I am fascinated with knurled items. It looks so cool, so naturally I wanted to be able to do this on my lathe. I’ll be brief; I tried a side feed knurler and it couldn’t really form the patterns without putting enormous strain on the saddle and compounds. Enco carries a “scissor knurl”, it mounts [...]
I have been trying to learn how to successfully weld aluminum for a while, and finally had the time to do the research to figure out what I was doing wrong. I first tried it on my old 85 amp Century mini-MIG, I had a customer project that required framing up solar panels and thought [...]
Since building the original system, we had swapped out our old Amana fridge for a new Whirlpool high-tech marvel. Unfortunately, it made the Coleman inverter trip out. The simple solution to this (which I may cover later) was a power filter. This worked, but drew a lot of reactive power idling and wasn’t such a [...]
Since the Trojans were scrap, I thought I would try a pulse charge to revive the bank. If you don’t know about these, they are a circuit that delivers a very narrow 50 volt spike to the battery every millisecond. They theory is the sulfate is resonant at 3 Mhz, and the pulse breaks the [...]
With batteries, that is. In 2003, I splurged and bought 4 Trojan T-105 deep cycle batteries and a Coleman quasi-sine 2/4KW inverter. I welded up a frame for the T-105s, tied them together in series/parallel, and wired it to the inverter. To keep it charged, I built a small 13.2 volt regulated supply to float [...]
I have been obsessed with having a viable source of back up power for years, ever since I lived in rural Missouri and suffered from frequent outages. Mostly ice, but also thunderstorms and wind and the occasional “drunk redneck hits the power pole”. The first foray into the field was the “Tractornator”. My dad bought [...]
A few years after “Tractornator”, I acquired two well-used Homelite generator heads from the GM Proving Grounds annual junk auction. No engines, and worn out brushes. The resident machinist agreed to help; I drew up plans for bearing plates, PTO shafts, and made two sets of new brushes from the electrical stock room materials. I [...]
