What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?

My biggest one is a shed that I built. Not counting my shoulder sprain
due to a posthole digger, the shed is way too narrow to be truly
useful. It is attached to the deck along its longer side, so it is
inconspicuous, but if it was 3-4 feet wider, it would have been a lot
more useful. The shed stands, is dry, and functions as designed, but
it was poorly designed.

i

My worst project was buying a used Onan powered 5kw generator/welder. I
got it very cheap since it turned over with virtually no compression. I
figured that it would have only one major glitch, the engine was the
problem. Got it home, stuck valve, freed that up, started right up. But
no power output.

Spent good money buying brushes, flashing the stator, etc. No go. Tore
it down, half of the windings were completely burned out. Onan wanted
$1700 for the new windings. NOT! Scrapped the generator section.

Found a 5 kw generator head on a close out. Built a frame to marry the
two together. Not stiff enough, doubled the steel in the frame.
Additional welding caused it to warp badly. Got things aligned with a
lot of grinding and shims.

Used a Lovejoy coupler to marry the engine to the generator head. Just
enough misalignment left over to wipe out couplings within an hour or two.

Sold the unit for less than I had in it in parts, not to mention all the
hours of messing around with it. And still didn't have either backup
power or a portable welder.

ARGH!!!

Ignoramus689 wrote:
What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?

My biggest one is a shed that I built. Not counting my shoulder sprain
due to a posthole digger, the shed is way too narrow to be truly
useful. It is attached to the deck along its longer side, so it is
inconspicuous, but if it was 3-4 feet wider, it would have been a lot
more useful. The shed stands, is dry, and functions as designed, but
it was poorly designed.

i

"Ignoramus689" wrote in message
...
What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?

My biggest one is a shed that I built. Not counting my shoulder sprain
due to a posthole digger, the shed is way too narrow to be truly
useful. It is attached to the deck along its longer side, so it is
inconspicuous, but if it was 3-4 feet wider, it would have been a lot
more useful. The shed stands, is dry, and functions as designed, but
it was poorly designed.

i

Mine was a dredge. At the time, I was interested in gold mining, and had
built a very efficient trailer mounted sluice. 5 hp Honda 2" pump, and
first class quick connects and components. We did okay with that, and found
five ounces of gold in one day one time. We did not do that good on every
trip, but in all, the trailer was profitable. We were doing dry placer
deposits.

Then I got interested in dredging some local swimming holes for Indian
artifacts. No gold, but interesting stuff and potentially profitable. I
had experience with air lifts from my commercial diving days. I built three
prototypes before arriving at a final design that worked slick as can be.
The tanks were designed so that when the top of the dredge became full of
lithic debitage, it would tilt 90 degrees in the water, and the debitage
would simply fall off. Simple. Efficient.

What I had failed to investigate was the legality of it all, and the federal
Antiquities laws put the kibash on the project. My best location was a
privately owned spring, and we had the permission to dredge. We had tested
the dredge three times, and it worked great. It even brought up tin cans
and broken glass, which made the owners happy. Right when we got ready to
do some serious dredging in the areas where we thought the artifacts were,
it went into bankruptcy, and I couldn't even get the bank to return phone
calls. I took what I could off in the way of reusable fittings, but the
rest went to the landfill.

Loss of about $3,000.

Steve

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:

What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?

My biggest one is a shed that I built. Not counting my shoulder sprain
due to a posthole digger, the shed is way too narrow to be truly
useful. It is attached to the deck along its longer side, so it is
inconspicuous, but if it was 3-4 feet wider, it would have been a lot
more useful. The shed stands, is dry, and functions as designed, but
it was poorly designed.

i
Not mine, but one I steered clear of.
This summer I came across a yard sale where the guy had a box of lawn
mower parts, mostly new looking. It seems his ex had hit something and
bent the crankshaft on a relatively new B&S 3.5 HP and insisted that
he attempt to repair it himself. He claimed to have close to $200 tied
up in new parts but never got around to putting it back together
before they split. He was willing to let the engine in a box go for
$10 but no deck etc. I told him I might have given him the $10 if he
still had the deck, but apparently someone had already had that brain
wave and then left him with the engine which he considered to be a
good deal till I explained that in the last month I had dragged home
three free machines, all repairable engines but rotted out decks.
Gerry :-)}
London, Canada

"Ignoramus689" wrote in message
...
What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?

My biggest one is a shed that I built. Not counting my shoulder sprain
due to a posthole digger, the shed is way too narrow to be truly
useful. It is attached to the deck along its longer side, so it is
inconspicuous, but if it was 3-4 feet wider, it would have been a lot
more useful. The shed stands, is dry, and functions as designed, but
it was poorly designed.

i

I designed and built a wire cutter to cut 3" long .014" wire, 6 coils at a
time. It worked well in that a bundle of wire looked like a mirror on the
ends. I never could figure out how to orient the cut wire and the machine
made piles of wire that looked like hay. Then I figured it would only cut
1/6 of the amount that my rotary cutter would do without disorienting the
wire. I figure I have about $2,000 in it and nothing is reusable except the
1/3 hp motor and the fasteners. Ooops!

A massive Westbury universal mill that took all my time for 'bout two
months. Had it all apart and was starting to paint and reassemble. I
had heated the bull gear in preparation for re-insterting the
spindle. The spindle hung on the way in and wouldn't budge. To add
insult to injury I broke one of the shifter forks trying to get
leverage. The whole thing went to the scrapper.

Ignoramus689 wrote:
What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?

