Mechanical/electrical hacking can be addictive
It's easy to get wrapped up in little hobbyist projects and forget it
is all about amusement. The conseqences are usually to your wallet, as
you run out and buy components or tools for your silly garage projects.
Well, here's some cost mitigation for you. This page is dedicated to
projects you can do with relatively simple, inexpensive tools and materials,
and a few junk items any decent packrat will have stashed away someplace.
For goodness sake, why?
Say you want to do some hacking, but you have already been staring at a
computer screen all day. Well, you can give your hands some much needed
excercise (as well as a few gashes and cuts) by taking your hacking instincts
in other directions.
Luckily, these days, we have access to a whole lot more interesting
and potentially useful types of salvage -- my stash is mostly computers,
but with a bit of imagination, almost any old, obselete or broken appliance
can supply parts to be made into something amusing or perhaps even something
with a practical use. My stash of parts is mostly from years of working in
the computer industry, and rarely saying "no" when someone wanted to unload
a broken part or two on me, so most of my designs tend to use computer parts.
Remember, though, hacking principles still apply, formost among them being
laziness. If it can't be done with a minimum of effort and yield a result
that is truly not deserved, it doesn't qualify as a hack. Not to discourage
serious craftsmanship, but that's not what this page, and "trash hacking" are
all about.
The iEye (silly sculpture)
Fifteen minutes, 8 tie wraps, and 3 unwanted compact disks makes you a
turbine for tiny wind-power projects.
Another simple-as-heck turbine if you happen to have
some 3.5" or smaller hd platters, a hard drive motor that has the "lug" style
pressure plate and a couple paperclips of just the right size.
Turn a two liter bottle into a Savonius VAWT.
-
Savonius VAWT from soda bottles and lock-plates.
STS-Spinner -- the STS-22x hard drive garden toy.
SunFlopper -- a solar-tracking unit made from a
floppy disk drive
Diamagnetic levitation
on the cheap
- Some miscellaneous trash hacking "subroutines"
- Some trash hacking "technical docs."
- A tour of small appliance motors.
See also...
I mainly concentrate on items that can be easily assembled without much
carpentry, relying almost entirely on components you can salvage, and of
course tie wraps and duct tape (gaffer, for the brits.) The
following sites may be of interest to the budget bodger who takes things
serious enough to fire up the bandsaw, or to drop some petty cash on a
few extra components or tools: