Category Archives: Tinkering

Cider Press Plans

September 17, 2009Food, TinkeringFood, Tinkeringwarren

Since I made my cider press last year, I have had numerous people ask me for the plans I used to build it. I couldn’t find any plans either so I sort of just starting cutting and drilling and painting. I figured that when it finally looked like a cider press, it would be done.

I suppose I did sort of congolomerate the ideas of plenty of folks and I added a few of my own so I can’t take all of the credit. My press is made soley of pine lumber. Hardwood is probably better but it costs more of course. I do sort of wish I would have had some plans when I was starting though so I will provide a few measurements that might help you build your own…

Click the image above to see the cider flowing. (Click here for a quicktime version)

By the way…you can see some of our first cider of 2009 over at Not Dabbling in Normal today.

Anyhow, here is my homemade cider press:

The length between the red and blue squares is 3 feet.
Between the red and green is 3 1/2 feet.
Between the green and brown is 1 foot.
I just added the yellow square because I thought it looked nice

The uprights are 2×4 pine and everything horizontal is 2×6 pine.

Hopefully these additional shots will help it all make more sense as well…

Dandelion Wine

May 7, 2009Food, Nature, TinkeringFood, Nature, Tinkeringwarren

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was making homemade hooch but I didn’t say what type I was making. It’s sort of a funny thing…Emily hates dandelions with a passion. I don’t understand her issues with them but she goes around the yard picking the heads off of them all the time. Occasionally she’ll dig the roots, but mostly she just wants the flowers out of sight. Always one to see an opportunity, I asked her to save the dandelion heads she picked for a project I had in mind!

Wine can be made from all sorts of things including various flowers. Most people have heard of dandelion wine, but wine can also be made from clover, roses, pansies, coltsfoot, and golden rod among others. Anyhow, the real key to dandelion wine, is to use the flower petals and not anything green. I picked a ton of dandelion heads and cut the petals off of them until I had 2 pints of dandelion petals. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you consider the sticky factor, you’ll understand the effort that went in to this project. My fingers were very yellow and sticky and I left yellow fingerprints all over the place!

Anyhow, I kept remembering how tasty the last batch of dandelion wine was many years ago so I pressed on through the allergies and rainbow of colors on my fingers. I wrapped the petals in cheesecloth so they would be manageable and started my brew!

In a big open pitcher, I added the petals, 6 pints of water, 3 Campden tablets, 3 lbs of white sugar (as an approximation…remember 2 cups a pound, the whole world round…2 cups of about anything weighs a pound), 1/3 oz of citric acid (taste some of that straight up sometime!), and yeast nutrients. I let this mixture sit for 2 days in the container loosely covered to keep dust out. After 2 days, I added champagne yeast and let it sit another day. Finally, as it started to bubble, I moved everything but the pouch of petals to a fermentation vessel. The bubbler on top allows the carbon dioxide to escape. Of course, carbon dioxide is a by product of the yeast converting the sugar to alcohol.

Funny story time…I know someone who was creative and decided to forego the typical bubblers used for fermentation. Really, the whole point is to allow a bit of CO2 to build up and then force its way out without allowing other contaminants back in. Some folks take care of that issue by stretching a balloon across the mouth of the fermentation jar. Well, being extra creative, this person stretched a balloon-like male birth control item over the jar lid. Of course, this method would work just fine to allow the CO2 to escape. I am not sure how I would feel about the CO2 building up and…uh…inflating the “balloon” though. Anyhow, without thinking about it, this winemaker bought the variety with spermicide too. Some folks say that too much drinking may lead to pregnancy, but I think this may be a solution!

Anyhow, now I have to wait a few months until all of the sugar is converted to alcohol or the alcohol content rises enough to kill the yeast. Either way, the bubbling will stop and the wine will be ready to settle/age/bottle. I’ll post more on that when the time comes.

(Here is a windows media version if the above doesn’t work)

In the meantime, I will certainly enjoy watching the bubbles rise through the murky yellow concoction. It bubbles and fizzes like crazy, very similar to a bottle of pop when first opened!