My biggest one is a shed that I built. Not counting my shoulder sprain
due to a posthole digger, the shed is way too narrow to be truly
useful. It is attached to the deck along its longer side, so it is
inconspicuous, but if it was 3-4 feet wider, it would have been a lot
more useful. The shed stands, is dry, and functions as designed, but
it was poorly designed.

i
Well, I tore up my back trying to drag a 375 Lb surface plate
out of the back of my car. I have slid heavy stuff around
before, but I was at the wrong angle, the skid caught on the
carpet or something, and I did major damage. I was in great
pain for a couple months, and it slowly healed. But, my back is
never going to be the same. As long as I take it easy, avoid
exhausting the back muscles and avoid the movement of pulling
something toward me hard, with my back, then I'm OK.

With my back totalled, I did manage to rig the surface plate to
my lawn tractor and pull it around to the basement door and then
winch it in. It sat on the floor for a year, then I built a
table for it when I got my TIG machine.

Sorry about the clutter in the picture :
http://jelinux.pico-systems.com/surftable.html
There are plugs in the pipes that have angled 1"-20 TPI threads
so the adjusting feet go straight up and down. I milled those
threads by CNC. It has 6 feet, 3 on the floor, and 3 holding
the granite plate.

The project came out great, but I sure wish I hadn't wrecked my
back. I'd managed to save myself from wrecking my back up until
I was 55 or so.

Jon

Ignoramus689 wrote:
What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?

My biggest one is a shed that I built. Not counting my shoulder sprain
due to a posthole digger, the shed is way too narrow to be truly
useful. It is attached to the deck along its longer side, so it is
inconspicuous, but if it was 3-4 feet wider, it would have been a lot
more useful. The shed stands, is dry, and functions as designed, but
it was poorly designed.

i
Well, I have a couple derelict projects, maybe not what you are
looking for, but ....

I tried to build a hybrid electric car. A friend donated a
massively rusted out VW bug, no floor on driver's side, you
could see both rear tires from the driver's seat, etc. I cut
out a piece of scrap and welded a new floor onto it. I think my
welder at the time might have been 48 V worth of trolling motor
batteries for the car. I got a Kaylor adaptor which mounts a
jet engine starter/generator to a VW flywheel. I built a
switching regulator for the generator shunt field, and I could
vary motor speed from about 3000 - 7000 RPM or so. I had some
big transistors to switch the armature, but never built that
controller. So, I had a spool of wire as a starting resistor
and just blipped that and then cut in the main relay, and it
sounded like a jet engine! The particular motor/gen I got had
such a light field structure it vibrated as the armature slots
went by. I had to make the giant bayonet fixture that holds the
motor/gen on the Kaylor adaptor, it didn't come with the
motor/gen. That actually came out OK, I would have been REALLY
****ed to chew up what would now be $100+ of aluminum and have
it not fit right. I had few measuring tools or precision setup
skills at that time. It was too big to fit on my 10" Atlas
lathe at the time, so I had to do it all on a rotary table on my
mill.

Anyway, the thing actually ran as an electric car. I have no
idea how far it would go on a charge, 4 90 AH trolling motor
batteries aren't a huge amount of energy. It did run quite
well, I ran up and down some hills near my house. I think it
probably was snappier than the original VW engine.

Then, I tried to put in the hybrid conversion. I bought a Honda
350 engine from a guy who I should have been more wary of.
After I cleaned the thing up, I found obvious signs the serial
numbers had been chopped up with a chisel. I eventually got the
engine running as is, it ran incredibly rough, and blew a lot of
smoke. I was never able to keep it running more than a minute
at a time. I don't know if it had an ignition problem, or what.
Anyway, I plunged ahead, building a frame for the engine, and
then modifying it to bring an extension of the crankshaft out
where the centrifugal oil separator was. I made an adaptor to
plug in where the oil separator cap went on the side cover that
brought the oil ports out to where I could hook up an external
paper filter. I added an oil pressure gauge, and it went so far
past 100 PSI that it bent the needle hammering it against the
zero peg. I made a totally horrible resilient coupling to a
stratofortress generator, that is a work of lightweight
mechanical art (the generator, that is). 400 amps at 30 V, and
the thing weighs about 30 Lbs! My coupling was way out of
balance, and didn't have anywhere enough resilience to handle
the uneven power strokes of the vertical twin Honda engine.
(With the pistons 180 degrees out of sync with each other, the
power strokes happen 1/2 rev apart, then there's a full rev and
a half with no power stroke.) After a couple short runs, a
disassembly showed the crankshaft extension was twisted, and
would obviously break within a couple more minutes' run. I was
going to have to redo that whole thing with a MUCH heavier
shaft. That is about where the project stopped. I still have
the jet engine starter motor, the Kaylor adaptor, the stratofort
generator, and the electronics. I gave away the Honda engine,
but one carb off it is on my lawn tractor. I kept the
trolling batteries for a while, but didn't bother to keep them
charged. While trying to recover one of them that wasn't
charging, I increased voltage to try to get it to take a charge
without realizing an intercell connection had gone open, I
managed to blow the top off the battery with a hydrogen
explosion. it sounded like firing a 12-gauge in the basement.
I'm damn lucky it was triggered up on top of the electrolyte or
I might be typing this on a Braille keyboard! Sheesh, how
stupid one can get sometimes! I sold the VW to a guy who needed
a good transaxle. This all happened about 1982 - 1985 or so.
I remember wrestling my 100 Lb vacuum-tube oscilloscope down the
steps to the garage to work on the switching regulator circuit.

Another insane project was building a 32-bit bit-slice computer.
The main CPU section was built on two hand-made wire-wrap boards
about 14" square. It had 16 K words of 96-bit wide control
store for the microcode. I actually got it running at the
blinding rate of 8 MHz for 2-register operations and 6 MHz for
3-register. I wrote an emulator in BASIC and a macro assembler
for it, and had a pretty sophisticated (for the time) download
and diagnostic system for it that ran on a Z-80 system with
S-100 bus and PC/M. (Is that the right OS for the old S-100
systems?) I was going to implement a 32-bit microprogrammed
computer with it, based loosely on the IBM System/360, and then
have to adapt an OS to run on it. Well, I got bogged down in
microcode, and never got anywhere NEAR finishing the thing.
Then, it became possible to buy a DEC MicroVAX-II CPU piece by
piece from brokers, and I never looked back! I still pull out
the huge wire-wrapped boards for visitors to marvel at.

