My neighbour a few years ago thought I was mad when I told him I was making an electric motor. “You can’t make one, you buy them!” he said. Nevertheless he was intrigued when I took a piece of dowel, a large steel bolt, a reel of insulated copper wire and a tin can that I set about demolishing with some tin snips. He was even more amazed when I connected up three ‘Dolphin’-type square batteries and started the thing spinning. He even brought his young son over to watch the contraption. Yes it cost more than a new small electric motor, and yes it was less efficient than a bought one. but I had the satisfaction of knowing exactly how it went together. The instructions came from a 1950s children’s encyclopedia that I had picked up from a Lifeline bookfair.<\/p>\n
I was therefore delighted to find a website devoted to all these neat things you could build out of household (or nearly household) items. Ever tried to build a ‘hero’ steam engine or thermopile? How about a crystal radio – or even a laser communicator powered by a cheap laser pointer used in lectures and presentations? They are all here on this site<\/a>! It’s like that children’s encyclopedia, but updated and includes how to make your own solar power panels! It’s well worth poking around – and maybe you too will get inspired to find out how much of our modern ‘black box’ technology you can build yourself \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Cheers My neighbour a few years ago thought I was mad when I told him I was making an electric motor. “You can’t make one, you buy them!” he said. Nevertheless he was intrigued when I took a piece of dowel, a large steel bolt, a reel of insulated copper wire and a tin can that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nJerry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"