The old and the new

I drew this diagram to show you how much better the new hinge is than the old one.

Questacon clock

I found this, and thought it was great, then I read a bit about it, and realised that it was the one my friend Gary had been telling me about. He and his team built it at Questacon's workshop just down the road from where I work.

My card box

If there are two types of games that I love (which there are), they would have to be billiards and cards. Last year I made this sweet, if rather chunky, card box of copper. It had a handmade hinge, and I etched a a picture of the mad hatter's tea party into the front of it. It held the cards well, was sturdy, and the bottom never fell out, not like the cardboard boxes that cards normally come in. Anyway, recently I lent it to a friend who wished to continue playing cards in their free period, something I often do, and the next thing I knew, it was gone. I had the cards, but no box. I don't know who lost it, and I don't really care anyway. It gave me the kick that I had been needing to make a newer, better one. So here it is. It's not done yet, but I've made the two parts of the box and done the hinge. Next up is to put an etching on the front. I expect I will do the same picture as before, but I'll do it better this time, the last one was a bit shallow. But I'll also etch a 500 scoring table on the inside of the lid. Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of the old one, but I do have photos of the new one.









Here are some of the details. The top is unadorned at the moment, but the bottom has a gear from an old broken German cuckoo clock that I found soldered on to it. I made the hinges with some very small copper pipe, I cut it to the length of the (short end of the) lid, plus a little extra, then cut it into thirds. I cleaned the ends up, then put some flux on the pipes and the edges of bot the box and the lid, pushed them into position lying on a tile, and gently heated them, then added a very small amount of solder.









The pin running through the pipes is some brass wire.








The old hinges were made from copper sheet, folded into a rough tube at one end, then soldered onto the rest of the box. Funtional, but chunky and fiddly. These ones, while fiddly, were actually easier than the old ones, and are almost invisible.

Slax

Micah came over for a bit today to install an OS on the Vectra. He brought with him a Slax boot disk. This is a live session Linux OS. I have to say though, I'm not enamoured with Linux thus far. I can't find anything on it, and it can't even see its own hard drive, which we discovered is 20GB, not the 8 that I had previously thought. I use Windows normally. I accept the flaws of Windows, on the presmises that a) I know how to use it, and b) PCs are modifiable. It seemed to work okay while Micah was still here, but when I tried to put music on it as soon as he left, the hard drive was gone. I have a sneaking suspicion that I will put Windows back on it later, but we'll see.

Vectra PC

I got a power supply for it today, 19v, 3.16A, usually used for laptops. Having arrived home, I hooked all the different bit of computer together and fired the Vectra up and, lo and behold, it worked. It turns out it's running XP professional, but only has an 8GB hard drive. That will have to be fixed. Micah and myself are going to do some fiddling on Monday. I plan to strip it down to the smallest possible amount of software. I want it to play music, read pdfs and do MS Word as well. And maybe paint. But that's all it needs. Micah has suggested using Live sessions, but we'll see.