All of my purely mechanical projects usually work in some
fashion, sometimes after a little adjustment, and seem to serve
their purpose. They are usually a lot less ambitious than the
two above.

Jon
Jon

--Well here's a link to some of my smaller mistakes:
http://www.nmpproducts.com/mistakes.htm
...but my biggest mistake was probably "Z-Key", a hex key that fits
in a tight place and has plenty of torque. Sounds like a good idea but after
I spent something like $20k on tooling I found I couldn't even give them
away. Sigh.
--Oh, and then there was that day in 1974 when, having recieved the
first stipend from my 10-years-dead father's estate, I drove my excellent
little VW beetle over to the Porsche dealer and swapped it for a 911-S. In
the ten years I owned that car the maintenance bills would have bought two
brand new beetles.
--Next boondoggle: I'm getting ready to build a weird car from the
ground up, with surplus parts (lesson #1: don't buy new if you can get it
used and in good condition!). If it doesn't work at least I won't be out too
much hard cash.

--
"Steamboat Ed" Haas : Whatever happened
Hacking the Trailing Edge! : to Tom Nelson?
www.nmpproducts.com
---Decks a-wash in a sea of words---

In article ,
steamer wrote:

...but my biggest mistake was probably "Z-Key", a hex key that fits
in a tight place and has plenty of torque. Sounds like a good idea but after
I spent something like $20k on tooling I found I couldn't even give them
away. Sigh.

Sounds interesting. I for one would be interested to hear more about it,
if it's not too painful to discuss.

Speaking of painful to discuss:

Without a doubt, bar none, my biggest boondoggle (ongoing, slowly) is my
shop & house project. I'm severely allergic to burying my butt in loans,
and I have been throughly disgusted with various shoddy crap I've found
in dealing with multiple houses built by others over the course of time,
so I wanted one where I could look in the mirror and complain straight
to the idiot that screwed things up.

The house is still a figment, the shop is going up first. Land was
bought in 1998. A backhoe was bought in 1999. Driveway through the woods
took a while. Concrete was poured and much progress made in 2003. Since
then, things have slowed down a lot. It's still more of a construction
project than a place I can actually get woodworking and metalworking
done. I'd no doubt be further along if I was cursing some idiot's shoddy
construction, and paying to heat their crappy insulation, and (ewww)
paying interest at the frigging bank.

Should be nice whenever it's finally done, but in hindsight I should
have bought the house with a garage and two shops that came on the
market at a tolerable (but mortgage needed) price a couple years after
we bought the land.

Still, not a cent borrowed so far.

As for having someone else do the work - other than my concrete
contractor, I've yet to find anyone to do the work right - in fact, the
other major thing I contracted out needs to be fixed, still, as the roof
is definitely sub-par.

If doing it over, I'd make it larger area and one story, as the second
story (staging, getting stuff up there, etc) is a big part of what's
taking so long.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by

On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson wrote:

[ ... ]

Well, I tore up my back trying to drag a 375 Lb surface plate
out of the back of my car. I have slid heavy stuff around
before, but I was at the wrong angle, the skid caught on the
carpet or something, and I did major damage. I was in great
pain for a couple months, and it slowly healed. But, my back is
never going to be the same. As long as I take it easy, avoid
exhausting the back muscles and avoid the movement of pulling
something toward me hard, with my back, then I'm OK.

Ouch!

With my back totalled, I did manage to rig the surface plate to
my lawn tractor and pull it around to the basement door and then
winch it in. It sat on the floor for a year, then I built a
table for it when I got my TIG machine.

Is that a granite surface plate -- or a cast iron one? The
edge looks granite, but the top looks rusty -- perhaps the appearance of
the spotting compound on it already?

and how big a plate it it? My largest is an 18x18 cast iron,
plus a 12x18 granite and a small 6x12 ping granite from Starrett
(through some other ownership along the way. :-)

Sorry about the clutter in the picture :
http://jelinux.pico-systems.com/surftable.html
There are plugs in the pipes that have angled 1"-20 TPI threads
so the adjusting feet go straight up and down. I milled those
threads by CNC. It has 6 feet, 3 on the floor, and 3 holding
the granite plate.

O.K. I can't seem to see the near leg on the right actually
touching the plate -- but it must be, or it would be toppling.

Yes -- three point support is the right thing to do with either
the granite or the cast iron.

The project came out great, but I sure wish I hadn't wrecked my
back. I'd managed to save myself from wrecking my back up until
I was 55 or so.

It is a pity that you did in your back. Any hopes of it getting
better over time, or is what you currently have as good as you can
expect?

Good Luck,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson wrote:

[ ... ]


Well, I tore up my back trying to drag a 375 Lb surface plate
out of the back of my car. I have slid heavy stuff around
before, but I was at the wrong angle, the skid caught on the
carpet or something, and I did major damage. I was in great
pain for a couple months, and it slowly healed. But, my back is
never going to be the same. As long as I take it easy, avoid
exhausting the back muscles and avoid the movement of pulling
something toward me hard, with my back, then I'm OK.


Ouch!
it was bad for a while, now it is just a slight annoyance.