Recycling you can take to the bank

February 13, 2009Fun, TinkeringFun, Tinkeringwarren

We recycle and reuse about everything we can. It’s amazing how much packaging gets put around the stuff we buy. Many packages are feats in engineering…I mean, has anyone ever been able to get all the stuff back into the original box from where it came? I thought not. The shape and structure of many packages are pretty amazing.People think a lot about how to maximize strength with minimal material and how to fit more stuff in a smaller space in the refrigerator…amazing!

Anyhow, lots of the things in my recycle bin can be reused for other stuff. I am almost certain I stole this idea from somewhere, though I can’t remember where. More importantly though, I found a way to draw attention to the lowly nipple fruit. This bank looks a lot like the nipple fruit – a non-edible fruit apparently in the eggplant family. I’d sort of like to grow some of these, just to say I have done it, but I don’t know what I would do with the fruit…I suppose it would just get me in trouble.

So, I found 4 old pop bottles we had left over from watching the Super Bowl . I cut the tops off, right at the top of the label. I had to monkey around a little bit, but 4 of those tops can be crammed together and super-glued in place to make a nipple-fruit-like bank (though watch out, super glue will haze plastic). Take any lid off and drop coins in (or pull coins out) and you’re in business. It won’t take all sizes of coins, but it you want, you can use 3 liter bottles for bigger sizes! Abigail also suggested putting some rice in it so it could be used as a rattle/rhythm maker!

Now here’s the funny part…it is really hard to type with a nipple fruit bank stuck to your hand. I got it stuck to my hand as I was trying to pry it off of the work bench…er…dining room table where it was stuck before I got it on my hand. I think there must be a better way of hooking all of this together…

Anyhow, this thing looks pretty cool and is recycling you can really take to the bank!

In other news, I wrote a little program to change the header image of the blog every 15 minutes. I took each of the pictures you’ll see somewhere in WV. You may have to refresh your browser to see the update. Is it cool or distracting?

DIY Automatic Cat Feeder

January 29, 2009Technology, TinkeringTechnology, Tinkeringwarren

So, our cat Mohinder is a growing boy. He wants to eat constantly. It’s not actually constant eating of course, but he always seems to be hungry when we want to sleep. Madeline has become patient with our sleeping/feeding schedule but Mo is terribly persistent about eating whenever he is hungry. Typically, he will jump up on the bed and carefully grab a bit of Emily’s hair in his mouth and gently pull it. It’s not meanness and it doesn’t hurt, but it is annoying to be sure. Of course, I have no hair so he can’t wake me in the same way. On the few occasions he has picked on me, he gently nips on my nose.

As you can imagine, that has gotten pretty old so I started to tinkering. I am going to post some ideas that I am fooling with and will show the finished product at a later date. The basic idea I am working with is to have a digital alarm clock trigger some electronics to open a stripped down computer cd-rom tray. I think the mechanism on a computer cd-rom is pretty nice and will work perfectly as a gate to let the cat food fall from a hopper into the cat bowl. I started by salvaging an old cd-rom from the junk bin at the office. I stripped all of the electronics out of it (basically, I just pulled off anything that wasn’t the mechanical stuff that opens the tray. With a little experimentation using a 9-volt battery, I was able to find the motor that drove the gears to open the drawer.

I bought a new alarm clock to trigger the electronics to trigger the motor that opens the cd-rom. I opened the alarm clock and found the wires that connect to the speaker for the alarm. A quick hole in the sidewall of the clock allowed me to pass the wires from a 9-volt connector to the wires that used to connect to the speaker. I closed the clock back up and was able to measure the current in the 9-volt connector when the alarm was (silently) going off. In other words, when the alarm goes off and would normally sound the alarm, it now send an electrical pulse out through my 9-volt connector which runs outside of the clock.

My plan is to have the power from the intercepted alarm signal drive a relay which allows a larger current to pass through it and a transistor. The relay and transistor work as a basic switch to send power to the cd-rom motor. I wired this all up last night and all of this stuff works just fine. I am sort of experimenting now with how to get the drawer to actually deliver the catfood. My plan is to have the drawer push open a slide or else be the slide that opens the hopper of food. The real challenge is to figure out how to make all of this stuff cat-proof. Mo is persistent and has a lot of free time and has gotten in to the most unusual things. Anyhow, these pics are an overview of the project, meant solely to both confuse and amaze. I’ll post the actual schematic and the finished product another day when I get it all figured out. Anyone have any thoughts about cat proofing stuff?

