Solder dispenser

Fellow Radiophiles,

I have been playing with single turn loop antennas lately. See Post 11 of Active Loop for electrical details.

Discarded bicycle rims make a good single turn loop. My colleague Bill Skirkey gave me a discarded 26" rim and I cut through the hole for the refil valve to make the loop gap.

I decided to re-use the discarded hub and spokes to make a very smooth solder dispenser. The spokes were make of common plated steel and were easy to solder together. I used some red rubber caps for non-slip feet. The front feet are held in place by two spoke nuts. The rear feet are held by the natural hook at the end of the spoke that was connected to the hub.

 

I filled the hub with the Rosin core solder of an entire spool. I eased the rolling process with a rubber foot on a screw that was driven by a low speed cordless drill. I rested the rubber foot at the edge of hub and let the drill do the work. Had I been just a bit more patient, I could have tensioned the solder wire properly to get a tighter solder roll.

The dispensing action is very smooth; it seems that the solder comes out simply by mind telekenisis.

Regards,

-Joe
 

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How nice, Joe! Now that's a funny piece of hardware for us bikers!                                                                                                

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Marco, glad to hear your sense of utility and humor resonates with mine!

There is another bit of bike technology that can be useful in our hobby, and that is the bicycle inner tube.

The synthetic rubber that inner tubes are made of, is very resilient and does not decay much over time, unlike natural rubber, which dries out in a just a year or two.

 

I have been using sliced bike inner tubes as elastics for years. I use them to keep tubes of the same type together, as well as wall adapter cords coiled in place, or digital camera batteries ordered in sequence with charged cells at the top, and dead ones at the bottom.

The strech range of these elastics is much less than for natural rubber, so it is necessary to have a range of sizes available.

If the rubber is kept at the limit of it's stretch range, it will decay rapidly.

 

 One of the handy lab gadgets I like is the rubber tube puller, to pull out hot tubes. I can't find where I put my commercial made one, so I improvised one from the inner tube of a mountain bike.

I turned the rubber inside-out to get rid of the non-stick powder.

I have seen no ill effects of tube heat on the rubber, when used  momentarily to pull out a tube.

 

Hmm, maybe all this bike technology play will remind me to get back into bicycling this spring...

Regards,

-Joe

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Dear Joe, here you have another interesting use of inner tubes. Until Elektro-Ersatzteile started to make replicas few months ago, the small belts for turntables like Perpetuum Ebner and similar brands were not available since decades. Not knowing what to do to fix them, I finally tried to use a slice of an inner tube.

Inner tubes usually have writings and other dents on the outer surface, but are flat on the inside. If only the inner side has to work over spindles (that is: the outer surface is not used as a "pulley" as sometimes happens) they can do the task pretty well. Of course the cut must be done precisely, or the "belts" will slip out of place.

The smallest tube available, the one for racing bikes, proved to be the right one. Its diameter is sensibly smaller than that of the original belts, but it is in turn more elastic so it fitted quite well. Its elasticity, however, is not excessive and does not cause udible wobbles or flutters.

I repaired turntables with gears even more complex than that shown below, like the Perpetuum Ebner REX A, which has 16 rpm speed also. Although I purchased the spare belts (now available, although expensive) some time ago, I'm still keeping the inner tubes in place to see how much they will last. It's been a pair of years now and they're still doing their job very well. The cost of this "spare parts" has been obviously ridicolous: one can make hundreds of them from a single inner tube!

 

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Dear Marco, we think in very similar ways!

I have also used inner tube slices to replace the rubber at the edge of the iddle wheel in my Sonora TE38

The neoprene rubber lasts long if it is not streched too far.

Thanks for expanding the useful and fun use of simple things.

-Joe

 

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Glass octal tubes could suffer from pulling them out.

The best thing to do, if possible, is to push the center-stemup from the other side of the chassis.

 

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