Is that a granite surface plate -- or a cast iron one? The
edge looks granite, but the top looks rusty -- perhaps the appearance of
the spotting compound on it already?

and how big a plate it it? My largest is an 18x18 cast iron,
plus a 12x18 granite and a small 6x12 ping granite from Starrett
(through some other ownership along the way. :-)
It is a Chinese 24 x 36 x 4" black granite plate, and yes, it
has some spotting compound on it. The bottle of red Canode
spotting dye is visible on the right side of the plate. I use
that instead of Prussian Blue because it easily washes off the
hands, etc.

Jon

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:

What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?


I'm afraid that it's got to be listening to my neighbour when he suggested
that we could clean up the corners of the pit that we had excavated for under
my workshop, by driving the mini-backhoe into said pit (water table is very
high in my garden). The result cost me a week's work about $3000 and a lot of
stress:-

http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html

The pit does the job it was intended for, but is neither as big or as deep as
I had planned. If I were to do the job again under similar conditions I would
dig out trenches and immediately fill them with concrete and rebar before the
ground had a chance to move. Once the concrete was hardened I would excavate
the ground from the centre section, pumping as necessary to control water
ingress.

Mark Rand
RTFM

On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson wrote:

[ ... ]

Well, I have a couple derelict projects, maybe not what you are
looking for, but ....

I tried to build a hybrid electric car. A friend donated a
massively rusted out VW bug, no floor on driver's side, you

[ ... ]

I sold the VW to a guy who needed
a good transaxle. This all happened about 1982 - 1985 or so.
I remember wrestling my 100 Lb vacuum-tube oscilloscope down the
steps to the garage to work on the switching regulator circuit.

Long saga mostly deleted.

Another insane project was building a 32-bit bit-slice computer.
The main CPU section was built on two hand-made wire-wrap boards
about 14" square. It had 16 K words of 96-bit wide control
store for the microcode.

Interesting. I remember considering making a Motorola 6800 CPU
from 2-bit bit-slice modules (for a hoped increase in speed), but never
got around to starting that project.

Lots of wire-wrapped things with 6800, 6802 and 6809 CPUs.

I actually got it running at the
blinding rate of 8 MHz for 2-register operations and 6 MHz for
3-register.

Pretty good for wire-wrapped. I wonder how much it could have
been boosted by more careful design of the routing of the signals?

I wrote an emulator in BASIC and a macro assembler
for it, and had a pretty sophisticated (for the time) download
and diagnostic system for it that ran on a Z-80 system with
S-100 bus and PC/M. (Is that the right OS for the old S-100
systems?)

Close -- CP/M. The PC term did not exist until IBM started
using it for their initial 8086-based system, IIRC.

Sort of like when I used to refer to my Altair 680b (MC6800 CPU)
as "my pet computer" before Commodore came out with the PET computer,
which led to enough confusion that I dropped the term.

I was going to implement a 32-bit microprogrammed
computer with it, based loosely on the IBM System/360, and then
have to adapt an OS to run on it. Well, I got bogged down in
microcode, and never got anywhere NEAR finishing the thing.

An impressive project, anyway.

Then, it became possible to buy a DEC MicroVAX-II CPU piece by
piece from brokers, and I never looked back! I still pull out
the huge wire-wrapped boards for visitors to marvel at.

I moved from the Altair 680b to the SWTP 6800, and then the SWTP
6809, (the last finally running with DOS-69 and OS-9 at the flick of a
switch) before I started picking up Sun workstations and servers,
starting with a Sun 2/120, and up through a current pair of Sun Blade
1000s and a Sun Fire 280R.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2007-11-25, Mark Rand wrote:
On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:

What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?


I'm afraid that it's got to be listening to my neighbour when he suggested
that we could clean up the corners of the pit that we had excavated for under
my workshop, by driving the mini-backhoe into said pit (water table is very
high in my garden). The result cost me a week's work about $3000 and a lot of
stress:-

http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html


Mark, of all bad projects mentioned here, yours is the most
spectacular. If anyone has not yet seen the pictures, it is highly
recommended to take a look!!!

i

On 2007-11-25, SteveB wrote:

"Ignoramus11731" wrote
http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html


Mark, of all bad projects mentioned here, yours is the most
spectacular. If anyone has not yet seen the pictures, it is highly
recommended to take a look!!!

i

It's got my vote. It hurts just to LOOK at the pictures. Musta been some
week.

My condolences to your wife.


Same here. I also appreciate Mark sharing these pictures with us. It
must have hurt!

i

Jon Elson wrote:

It is a Chinese 24 x 36 x 4" black granite plate, and yes, it
has some spotting compound on it. The bottle of red Canode
spotting dye is visible on the right side of the plate. I use
that instead of Prussian Blue because it easily washes off the
hands, etc.

Where have you been buying your spotting ink at?

Sorry about your back and the next time my uncle makes observations on my
shop conditions, I'm showing him your picture

Nice stand btw.

Wes

That nasty Red Canode spotting dye - Now I understand.

Bought a couple 3x4' plate of 3/8" HRS at the special scrap yard.
The top was red - but I wasn't thinking - thought primer.

Cut out some needed patterns and started working - gloves red. Ish.
Washed it off with many paper towels.

Martin
Martin H. Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
TSRA, Life; NRA LOH & Patron Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot's Medal.
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder
IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.
http://lufkinced.com/


Jon Elson wrote:
DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson wrote:

[ ... ]


Well, I tore up my back trying to drag a 375 Lb surface plate out of
the back of my car. I have slid heavy stuff around before, but I was
at the wrong angle, the skid caught on the carpet or something, and I
did major damage. I was in great pain for a couple months, and it
slowly healed. But, my back is never going to be the same. As long
as I take it easy, avoid exhausting the back muscles and avoid the
movement of pulling something toward me hard, with my back, then I'm OK.


Ouch!
it was bad for a while, now it is just a slight annoyance.

