What happened to my face?
Also, built a new workbench from scrap plywood and some 2x3 I had laying around in my home bike and everything else mess.
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Why didn’t I build this bench with casters in the first place?
Bench is now against the back wall, I can get at the side door, and the bench can be easily rolled out of the way if there’s a water heater crisis.
Bike hooks relocated from the back wall where they were blocking the side door, up to where the bench used to be by the garage door. Now I can get them in and out of the garage without having to navigate the garage mess.
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I see no mess in that garage.
the other two corners:
I’m hoping to get stuff clean enough that I can park the 2tondeathmachine in what is currently the messcorner
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2pound dethmachine parking on the top shelf. Is that a Losi XXT?
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I was going to guess a Losi or Associated stadium truck.
The clear plastic wheel covers gave it away for me. Also the milled out motor mount, those were hard to find for a while!
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Hah, good eye. It’s a Losi XXXT but the rear wheels came off an XXT. Pre-lithium batteries and brushless motors era; 72MHz FM transmitter that I still have a little baggie of crystals for…
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Nicads and a bunch of crystals, the good old days.
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Wait you literally had to carry around a bag of crystals to plug in to your transmitter for it to work? I wonder what “high tech” things we do today will sound like dark ages black magic in 20 years
“computers are just rocks we tricked into thinking”
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Yep, both transmitter and receiver. Having multiple crystals meant you could switch to a different channel in those bands. Useful for racing and not having your car (plane, helicopter, etc) controlled by someone else’s transmitter.
New shit is all high tech auto switching 2.4ghz stuff.
I remember my dad telling me that when I was a kid and I didn’t understand it. 25 years later I still don’t.
yes, the transmitter and receiver had to have a matched pair of crystals on the same frequency:
Every RC park had a huge pegboard with clothespins on it, you’d go and pick out the clothespin with the frequency you were using before you powered on your car and controller. If the pin with your frequency was gone, that meant it was already in use and you poked through your set of crystals to find one that no one was using.
RC aircraft were on a completely different band from cars/boats so they wouldn’t get accidental interference.
tangentially, here’s a fascinating video about making quartz crystals for radios in WWII: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKprsCNLUlE
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Brings back the memories of some novice turning on their radio in the pits, immediately followed by someone yelling from the driver’s stand, “WHO’S ON CHANNEL X? TURN YOUR RADIO OFF!”
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The funny thing is that I can intuitively understand what was going on with the crystals - “oh i’m manually selecting the frequency of the carrier wave that’s being transmitted, and making sure the receiver is tuned to the same frequency”. The modern stuff that automatically negotiates the frequency and avoids interfering with anyone else’s gear nearby without any input from me is what seems like black magic.
holy shit, the place i used to use for scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has a vacuum chamber setup of the same vintage as the one shown at ~39:30 for sputtering organic samples with either carbon (pencil leads) or actual gold for really organic stuff
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This wall used to be shelves, but now I’ve got the tandem off of the floor.
Not pictured: all the stuff from those shelves on the floor.
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