Don't try this at home

[tigger449]

I'm told that prisoners improvise toasted sandwiches with tinfoil containers and an electric iron...

[OscarFoxtrot]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

...used a Hoover Constellation cleaner to try to vac some grit out of the bottom of the petrol tank of his car.

That's a novel one and not what people usually get into trouble doing with Hoover Constellations!


http://archive.spectator.co.uk/artic...s-as-it-sweeps

[Dave Moll]

Not so much improvisation, but a product that pre-dated our modern attitudes to electrical safety - and no, it's not a beached flying saucer!

As originally produced, this electric bed warmer would have made a somewhat dubious bedfellow, consisting as it does of a metal shell containing a socket for an incandescant light bulb as a heating element - but with a two-core cable and the usual BC plug. Needless to say, it now has a three-core cable on a 13A plug with the earth core firmly attached to the metal casing, and is only used to pre-heat the bed before being unplugged.

[emeritus]

Re #21, GEC used to sell a "Convertible" electric ironing and cooking outfit that used an electric flat iron as the heat source: extract from their 1911 catalogue attached.

[tigger449]

Your bedwarmer looks like it was inspired by the brass warming pans of old, Dave.
There was also a version like a cage with the bulb inside.

[Richard_FM]

One of my Dad's friends managed to once get a cab ride in a diesel loco in India.

The driver asked if he wanted to some tea, & the second-man (engineer-walla!?) proceeded to get a Belling style hotplate out of a locker, which had crocodile clips soldered onto the terminals. He connected these to a live power feed behind a panel.

This caused the hotplate to glow white hot, & boil a kettle in no time at all!

[Oldcodger]

On the more comical side. But ingenious. In Zimbabwe, cigarette lighters & gas were expensive, but at work, lantern batteries were two a penny, so some were turned into communal lighters in the workshop. Coil of fine wire across the terminal and it got hot enough to light up.

[Herald1360]

Originally Posted by Richard_FM

This caused the hotplate to glow white hot, & boil a kettle in no time at all!

Sounds like 600V or so!

[McMurdo]

Here's a pic of one of those american hot-dog heaters. Yes, each spike was connected to one side of the mains with a 120V lamp ballast. One featured on 'american pickers' (US version of Salvage Hunters) a few months ago and I've seen the domestic version dating from the 1970's on ebay a few times, albeit in a plastic enclosure with safety cover.

Apparently, cooking food by passing current through it can taint it. Not so important with a hotdog I suppose.

I@ve got one of those 101-handy-electric-trick booklets from the 1920's. One of them tells you how to identify the polarity of DC mains by sticking your supply cables into a potato.

[TonyDuell]

Talking of bed warmers I still have (but don't dare use) a couple of wooden 'cage' types. They consist of a pair of octagonal wooden end plates, about 10 inches across, joined by 4 thin wooden slats in the centres of 4 of the sides of said octagon. One end plate has a batten holder screwed to the inside face, fitted with a 60W GLS bulb.

One of mine I think still has the original twisted cable and wooden BC plug, the other was rewired with more modern cable and a 13A plug.

[Radio Wrangler]

That was a different news item and a different vac.

The Hoover Constellation is the spherical hovercraft one, with a ring shaped base blown by the exhaust air.... Sort of Dyson's slogan inverted 'greatest loss of suction'
This is the one turned into a fuel-burning jet engine by the sparks off the comm. Must have been spectacular.

The Hoover Dustette was a conventional little hand-held vac, whose nozzle end is only a few inches from the fan. Combined vacuum cleaner and intelligence tester, fast track to the Darwin awards.

David

[Boater Sam]

I still use a wet and dry canister vac for sucking the bottom of boat diesel tanks clean.
You switch off when the white smoke appears from the exhaust.

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by tigger449

Your bedwarmer looks like it was inspired by the brass warming pans of old, Dave.

I have always thought the same - but so much easier than filling with hot coals from the open fire, especially as I don't use one.

[GrimJosef]

When I was a student I used to roast chestnuts on the curved grille of an ordinary two-bar electric fire. I had to tilt it back a bit to stop them falling off but otherwise it worked a treat !