Is that a granite surface plate -- or a cast iron one? The
edge looks granite, but the top looks rusty -- perhaps the appearance of
the spotting compound on it already?

and how big a plate it it? My largest is an 18x18 cast iron,
plus a 12x18 granite and a small 6x12 ping granite from Starrett
(through some other ownership along the way. :-)
It is a Chinese 24 x 36 x 4" black granite plate, and yes, it has some
spotting compound on it. The bottle of red Canode spotting dye is
visible on the right side of the plate. I use that instead of Prussian
Blue because it easily washes off the hands, etc.

Jon

"Ignoramus11731" wrote
http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html


Mark, of all bad projects mentioned here, yours is the most
spectacular. If anyone has not yet seen the pictures, it is highly
recommended to take a look!!!

i

It's got my vote. It hurts just to LOOK at the pictures. Musta been some
week.

My condolences to your wife.

Steve

Close -- CP/M. The PC term did not exist until IBM started
using it for their initial 8086-based system, IIRC.

It was used on their 8088 based computer.

Wayne

Wes wrote:
Jon Elson wrote:


It is a Chinese 24 x 36 x 4" black granite plate, and yes, it
has some spotting compound on it. The bottle of red Canode
spotting dye is visible on the right side of the plate. I use
that instead of Prussian Blue because it easily washes off the
hands, etc.


Where have you been buying your spotting ink at?
I bought that at Dapra, but they have a $50 minimum, and the dye
was only $12, so I had to buy some other stuff. There may be
other distributors without minimums or with other stuff you
need, like MSC, KBC, Travers, etc.

I later got a bottle of blue Canode at Cummins Industrial, no
idea why they had it, but they had several cases hidden in a
pile of stuff in the back. One of our local metalworking group
members spotted the stuff there.
Sorry about your back and the next time my uncle makes observations on my
shop conditions, I'm showing him your picture

Ahh, it gets bad for a while (the junk that is), then a big
project develops, and a mad cleanup has to be done. There are a
few piles of stuff that are hard to get into, but that entire
area in the photo has been totally rearranged. At the right
edge were where I had shelving units arranged like library
stacks, wasting a lot of space in the aisles. I calculated I
would only give up one rack if I lined the walls with the
shelves, opening up a HUGE area, where my surface mount pick and
place machine now sits. See
http://jelinux.pico-systems.com/CSM84.html
for awful pictures and story. But, that was NOT one of my worst
projects, but most successful, so I couldn't talk about it in
the original response.

Nice stand btw.
Thanks, I think it is pretty cool, too.

Jon

Martin H. Eastburn wrote:
That nasty Red Canode spotting dye - Now I understand.

Oh, the Canode isn't bad at all, it washes off skin real easy.
It doesn't wash off clothes as well, but the Prussian Blue NEVER
washes off anything! I have clothes that must have been washed
100+ times, and the blue is still there. The blue on your skin
comes off because you grow new skin!

Jon

DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson wrote:
Another insane project was building a 32-bit bit-slice computer.
The main CPU section was built on two hand-made wire-wrap boards
about 14" square. It had 16 K words of 96-bit wide control
store for the microcode.


Interesting. I remember considering making a Motorola 6800 CPU
from 2-bit bit-slice modules (for a hoped increase in speed), but never
got around to starting that project.

Lots of wire-wrapped things with 6800, 6802 and 6809 CPUs.

Yeesh, that was the Signetics/Intel 3002 series, with their
insane local branching scheme, where your program listing had to
be a 2D grid, with routines writhing all over the map like snakes!

I actually got it running at the
blinding rate of 8 MHz for 2-register operations and 6 MHz for
3-register.


Pretty good for wire-wrapped. I wonder how much it could have
been boosted by more careful design of the routing of the signals?

Not much. This was really old-school Schottky TTL, there was a
limit on how much they could put in one chip without thermal
problems. The registers were external to the ALU chips, and you
had to decode the register addresses. I could have made it un
faster with faster register chips, but they would run even
hotter, and be a lot less capable. The AMD register chips had 3
ports, 2 for reading one for writing, and there wasn't much
alternative. 55 ns access time, I seem to recall, sounded
blindingly fast at the time!

I wrote an emulator in BASIC and a macro assembler
for it, and had a pretty sophisticated (for the time) download
and diagnostic system for it that ran on a Z-80 system with
S-100 bus and PC/M. (Is that the right OS for the old S-100
systems?)


Close -- CP/M.
Yes, of course, how could I have forgotten that. I spent a LOT
of time working with it, even rigged up a VERY early Memorex 10
MB Winchester drive to it, also has a 12" vector-writing CRT
with a light pen, and a Honeywell 600 LPM drum printer, also 800
BPI 9-track mag tape for backup.
I was going to implement a 32-bit microprogrammed
computer with it, based loosely on the IBM System/360, and then
have to adapt an OS to run on it. Well, I got bogged down in
microcode, and never got anywhere NEAR finishing the thing.


An impressive project, anyway.

it would have been impressive if I'd ever gotten it running.
I had 2 MB of Memorex 3rd party static RAM memory out of IBM
370's at work that were scrapped. I was going to build an
interface between that memory and the 32-bit CPU, which would
have allowed me to actually run a program on the thing. But,
the microcoding was a total nightmare, partly because the tools
I had were a bit primitive. It took me a couple days to write
the code to do the simplest operations, like add 2 numbers
together and write the result in another register. The last
thing I did was get a simple 32x32 - 64 bit multiply working.
Next would have been divide, and I think that's about where the
project stopped.

Then, it became possible to buy a DEC MicroVAX-II CPU piece by
piece from brokers, and I never looked back! I still pull out
the huge wire-wrapped boards for visitors to marvel at.