Refrigerator marble run

January 27, 2009Fun, TinkeringFun, Tinkeringwarren

Like many refrigerators I have seen, ours is an exercise in chaos. Both kids pretty much get the alphabet now but we’ve retained the magnet letters for some reason. We occasionally form up some clever words but there is a limit to what can be spelled out. In addition to the letters, the refrigerator serves as our command center of sorts. All things kid-related are stuck to the front door, held in place by magnets that are one sheet of paper from being over-taxed. Mo, one of our cats, seems to always push the envelope of magnetic tolerance and periodically clears the lower reaches.

I came across this post and it seemed like the perfect change…the fridge was just crying out for a change. I junked a bunch of stuff and threw this marble run together pretty quickly. Hot glue + magnets + plumbing odds and ends = fun! Abigail and I messed with it quite awhile after supper until bed time. I am sure that we’ll mess with it more this evening.

She was pretty quick to get the point of how the marble we were using knocked down through the system. Unfortunately, she also had to see the underside of our oven and refrigerator as we tried to recover renegade marbles that understood physics better than we did!

Mo our cat was, of course, terribly interested in the entire bit of fun. He kept standing under the outlet and got thumped a few times watching the marble come down!

Catapult of awesomeness

January 23, 2009Fun, TinkeringFun, Tinkeringwarren

My wife accused me of trying to be Jack Black with the title of this post. Although I do look pretty fantastic in wrestling tights, I don’t have his kung fu or guitar skills. Instead, I have to rely on my skills with a hot glue gun. This week I have posted about all sorts of domestic stuff so it’s about time for a little manly mayhem!

The kids and I made a catapult last night. I recently finished out a bottle of medicine and hated to see the bottle just go into the recycle bin. The bottle is just too pretty… I mean, the color instills fear in the recipient of the catapult’s action! Anyhow, with a few minutes, a couple of pieces of scrap wood and a hot glue gun, we made a catapult which we used to launch Jolly Ranchers into Isaac’s mouth.

Homemade Catapult at the ready

We had to mess with the angle of the base to get better distance, but Isaac was willing to dive for a few until we figured it out. We found that by lifting the back of the base, we could launch a Jolly Rancher quite a distance. As part of the fun, we learned some about the physics of catapults and also the history of seige warfare. Isaac knew that the spring stored energy when flexed. We talked about momentum and kinetic/potential energy. It was a pretty quick project and I think we all learned a little too. I think we may try a trebuchet this summer. We have a compost pile ripe for attack!

I think we’ll revisit this project in a few years and do a little experimentation. I would like for us to experiment with the length of the catapult arm, the angle of the base, the tension of the spring and the distance the arm can travel. I think we are a little young for too many calculations, but we may try this outside this summer with a bigger setup that we can really play with!

Knitting on the cutting edge

January 22, 2009Food, TinkeringFun, Tinkeringwarren

It’s been cold here and I have such a delicate, pretty bald head. Without hair, I never have to worry about messing up my do or getting hat head. It does leave me with a heat radiator in the winter and an overactive solar panel in the summer. Out of necessity I have a pretty fair collection of winter hats. I was reading Children in the Corn’s blog several months ago and she posted about knitting winter hats on looms. I had never heard of loom knitting but I have tried regular knitting and hated every minute of it (and I spent at least 4 minutes trying…most miserable 4 minutes of my life). Anyhow, loom knitting looked pretty cool and I figured it was a new fangled thing. I was dying to be at the cutting edge of knitting technology! I found the round loom set by Knifty Knitter at several locations but I was especially happy to find it half price at a local craft store. I picked up the 4 loom set for $7.50. That prompted me to do a little research on loom knitting. It turns out that loom knitting has been around for a long time , possibly since the 1300s . Awesome! I wanted to be a part this ancient art…no need to fool around with the modern stuff…new fangled knitting technology has no place in my home! Well, you know how it goes. There isn’t much new under the sun. I thought I was getting into something new and cool, but instead, I am getting into something old and cool.

I posted about my first knitting experience a few months ago. These new looms are of the same type as the first one I tried but are much larger (and more powerful of course!). I decided to use my new looms to make a black hat to keep my bald head warm this winter. I used regular medium weight black yarn. To make it thick enough to keep the cold out, I used two strands of yarn at a time (i.e. I just bought 2 skeins of yarn and double wrapped each post of the loom). I knocked out my first hat in only 6 weeks. It really only took me a few hours but, like all of my projects , I stretched it out over a sufficient period of time so as to keep my wife guessing.