Cheers,

GJ

[Radio Wrangler]

Originally Posted by tigger449

Your bedwarmer looks like it was inspired by the brass warming pans of old, Dave.

It's a common thing. Some new technology comes about and the first applications are strongly steered by how the old technology was applied.

Those electric warming pans evolved into electric blankets as people realised that electricity could be used in ways impractical with hot coals.

The first radio designs with transistors tried to treat them as if they could be used just like valves, just on lower voltages. It took time to learn to handle wild spreads of parameters, the tendency to thermal instability and current-mode operation. Some people still have a soft spot for depletion mode FETs because they were less of a mental wrench.

They stuck the engines at the front of cars, because that's where the horses used to go. In this case it was not a bad decision from the point of view of balance and handling, but that wasn't the reasoning at the beginning.

The process of invention is fascinating.

Just how do you try to think up something new?

There is mileage in trawling through a lot of old obsolete stuff, and suddenly spotting where a new device can give it new life and remove all the reasons that technique fell from favour.

I once asked a theatre full of students how they would design the chicken-plucking attachment for the Kenwood chef (well they have something for everything else in preparing food?)

David

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

The process of invention is fascinating.

Just how do you try to think up something new?

It's not so much the thinking-up of something new. it's our attitude towards it that swings things. Nothing is ever as good as what went before it. And, after years of grudging acceptance and then subsequent renewal / improvement / replacement, nothing is as good as what went before it!

In the 1990s, camera manufacturers went about developing a whole new camera (this was pre-digital photography) that was not the 'traditional' SLR shape. The magazines were full of it, but they flopped, badly, The nearest revolutionary thing was the Canon EOS which was a traditionally-shaped SLR with roundy edges.

And what do we have now? Cameras that are all technologically perfect and sophisticated beneath, but which exude the familiarity of a '70s Leica (which, back then, exuded the familiarity of a 1950s Leica).

And what happened to Saab's notion of replacing the steering wheel with a joystick? It was different! But we don't do different, because different is a change. And we don't like change.

[Refugee]

Originally Posted by russell_w_b

And what happened to Saab's notion of replacing the steering wheel with a joystick? It was different! But we don't do different, because different is a change. And we don't like change.

A joystick was a successful way of steering tracked excavators.
In the home country of Saab the tracked excavator is king until all the snow is cleared up each winter morning.

[G6Tanuki]

I think for a lot of things the shape/style/design has been arrived-at by decades/centuries/millennia of evolution.

There's therefore value in anyone introducing 'a new way of doing something' to present it in a way which will be familiar and approachable, so as not to cause too much cognitive dissonance.

So we have metaphors like an image of a paper-document-folder, floppy-disk and a wastebasket in Windows-style desktops to symbolise directories, save/delete destinations etc. and the speed-camera sign is a depiction of an old bellows-camera.

"Skeumorphism" being the technical term. Alas it's beginning to fail: a while back I rented a BMW whose heating/air-conditioning/navigation/entertainment functions were controlled by an entirely non-intuitive wobble-and-twist joystick-type thing on the centre console and menus on the LCD panel. Utterly awful! Give me intuituive knobs/levers every time [specially when it's dark, and you're trying to drive across an unfamiliar Texan city]

Sometimes it does go spectacularly wrong: I remember there were fatalities caused by confusion between a real pistol and a cigarette-lighter-styled-to-look-like-a-pistol.

[hannahs radios]

When I worked a Canatron transformers in Newbury, my boss Barry used to warm his lunchtime meat pie on a homemade heating ring made of resistance wire he'd wound onto an asbestos former. To power it he'd unplug a 5 amp plug used to feed power to our insulation tester and clip 2 leads onto the plug pin. Interestingly the plug was fed from a variac and was the live side, and its socket was connected to the tester so plug and socket had reversed roles. The only concession to safety - the whole lot was powered from an isolation transformer.

Has anyone seen those so called suicide showers, they are electrically heated shower heads where the water passes directly over the bare heater elements, apparently safe as long as you connect the earth wire which is in the heated water. Look up gadget addict channel on YouTube and also bigclive.com channel to see a demo of them.

[The Philpott]

Yes, Clive exposes some truly mediaeval imported appliances that make no attempt at safety whatsoever. A few almost seem to be deliberately dangerous.