I moved from the Altair 680b to the SWTP 6800, and then the SWTP
6809, (the last finally running with DOS-69 and OS-9 at the flick of a
switch) before I started picking up Sun workstations and servers,
starting with a Sun 2/120, and up through a current pair of Sun Blade
1000s and a Sun Fire 280R.
I got a SGI Iris 2020 off the loading dock at work. It almost
booted up, you could look around in the file system, etc. I got
some help on the net and determined the graphics engine was bad,
and bought all the boards out of a German guy's system for $100.
His graphics engine worked, and the thing came up and ran their
OS and nifty demos like the "flight simulator". It ran for
about 2 years and then the graphics engine blew again. I sold
all the guts for $200 to a broker. This machine was so far
beyond obsolete it wasn't funny. 68020, I think.

My VAX just died this year, after 20 years of operation, and a
number of upgrades. It is also mighty far out of date, 0.9
MIPS, 4 MB of memory. I had one last application running on it
for the last 7 years, an energy/environment monitoring system
that has a couple LCD displays around the house that show time,
inside and outside temp, humidity, etc. and also logs a whole
bunch of info on furnace and air cond operation to a file every
15 seconds. I finally migrated the code and interface over to
my server PC. Every night it summarizes the day's data. Used
to take 3 minutes on the VAX while the displays froze. On the
PC it takes 0.7 seconds, so the clock display never misses a beat.

Jon

Ignoramus11731 wrote:
On 2007-11-25, Mark Rand wrote:

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:


What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?


I'm afraid that it's got to be listening to my neighbour when he suggested
that we could clean up the corners of the pit that we had excavated for under
my workshop, by driving the mini-backhoe into said pit (water table is very
high in my garden). The result cost me a week's work about $3000 and a lot of
stress:-

http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html



Mark, of all bad projects mentioned here, yours is the most
spectacular. If anyone has not yet seen the pictures, it is highly
recommended to take a look!!!

i
Holy Cow! No kidding, the water table is really high, in fact,
your house is sitting on a swimming pool! Wow!

I had some water problems too, and had a REALLY heavy reach lift
truck sink in my back yard, but it stopped sinking when the
axles were level with the ground.
See http://jelinux.pico-systems.com/sheldon.html
The machine was able to lift one axle at a time off the ground,
then you just had to shove 3/4" plywood under it to keep it from
sinking again. I pulverized $200 worth of plywood in one day,
but managed to get the machine back on solid pavement by the end
of the weekend. The ruts in the yard are slowly levelling out.
That Lull machine weighed 21000 Lbs.

Jon

Choke!!!! I'm still coughing!!!

I'm sure glad I wasn't around for that one! Just so you know that you
are not the first to do that, I have some pictures of a 6 month old,
$106,000 Hyaundi 1.5 yard excavator that shows only the top 3' of the
boom still above the mud level.

Mark Rand wrote:
On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:

What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?


I'm afraid that it's got to be listening to my neighbour when he suggested
that we could clean up the corners of the pit that we had excavated for under
my workshop, by driving the mini-backhoe into said pit (water table is very
high in my garden). The result cost me a week's work about $3000 and a lot of
stress:-

http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html

The pit does the job it was intended for, but is neither as big or as deep as
I had planned. If I were to do the job again under similar conditions I would
dig out trenches and immediately fill them with concrete and rebar before the
ground had a chance to move. Once the concrete was hardened I would excavate
the ground from the centre section, pumping as necessary to control water
ingress.

Mark Rand
RTFM

On 2007-11-25, Jon Elson wrote:
Ignoramus11731 wrote:
On 2007-11-25, Mark Rand wrote:

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:


What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?


I'm afraid that it's got to be listening to my neighbour when he suggested
that we could clean up the corners of the pit that we had excavated for under
my workshop, by driving the mini-backhoe into said pit (water table is very
high in my garden). The result cost me a week's work about $3000 and a lot of
stress:-

http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html



Mark, of all bad projects mentioned here, yours is the most
spectacular. If anyone has not yet seen the pictures, it is highly
recommended to take a look!!!

i
Holy Cow! No kidding, the water table is really high, in fact,
your house is sitting on a swimming pool! Wow!

I had some water problems too, and had a REALLY heavy reach lift
truck sink in my back yard, but it stopped sinking when the
axles were level with the ground.
See http://jelinux.pico-systems.com/sheldon.html
The machine was able to lift one axle at a time off the ground,
then you just had to shove 3/4" plywood under it to keep it from
sinking again. I pulverized $200 worth of plywood in one day,
but managed to get the machine back on solid pavement by the end
of the weekend. The ruts in the yard are slowly levelling out.
That Lull machine weighed 21000 Lbs.

Looks like war pictures... For more fun stuff of this nature (to not
feel alone)

http://www.futurefirepower.com/abram...-abrams-in-mud
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de8vL1QMQLg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K8NXhFxeqk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgBAml2mgr4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JLpU3LxD0Y (T34 tank, not related)

and some random stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kKLbKHNquE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fWI0uTj9rM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjg6siN2QDE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_v00mY-CcE

i

On 2007-11-25, Jon Elson wrote:
DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson wrote:
Another insane project was building a 32-bit bit-slice computer.

[ ... ]

Interesting. I remember considering making a Motorola 6800 CPU
from 2-bit bit-slice modules (for a hoped increase in speed), but never
got around to starting that project.

Lots of wire-wrapped things with 6800, 6802 and 6809 CPUs.

Yeesh, that was the Signetics/Intel 3002 series, with their
insane local branching scheme, where your program listing had to
be a 2D grid, with routines writhing all over the map like snakes!

Perhaps it is just as well that I did not start collecting
hardware to try that then. :-) And at that time, the 6800 was my only
view of how a CPU should be configured.

I actually got it running at the
blinding rate of 8 MHz for 2-register operations and 6 MHz for
3-register.


