Own More Than One ‘Scope? You’ve Got Nothing On This Guy!

May 24, 2023 by Jenny List 18 Comments

We’re guessing that quite a few of our readers have a surprising amount of redundant test gear, and we ourselves have to admit that more than one instrument adorns our benches. But we are mere dilettantes, amateurs if you will, compared to [Volke Kloke]. He’s got 350 of them in his average American home, and we have to say, among them are some beauties.

The linked newspaper article is sometimes frustratingly light on the details, but fortunately he has a website all of his own where we can all get immersed in the details. Of particular interest is an instrument which doesn’t even have a CRT, the General Radio 338 string oscillograph used a mirror drum to catch a standing wave in a tungsten wire, but there are plenty more. Is your first ‘scope among them?

As we now live in the age of cheap digital ‘scopes, at any surplus sale you’ll see plenty of CRT-based instruments going for relative pennies. Of those, the more recent and high-end ones are still extremely useful instruments, and it’s not just misty-eyed reminiscing to say that they remain a worthy addition to any bench.

Want to know about early ‘scope tech? We’ve taken a look before.

Handle Sheet Metal With The Power Of Microwave Oven Electromagnets

May 23, 2023 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

For those of us who don’t do it every day, handling sheet metal can be a nerve-wracking affair. Sheet metal is thin, heavy, and sharp, and one wrong move while handling it can have much the same result as other such objects, like guillotine blades. If only there was a way to lessen the danger.

Perhaps something like this electromagnetic sheet metal handler by [Lucas] over at “Cranktown City” would be useful in keeping one’s fingers and toes attached. Like many interesting builds, this one starts with the dismemberment of a couple of old microwave ovens, to liberate their transformers. Further dissection resulted in open-frame electromagnets, which when energized with a battery from a Ryobi cordless tool do a fine job sticking to stuff.

[Lucas] then harvested the battery connector from the cheapest possible Ryobi tool — an electric fan — and built a prototype, which worked well enough to proceed to a more polished version two. This one had the same guts in a nicely designed case, 3D-printed from lime green filament for that OEM look. The video below shows the design and build, as well as field testing. We have to say this gave us a bit of pause, especially when the battery popped out of one of the handlers and sent the sheet on a near-miss of [Lucas]’ toes. Close call there.

If you’re thinking that you’ve seen MOTs repurposed as electromagnets before, you’re right. Whether climbing like [Spider-Man], lifting heavy steel beams, or walking upside down, microwave oven transformers are the key.

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Zippy Plastic Welding

May 15, 2023 by Al Williams 53 Comments

Plastic welding isn’t a new idea. But a recent video from [The Maker] shows an interesting twist. Given a broken piece of plastic, he secures it together with tape, machines out a channel around the cracks, and then melts zip ties into the channels. Honestly, although he mentions plastic welding and soldering, we aren’t sure this isn’t just simple gluing, but it did give us some ideas. Watch the video below and you’ll probably get the same ideas.

The ingenuity here isn’t necessarily using hot plastic to glue together two pieces — that’s just a hot glue gun, after all. Rather, it occurred to us that the key here was machining out the places where significant amounts of the hot plastic could bond the two pieces together. He cut the channels with a rotary tool, buffed them, and used a hot knife to give them some internal texture. But with a 3D printer, you could build these channels into parts that were made to interlock.

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Anodizing Titanium In Multiple Colors

May 14, 2023 by Al Williams 12 Comments

[Titans of CNC Machining] wanted to anodize some titanium parts. They weren’t looking for a way to make the part harder or less prone to corrosion. They just wanted some color. As you can see in the video below, the resulting setup is much simpler than you might think.

The first attempt, however, didn’t work out very well. The distilled water and baking soda was fine, as was the power supply made of many 9V batteries. But a copper wire contaminated the results. The lesson was that you need electrodes of the same material as your workpiece.

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An Open-Source 4-Shaft Portable Loom

May 14, 2023 by Jenny List 18 Comments

Part of writing for Hackaday involves doing the rounds of our community’s events in search of amazing projects for your delectation. This weekend it was a trip to Maker Faire Delft, thanks to the wonders of the European Interail scheme. Once on the site, [Aslı Aydın Aksan]’s 4-shaft weaving loom immediately caught our eye. This is an open-source portable folding loom design. In weaving terms, shafts are sliding vertical frames. As the name implies, this loom has four, which allow different sets of warp threads to be brought to the surface of the weave at different times. This feature makes it capable of weaving complex patterns in the fabric and thus makes it a very interesting project indeed.

