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My room’s door doesn’t have a lock. It doesn’t need one. But cars probably don’t need to go above 130km/h either, yet they can, for… reasons. So for… reasons, I made a lock for my door that is very simple and requires no modification of the door’s current hardware. My door swings inward, so to prevent someone from coming in, I have to prevent them from pushing the door into the room. This is accomplished by bolting the door to the doorframe, using the strike plate (the little hole that the latch goes into) as a point to latch onto,…
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Line AC power is a lot more dangerous than low-voltage DC power. As such, it requires different methods of connecting wires together temporarily. For example, you can use the same wire nuts used for permanent connections, though it’s not particularly fast or repeatable. You could just twist the wires together, but just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should. A modest step up in safety is wrapping the twisted wires in electrical tape, but that’s not particularly convenient or safe. You can use things like crocodile clips, but I didn’t have any on hand and many are…
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This Repair Café took place at the Palo Alto Museum of American Heritage. The Repair Café is an event in which volunteers (“fixers”) repair peoples’ things for free, usually appliances, clothing, or bicycles, though most anything can be brought if it’s broken. I participated as a fixer and had the opportunity to repair some interesting things. There was a broken IR remote that was the only way to control a Bose radio and CD player. In my opinion, based on trying to fix the thing, this was a very poorly designed product: not only were there no buttons on the…
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Introduction My middle school, JLS, has a good Video Production and Broadcast Journalism team (YouTube channel here, website here), taught by Ms. Julia Lee. It does (as of September 2023) live broadcasts every morning and the “news anchors” have celebrity status among sixth graders. For this reason, I applied for the semester-long Video Production elective, the prerequisite for Broadcast, in my 7th-grade year. Video Production Semester 1 For our first project, we were assigned teams with a genre of film to shoot. I, like many other boys, wanted to make an action film, which turned out to be …
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This is the disassembly of a Yale Assure Smart Lock. The outside part (called, according to Yale, the “Touchscreen Escutcheon”) basically consists of a touchscreen interface and a traditional cylinder lock. A metal plate with a keyhole mounting hole (that’s the hole shaped like a keyhole; it has nothing to do with keys), which is possibly an alternative method of mounting the lock, covers the screen mounting bracket. After it is removed, the screws holding the plastic bracket that holds the touchscreen can be undone. Another plastic piece holds the screen cable in place, and a metal bracket secures the…
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, with a lot of spare time on hand, I took up the hobby of manual typewriter restoration. It’s really not a difficult task: typewriters are generally very well built and aside from being dusty and gummed up, most manual typewriters for sale today are still in perfect working order, despite being over half a century old. How It’s Done When restoring typewriters, the first thing to do is to find out your typewriter model. If you are lucky enough, it is written on the typewriter itself, and if not, then you can scroll through the Typewriter…
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Disclaimer The methods described in this post worked for me. There are many factors that affect whether or not any of this may work for you, but two big ones are weather and soil conditions. Here in Palo Alto, we have clay soil and the weather is hot and dry, at least in the summer. The molds that I’m making are one-part molds, which tend to be simpler, but these methods probably apply to two-part molds as well. Also, I am casting with zinc, a low-temperature, runny metal that takes well to casting. Also, a note about safety: although zinc…
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I realize that the field of hobbyist 3D printing is rapidly advancing and that this post may become obsolete very soon. How I Got It I got this printer used for $30 on Nextdoor in 2020. It was a Wanhao Duplicator i3 v2 that came with frame braces, a glass bed, and a Cobra Cooler fan duct. At the time I knew almost nothing about the details of 3D printing, only the theory, which can be summarized in the sentence “hot plastic extruded in layers to form an object”. Upgrades After seeing the first layer fail to go down many…
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This was my science project for the Synopsys Science fair which I participated in in 2023. Abstract 1.2 billion people worldwide need to boil water to make it drinkable, even in places considered developed. This is because boiling is simple, versatile, and accessible. While water is commonly boiled, it must take in lots of energy to reach its boiling point. After this, the scalding-hot water must then release that energy and cool for between 45 minutes several hours before it is drinkable. The two opposite steps just outlined lead to a solution: by using a heat exchanger, the boiled water…
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