Pretty good for wire-wrapped. I wonder how much it could have
been boosted by more careful design of the routing of the signals?

Not much. This was really old-school Schottky TTL, there was a
limit on how much they could put in one chip without thermal
problems.

Before the LS series, then.

Of course, I still have some plain pre-Schottky TTL just plain
"SN7400"s and similar. (Then again -- I also still have the Altair
680b. :-)

The registers were external to the ALU chips, and you
had to decode the register addresses. I could have made it un
faster with faster register chips, but they would run even
hotter, and be a lot less capable. The AMD register chips had 3
ports, 2 for reading one for writing, and there wasn't much
alternative. 55 ns access time, I seem to recall, sounded
blindingly fast at the time!

Yep -- considering what I was usually working with which was
doing amazing things if it reached a 150 nS access time. :-)

[ ... ]

Close -- CP/M.
Yes, of course, how could I have forgotten that. I spent a LOT
of time working with it, even rigged up a VERY early Memorex 10
MB Winchester drive to it, also has a 12" vector-writing CRT
with a light pen, and a Honeywell 600 LPM drum printer, also 800
BPI 9-track mag tape for backup.

At first, I did not have *any* OS for the Altair 680b -- until I
wire-wrapped an interface for a digital cassette drive and burned
routines to read and write Motorola Hex format data to/from it and added
commands to the monitor ROM to use those. Everything had to live in
1720 EPROMs (256x8 IIRC, and slow enough so the 680b was clocked down to
500 KHz instead of the native 1 MHz for the CPU. And the 6800 seemed to
do a little more at 1 MHz than the 8080 at 2MHz -- did things on each
edge of the clock pulse, instead of just one edge.

The SWTP 6800 I ran on floppys (both 8" and 5.25") for quite a
while, and was finally replaced with the SWTP 6809, using the same disks
and controller cards.
then I picked up an IMI 5MB hard disk with a controller whose
external interface looked a bit like SASI, but wasn't quite it. I first
wrote drivers for DOS-69 (rather CP/M like, except that it didn't have
PIP as a command and was 6.3 filename format -- I think that CP/M was
8.3 like early MS-DOS. However, since DOS-69 (and its predecessor
DOS-68) did not have a subdirectory structure, a 5MB drive got awfully
cluttered, so I took the time to write drivers for OS-9 (unix-like OS
for the 6809), and OS-9 was quite happy with the disks. I added another
of those to max out that controller, then added two 27 MB MFM drives
with a SASI (pre-SCSI) controller, and wire-wrapped an interface for
that. That worked quite well until it got replaced by my first unix
system, the Cosmos CMS-16/UNX which was based on an 8MHz Motorola 68000
CPU.

[ ... ]

An impressive project, anyway.

it would have been impressive if I'd ever gotten it running.
I had 2 MB of Memorex 3rd party static RAM memory out of IBM
370's at work that were scrapped. I was going to build an
interface between that memory and the 32-bit CPU, which would
have allowed me to actually run a program on the thing. But,
the microcoding was a total nightmare, partly because the tools
I had were a bit primitive. It took me a couple days to write
the code to do the simplest operations, like add 2 numbers
together and write the result in another register. The last
thing I did was get a simple 32x32 - 64 bit multiply working.
Next would have been divide, and I think that's about where the
project stopped.

O.K. About where it started to get really complex -- especially
with primitive development tools.

Then, it became possible to buy a DEC MicroVAX-II CPU piece by
piece from brokers, and I never looked back! I still pull out
the huge wire-wrapped boards for visitors to marvel at.


I moved from the Altair 680b to the SWTP 6800, and then the SWTP
6809, (the last finally running with DOS-69 and OS-9 at the flick of a
switch) before I started picking up Sun workstations and servers,
starting with a Sun 2/120, and up through a current pair of Sun Blade
1000s and a Sun Fire 280R.

I got a SGI Iris 2020 off the loading dock at work. It almost
booted up, you could look around in the file system, etc. I got
some help on the net and determined the graphics engine was bad,
and bought all the boards out of a German guy's system for $100.
His graphics engine worked, and the thing came up and ran their
OS and nifty demos like the "flight simulator". It ran for
about 2 years and then the graphics engine blew again. I sold
all the guts for $200 to a broker. This machine was so far
beyond obsolete it wasn't funny. 68020, I think.

Hmm ... Well, I went through the 68000 (on the Cosmos
CMS-16/UNX), then the 68010 (AT&T Unix-PC followed by Sun 2/120) before
I finally got to the 68020 with the Sun-3 family.

My VAX just died this year, after 20 years of operation, and a
number of upgrades. It is also mighty far out of date, 0.9
MIPS, 4 MB of memory.

I have a friend who might have been able to sell you the parts
to get it running again. But he strips machines and sells parts to
dealers, so the prices would probably not be too friendly. :-)

I had one last application running on it
for the last 7 years, an energy/environment monitoring system
that has a couple LCD displays around the house that show time,
inside and outside temp, humidity, etc. and also logs a whole
bunch of info on furnace and air cond operation to a file every
15 seconds. I finally migrated the code and interface over to
my server PC. Every night it summarizes the day's data. Used
to take 3 minutes on the VAX while the displays froze. On the
PC it takes 0.7 seconds, so the clock display never misses a beat.

Isn't it amazing how much faster today's systems are. I tend to
forget -- until I have to dig up the older ones to extract something for
someone -- in particular the AT&T Unix-PC/7300/3B1, which was 10 MHz
68010. It seemed pretty fast compared to the v7 unix on the 8MHz 68000,
but now that I am used to Ultra-SPARCs that is a different matter.

Out of curiosity -- were you running VMS or a unix on the VAX?

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 10:09:28 -0500, Stormin Mormon wrote:

I didn't know roofs from what, and made a 12 - 12 pitch, which turned out to
be terrifying for nailing on the shingles.