I am pretty happy with the way this hat turned out. It is pretty warm which is requirement #1. The other requirement is that it be cheap. I seem to change hats like I change underwear..at least once every few weeks. I just cannot seem to keep track of hats. They always turn up again, but I hate going outside in the intervening days. Since I can now whip out hats in 3 hours to 6 weeks, I no longer am worried about keeping track of my hats!

Cookie tin banjo

December 10, 2008Audio, TinkeringAudio, Tinkeringwarren

I was browsing through some old Firefox books a while back when I came across some folks talking about making banjos and dulcimers. In particular, one fella talked about making a cookie tin banjo. I had 4 cookie tins in my office that I saved after we emptied them last Christmas which seemed perfect for the job. So, since I had one insignificant piece of junk I needed, I felt compelled to find the rest and build a banjo!

For the neck of the banjo, I used an old piece of bamboo flooring which I glued to a pine 1×4. The floorboard by itself was not thick enough to provide support where it enters into the cookie tin. I am not exactly sure that it’s the right thickness now but it seems to fit in my hand ok. I left the bamboo top squared off but I rounded the back (the pine part) off smooth so I could hold it easily. Now, I know you are curious how I came up with the shape for the peg head…I traced two Mt Dew cans. This part is important…you have to use Mt Dew to get the thing just right.

The tail piece is a chunk of an extra slat from plantation blinds we installed last Summer. I think there must be a proper way to do this but it seems that the only measurements that really matter are the distance from the bridge to the nut (basically, from the wooden peg on the face of the banjo to the point where the neck joins the peg head.

My length is 25 inches though there is some flexibility in that size. The distance from the bridge to the 5th string which attaches to the side of the neck is 18 1/2 inches. Just about everything else negotiable as far as I can tell from reading in Firefox 3.

The hardest thing for me to do was carve the tuning pegs. I tried using steel thumsbcrew and eye bolts and regular screws but none of those things would hold the string tight enough to tune. That left me with carving wooden pegs which hold their position by friction.

I bought square 1/4 poplar dowel rods and cut off 2.5 inch sections to carve the pegs. I rounded the bottom 2/3 of the peg to fit in the hole. The top part I left square so I could get a better grip on it for tuning. It seems simple enough but it was a real drag to carve them round. My hands are killing me from messing with those tiny pegs. Anyhow, I drilled a small hole in each to catch the string and they seemed to tune and hold pretty well.

I have a chromatic tuner that I got to tune my violin. I messed around a bit to get the tuning right for the banjo. I think it is pretty close although the 4th string doesn’t sound right to me. We’ll see. It definitely has a banjo sound.

[audio:https://myhomeamongthehills.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/mycookietinbanjo.mp3]

So, the $6 Martin banjo strings are about the only money I have in this thing. Gosh, if only I had any idea how to play a banjo!

Solar Furnace – Results

November 24, 2008Green, House, TinkeringGreen, House, Tinkeringwarren

We finally had a sunny day yesterday and I was able to get some real results from my solar furnace . I had to make a few changes for success though…

First of all, I discovered that the mercury switch was not sensitive enough to really work. The cold air outside was messing up the way it functioned. I could not insulate the part of the air box where the switch was since the switch has to be able to move (if you’ve never seen the setup, a mercury switch is placed on a temperature sensitive metal coil which moves and allows the mercury to open or close the switch). I decided to experiment with wiring the solar panel straight to the fan which actually worked very well. The fan only came on when the sun was out and shining pretty brightly which was precisely when the best heat was being made.

The pipes that run from the furnace to the house were white originally but it seems that enough cooling took place in the pipes to make the system not work as well as I had hoped. I painted them flat black like the rest of the system and it worked like a charm. The pipes absorbed heat from the sun while transferring the heat through the system, thus helping with the whole “hot air rises” thing.

I also discovered that I had a few air leaks around the pipes and in the holes for the air pipes in the furnace. I used silicone caulking (which will actually cure in about any temp regardless of what the instructions say) to patch all of the holes/gaps/leaks.

