My TV project, aged 12 and a half

[ppppenguin]

Peter, I've known people aged over 60 running round the room with it and whooping.

[peter scott]

A man drives to a gas station and has his tank filled up. While doing this the clerk spots two penguins sitting on the back seat of the car. He asks the driver, "What's up with the penguins in the back seat?" The man in the car says, "I found them. I asked myself what to do with them but, I haven't a clue." The clerk ponders a bit then says, "You should take them to the zoo." "Yeah, that's a good idea," says the man in the car and drives away.

source: http://www.jokes4us.com/animaljokes/penguinjokes.html

[peter scott]

The next day the man with the car is back at the same gas station. The clerk sees the penguins are still in the back seat of the car. "Hey, they're still here! I thought you were going to take them to the zoo!" "Oh, I did," says the driver, "and we had a great time. Today I'm taking them to the beach."

[ppppenguin]

Did you ever wonder why you never see dead penguins on the ice in Antarctica?

Ever wonder where they go? Wonder no more.

It is a known fact that the penguin is a very ritualistic bird which lives an extremely ordered and complex life.

The penguins have a very strong community bond. They are very committed to their family and will mate for life. They also maintain a form of compassionate contact with their offspring throughout its life.

If a penguin is found dead on the ice surface, other members of the family and social circle have been known to dig holes in the ice, using their vestigial wings and beaks, until the hole is deep enough for the dead bird to be rolled into and buried.

The male penguins then gather in a circle around the freshly dug grave and sing....

"freeze a jolly good fellow." ....

[ppppenguin]

Another instalment.

PS: I've been given an A3 printer/scanner. I really must commission it. Would make scanning this project much easier.

[BusyBee]

Well with you and now Amie I know I was a late starter. Perhaps I will get back to sewing lol.

Tracy

[ppppenguin]

I started playing with electricity after a fashion aged 2 and a half. My mother found a box of old electrical fittings at home and they made a wonderful "fit together" toy. Kept me quiet when I was ill. By 4 I could wire up batteries and lamps, fit a mains plug and fix a blown fuse. Then it was downhill all the way.

[ppppenguin]

I now have an A3 scanner/printer (the wonders of Freecycle!) so here's the next pair of pages without the cutoff margins.

Alos a photo of the printer/scanner on the table (it's a door mounted on wall battens and a filing cabinet) to the side of my desk. It's a big lump! I had to substantially raise the shelf above it to be able to open the lid for scanning. All sorts of other things ended up being moved around and it was an excuse for a bit of tidy up and chuck out. My Samsung laser looks tiny to the left of the monster.

The Epson needed a Magenta cartridge - I knew this when I got it - and all the other cartridges were low on ink. I've taken to buying ink and toner from Stinkyink: https://www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk/  Good quality, low prices and good service. You rarely gety all 3 together. A set of 4 own brand cartridges cost me just £4.19 (about £7 when not in the sale) and arrived next working day. Had to do a couple of head cleans to wake up everything. Disadvantage of Epson is that you don't get a new print head with the cartridge. You can always fix a badly bunged head in an HP inkjet by changing the cartridge which includes the head. My old HP 6110 multifunction will probably be retired soon.

[Old Sparky]

I remember wondering 'How does the wireless work?' from a very early age, maybe 5 or 6, which led to my buying magazines such as PW, RC, etc, though I wasn't able to do practical work until mid 1966 because both houses in which I lived before then were without a mains electricity supply.

[Terry]

Lack of elecktrickery isn't a valid excuse!

True, we did have it in the house I grew up in - one 5A 2pin socket in the living room! We also had electric light in the two main rooms downstairs, the hall and landing and a lamp over the bed in the master bedroom but everywhere else was gas lit - including the kitchen.

When I was about 12 or so I succeeded in drilling a hole in the plasterboard wall behind the switch over my mum's bed and though the other plasterboard wall so that I could poke the end of a length of VIR cable that I found somewhere through the wall and run it round my bedroom to a light I screwed to the wall over my bed and a 5A 2pin socket behind the bed!

Someone gave me a prewar Cossor radio which performed very well and sat conveniently beside my bed for years!

My brother, 4 years my junior, had a smaller room in the rear extension over the kitchen and when I started listening to the Cossor, he wanted a radio too!

There was no way my mother would have allowed me to pull up floorboards to get a cable into the room so anything in there would have to be battery operated, so mum asked me if I could build something for his birthday present.

Mum was bringing us both up on a Widowed Mother's Pension, so money was tight which meant that economy was the order of the day!

Someone had given me a chassis which had never been used but was pre-drilled with holes for octal valve holders, IFTs and so on, so I used that. The obvious thing to build was a one valve TRF, so I would need an octal valve.

Careful scrutiny of the ads in PW and my valve data book yielded a 1N5GT at a reasonable price. I'd found a book in the library with several suitable circuits but the one that caught my eye used a pot for reaction rather than the usual solid dielectric capacitor. I didn't have the cap but I did have a suitable pot and it even had a DP Switch! A scrap chassis yielded a twin gang tuning cap that conveniently matched holes on the chassis, so that sorted that out and there was even a slow motion drive to go with it!

A Repanco DRR2 was used for the coil. Add a Yaxley switch for wave-change and all I had to do was put it all together - but there was still one problem. High impedance headphones were very expensive - considerable more that the total cost of all the other parts. But this was still in the heyday of Government surplus, and Duke's in Manor Park advertised single low impedance earphones very cheaply in PW. My scrap chassis still had its output transformer. How well would it work with a 60Ω earphone rather than a 3Ω speaker? There was only one way to find out!

It wasn't much of a detour on my way home from school to visit Duke's, so off I went and also took the opportunity to browse the rest of his stuff.

All of the electronic part of the construction took place in the kitchen beside the gas cooker, because that is where I heated up my trusty soldering iron - 1/9d from Woolworths!

When it was finally finished it was time for the acid test. I switched it on and Wow! - I couldn't believe the sensitivity and selectivity! It served my brother well!