2012-02-25

Chemistry 2012

The original zink plating experiment has evolved. To get the right chemicals (mainly the zink brightener) I surrended and bought them from Caswell.
I'm in the process of building the essential zinkplating rig at the moment. My intention was to start today but I did not have enough copper wires to complete it, maybe tomorrow.

This far I have made the rig for zinkplating the fork springs for the Fleetwood front fork (except the main zink anodes). In the picture below, at least the center anode...

2012-02-21

Dechromed

1/3 of the way. A lot of parts that have been dechromed.

Some are going to be rechromed and some are going to be zink-plated. I will have to decide, depending on the quality of the goods and how much elbow grease I want to put in.

2012-02-07

Antenna

After the second digital reciever broke in a couple of years I started to suspect that a too weak signal from my home made antenna caused the reciever to work "hard" (nothing that I know about electronics supports that assumtion but anyway).

Home made antenna, ver 1.0

Just a coax cable. I removed the shielding 40cm from the outer end.

Started a project building a fractal antenna from bits and pieces.
Studied the channel frequencies to find a good average lengt (for the channels I mostly watch) for the antenna.



Home made antenna, ver 2.0


It works (and why would it not). Maybe I should take a more scientific approach and measure if there is a noticable improvement in signal strenght? Maybe later.

If there is any ver 2.x it will probably have a backplane...

EDIT: Checking the signal strenght and picture quality: Very good 98/98% for Channels 23 & 42 (490/642MHz), good 80/96% for Channel 50 (706MHz) and not so good 45/50% for channel 56 (754MHz). At least it's a big improvement compaired to the earlier antenna.

2012-02-01

Did it again

This time working on the frame. Started thinking about other things while hammering ...

The major misshap was not hitting myself on the thumb. The problem was the damage caused by the cold chisel richosheting in the shop afterwards.