Once I made those three changes, I took temperature measurements of the cool air pipe from my family room floor and the warm air pipe from the furnace. My floor air was 63 deg F and my warmed air was 84 deg F! Hee-haw! Eureka! Ding Dang, y’all!

Ok, so I was pretty happy with the results. The fan kicks on and off with the sun which manages the heat pretty well. I still need to boost the power to the fan to get a little more air flow. I did some experimenting and was able to get a better temperature rise with a bit more air flow. I will probably add another cheap-o solar panel to run the fan better. I also need to find a better way to prevent backflow. I really don’t like hanging a piece of plastic in front of the vent. For now, it is working but I don’t like it as a long term solution. I have glass to build one more furnace so I will probably build it out then figure out some way to deal with both systems. Anyhow, for now, I am pleased with the solar furnace!

Solar furnace installation

November 18, 2008Green, House, Technology, TinkeringGreen, House, Technology, Tinkeringwarren

I last posted a week or so ago about my solar furnace. I mentioned that I needed to install the system in my window and get the fan/thermostat working. Well, my friends, wait no longer! This weekend I finished the installation of the solar furnace and even powered it with a small solar panel…but I am getting ahead of myself.

My downstairs family room has 5 windows, 3 of which face southward. A south facing panel is optimum because it gets sun almost all day as the sun progresses across the sky. I read that 20 degrees from due south results in a 5% decrease in performance. Luckily I have south windows but if I didn’t have due south, I would still try the furnace. A 5% decrease would still make things interesting. In addition to the direction, you have to consider the angle from horizontal of the panel so that it gets optimum sunlight in the winter when the sun is lower in the sky. I have read various thoughts on the optimum angle but the easy one for me to remember is “latitude + 10”. Here in Charleston, our latitude is 38 degrees.

According to this calculation then, the optimum angle from horizontal is 48 degrees. Using my trusty eyeball, I leaned the solar panel along the south wall of my house and tilted it at precisely 48 degrees. To be more exact, you should consider doing a site survey to make sure you really have things right. I will probably just mess with it until it gets the best sun. In a more permanent installation, you would want this to be much more precise. Mine is easily movable.

Anyhow, I built a box (which I insulated) to run a warm pipe and a cool pipe through my window. The thermostat and fan are inside the warm pipe inlet so the warm air should automatically rise and slowly flow across the thermostat. The rise in temperature should kick on the thermostat/fan and move the air a little better through the system. As the warm air evacuates, it will cool the thermostat and turn off the fan.

I mentioned in the last post on this topic that I could not drive the fan with a super cheap solar cell. I was rummaging through the junk bin at the office when I found a pair of fans (actually, quite a few fans) that were lower amperage than my original one. Anyhow, my new fan is rated at 12 volts and 0.16 amps. I know it will run at 9 volts so I figured I needed a solar panel that would produce 1.44 watts (i.e. 9 * 0.16). Harbor Freight sells a solar panel used for trickle charging auto batteries for $19.99. Actually, the website has it for $14.99 but in the store it is more. If I would have taken the printout to the store, they would have reduced the price. Apparently the store and website are somewhat independent. I didn’t have a printout and it wasn’t worth driving back for it so I paid $19.99. Ok, back to the story – it will produce 1.5 watts which will run my new fan. I don’t know if it always just produces 12 volts and the amps vary (because it produces differently depending on the strength of the sun) or if it produces 0-12 volts and constant amps, etc. All that is to say, I don’t know exactly what wattage is driving my fan but it turns it.

It occurs to me as I write this that I should measure the output with my mulitmeter…but really, for now, I don’t care. The fan turns fine in sun and that is my main goal. Unfortunately, the fan will not blow the dryer vent louver open. I had planned to use a dryer vent to close the inflow when not in use. I will have to resort to the “plastic over the hole” method I mentioned in the earlier post, to prevent back-siphoning. And let me tell you, back-siphoning is real and a problem if you don’t deal with it…I quickly learned a lesson on that topic!

Ok, lots of words to describe all this. The only problem is, I have not had a sunny day since I got this thing installed. I wanted to post about this progress but I don’t have any real results yet. I will have to post again with results. I know it will make a difference, but I don’t know the extent. Stay tuned!

My Home Among The Hills

Life in WV!