened it, he bridged the strips and received and alarming but completely safe shock.

Word of my interest spread and I was commissioned by a geography teacher to design and build a remote camera shutter release for use on a big kite, for aerial photography.

I also made a nice living during A levels by building light chaser units for discos for my friends.. Simple thing for me to build but I took care around safety. I made about 80% profit margin and also got invited to every party around!
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Old 8th Feb 2018, 1:46 pm   #77
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I don't know if this counts as either weird or experimental, but all though the '90s and the 2000's I built (from kit) a few electromagnetic therapy machines from the excellent but now defunct Italian magazine "Nuova Elettronica". Feel free to think it was placebo but I really appreciated the positive health effect. The last one I had broke in 2012 and shortly later the magazine went bust. I did also experiment building my own coils and changing the frequency generator stages with various degrees of failure! Good times!
 
Old 9th Feb 2018, 10:47 am   #78
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Accidental 'experiments' are amusing: I couldn't get a 20kohm/volt voltmeter to zero yesterday, the reason being my body was generating 500mV at 4uA.. Reversing the leads in the meter provided an answer- it reversed the deflection! I was holding the croc clips, one of which was an RS Nickel plated, and the other unmarked (but presumably Zinc plated)

A little bit of sweat is obviously a good electrolyte, then-- Cure- make sure the croc clips match. I have forgotten the list of nobles, but in this case Nickel was positive..
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Old 9th Feb 2018, 12:00 pm   #79
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Yesterday I plugged a speaker out of a dumped flat screen TV into my LCR bridge.
It gave a mushy null that only changed while I was pushing on the cone but not if it was held still. Yes It was set to inductance.
It only made a faint sound for the small test signal.
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Old 11th Feb 2018, 10:49 am   #80
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Most of my early experiments were violent, unsuccessful and resulted in an angry grandmother. She worked on the principle of “benevolent neglect” when I was over there so I use to get to play with things my parents wouldn’t allow. Amazing what you could get from jumble sales at the local scout hut in the early 80s for 5-10p. Grand plans were always hatched but very few paid off. Most caught fire. Sometimes that was intentional but even when it wasn’t I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed.

One of the finest experiments I did was trying to charge an alkaline PP3 battery off the heater winding of an old HT transformer with AC. It, very surprisingly actually worked. It took 3 seconds to give the battery a few extra minutes of life. It got rather hot which i suspect was the real reason. It also leaked pretty much instantly after it went flat again. I remember it - metallic green radio shack enercell. Another three seconds may have taken out one of my eyes however.
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