The frame of the loom is laser-cut ply, cunningly designed such that when not in use it can be folded into a compact unit. The attachments are all 3D-printed PLA in the prototypes, the comb is laser-cut acrylic, and the heddles are 3D printed in a flexible material. These last components conceal a further trick, they’re designed to be extra-easy to move between shafts on the fly, allowing even more complex patterns to be created.

All in all this is one of those special projects that comes out of the blue and raises the bar on all in its class. If there’s another 4-shaft loom this accessible, we’ve yet to hear of it.

It’s not the first loom we’ve covered, however, this one wasn’t nearly as accomplished.

Tools Of The Trade: Dirt Cheap Or Too Dirty?

May 13, 2023 by Elliot Williams 69 Comments

We’ve recently seen a couple reviews of a particularly cheap oscilloscope that, among other things, doesn’t meet its advertised specs. Actually, it’s not even close. It claims to be a 100 MHz scope, and it’s got around 30 MHz of bandwidth instead. If you bought it for higher frequency work, you’d have every right to be angry. But it’s also cheap enough that, if you were on a very tight budget, and you knew its limitations beforehand, you might be tempted to buy it anyway. Or so goes one rationale.

In principle, I’m of the “buy cheap, buy twice” mindset. Some tools, especially ones that you’re liable to use a lot, make it worth your while to save up for the good stuff. (And for myself, I would absolutely put an oscilloscope in that category.) The chances that you’ll outgrow or outlive the cheaper tool and end up buying the better one eventually makes the money spent on the cheaper tool simply wasted.

But that’s not always the case either, and that’s where you have to know yourself. If you’re only going to use it a couple times, and it’s not super critical, maybe it’s fine to get the cheap stuff. Or if you know you’re going to break it in the process of learning anyway, maybe it’s a shame to put the gold-plated version into your noob hands. Or maybe you simply don’t know if an oscilloscope is for you. It’s possible!

And you can mix and match. I just recently bought tools for changing our car’s tires. It included a dirt-cheap pneumatic jack and an expensive torque wrench. My logic? The jack is relatively easy to make functional, and the specs are so wildly in excess of what I need that even if it’s all lies, it’ll probably suffice. The torque wrench, on the other hand, is a bit of a precision instrument, and it’s pretty important that the bolts are socked up tight enough. I don’t want the wheels rolling off as I drive down the road.

Point is, I can see both sides of the argument. And in the specific case of the ’scope, the cheapo one can also be battery powered, which gives it a bit of a niche functionality when probing live-ground circuits. Still, if you’re marginally ’scope-curious, I’d say save up your pennies for something at least mid-market. (Rigol? Used Agilent or Tek?)

But isn’t it cool that we have so many choices? Where do you buy cheap? Where won’t you?

OScope Advert From 1987 Rocks It

May 11, 2023 by Al Williams 31 Comments

We can’t remember ever seeing a late-night TV ad for oscilloscopes before but, for some reason, Tektronix did produce a video ad in 1987. You can see it below and enjoy the glorious music and video production standards of the 1980s.

We assume this was made to show at some trade show or the like. Even if there was a Home Shopping Network in 1987, we doubt many of these would have been sold despite the assertion they were “low cost” — clearly a relative term in this case.

You’ve got to wonder if the narrator understood what he was saying or if he was just reading from a script. Pretty impressive either way. We loved these old scopes, although we also like having very capable scopes that don’t strain our backs to lift.

On the bright side, these scopes today are pretty affordable on the used market if you can find one that doesn’t need a repair with an exotic part. For example, we found several 2221s or 2221As for under $200 without looking hard. The shipping, of course, could potentially almost double the price.

While you can get a modern scope for $200, it probably isn’t the same quality as a Tektronix. Then again, the new scope won’t have CRTs and exotic Tektronix parts to wear out, either. Picking a scope is a pretty personal affair, though, so one person’s great scope might be another person’s piece of junk.

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