It's even more fun on a cold windy winter day, in firefighting gear, working
on a chimney fire. Wait, did I say "more"?

Jon Elson wrote:

Wes wrote:

Where have you been buying your spotting ink at?

I bought that at Dapra, but they have a $50 minimum, and the dye
was only $12, so I had to buy some other stuff. There may be
other distributors without minimums or with other stuff you
need, like MSC, KBC, Travers, etc.

Okay thanks. I bought some once from a place in MI over the web and
thought I'd just drop by on the way from picking up a 12" RT and get more
to save shipping. Well I had the gps coordinates and address but never
found the place. One of those areas where roads appear and disappear. I
wish I had the foresight to have written the phone number down.

The place that looked closest was a developement with $1M+ homes where names
on brick mailboxes were verboten.


I later got a bottle of blue Canode at Cummins Industrial, no
idea why they had it, but they had several cases hidden in a
pile of stuff in the back. One of our local metalworking group
members spotted the stuff there.

I found a deal to good to be true. 3 pints for 4 or 5 bucks each on the
web. Ordered it and never recieved it, got charged or recieved a sorry we
are out.

Sorry about your back and the next time my uncle makes observations on my
shop conditions, I'm showing him your picture

Ahh, it gets bad for a while (the junk that is), then a big
project develops, and a mad cleanup has to be done. There are a
few piles of stuff that are hard to get into, but that entire
area in the photo has been totally rearranged. At the right
edge were where I had shelving units arranged like library
stacks, wasting a lot of space in the aisles. I calculated I
would only give up one rack if I lined the walls with the
shelves, opening up a HUGE area, where my surface mount pick and
place machine now sits. See
http://jelinux.pico-systems.com/CSM84.html

for awful pictures and story. But, that was NOT one of my worst
projects, but most successful, so I couldn't talk about it in
the original response.

Is that what I would call a PCB board stuffer?


Nice stand btw.
Thanks, I think it is pretty cool, too.

Looks like your knees don't beat into it compared to a rectangular stand.

How much was the freight on that big rock and what were you scraping?

Wes

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 22:55:47 -0600, Jon Elson
wrote:

DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson wrote:
Another insane project was building a 32-bit bit-slice computer.
The main CPU section was built on two hand-made wire-wrap boards
about 14" square. It had 16 K words of 96-bit wide control
store for the microcode.


Interesting. I remember considering making a Motorola 6800 CPU
from 2-bit bit-slice modules (for a hoped increase in speed), but never
got around to starting that project.

Lots of wire-wrapped things with 6800, 6802 and 6809 CPUs.

Yeesh, that was the Signetics/Intel 3002 series, with their
insane local branching scheme, where your program listing had to
be a 2D grid, with routines writhing all over the map like snakes!

I actually got it running at the
blinding rate of 8 MHz for 2-register operations and 6 MHz for
3-register.


Pretty good for wire-wrapped. I wonder how much it could have
been boosted by more careful design of the routing of the signals?

Not much. This was really old-school Schottky TTL, there was a
limit on how much they could put in one chip without thermal
problems. The registers were external to the ALU chips, and you
had to decode the register addresses. I could have made it un
faster with faster register chips, but they would run even
hotter, and be a lot less capable. The AMD register chips had 3
ports, 2 for reading one for writing, and there wasn't much
alternative. 55 ns access time, I seem to recall, sounded
blindingly fast at the time!

I wrote an emulator in BASIC and a macro assembler
for it, and had a pretty sophisticated (for the time) download
and diagnostic system for it that ran on a Z-80 system with
S-100 bus and PC/M. (Is that the right OS for the old S-100
systems?)


Close -- CP/M.

Also OS9. Ran well on 6809 based systems. True multi-user
multi-tasking on a pico-power system. (I have OS9 for Radio Shack
CoCo)
Yes, of course, how could I have forgotten that. I spent a LOT
of time working with it, even rigged up a VERY early Memorex 10
MB Winchester drive to it, also has a 12" vector-writing CRT
with a light pen, and a Honeywell 600 LPM drum printer, also 800
BPI 9-track mag tape for backup.
I was going to implement a 32-bit microprogrammed
computer with it, based loosely on the IBM System/360, and then
have to adapt an OS to run on it. Well, I got bogged down in
microcode, and never got anywhere NEAR finishing the thing.


An impressive project, anyway.

it would have been impressive if I'd ever gotten it running.
I had 2 MB of Memorex 3rd party static RAM memory out of IBM
370's at work that were scrapped. I was going to build an
interface between that memory and the 32-bit CPU, which would
have allowed me to actually run a program on the thing. But,
the microcoding was a total nightmare, partly because the tools
I had were a bit primitive. It took me a couple days to write
the code to do the simplest operations, like add 2 numbers
together and write the result in another register. The last
thing I did was get a simple 32x32 - 64 bit multiply working.
Next would have been divide, and I think that's about where the
project stopped.

Then, it became possible to buy a DEC MicroVAX-II CPU piece by
piece from brokers, and I never looked back! I still pull out
the huge wire-wrapped boards for visitors to marvel at.


I moved from the Altair 680b to the SWTP 6800, and then the SWTP
6809, (the last finally running with DOS-69 and OS-9 at the flick of a
switch) before I started picking up Sun workstations and servers,
starting with a Sun 2/120, and up through a current pair of Sun Blade
1000s and a Sun Fire 280R.
I got a SGI Iris 2020 off the loading dock at work. It almost
booted up, you could look around in the file system, etc. I got
some help on the net and determined the graphics engine was bad,
and bought all the boards out of a German guy's system for $100.
His graphics engine worked, and the thing came up and ran their
OS and nifty demos like the "flight simulator". It ran for
about 2 years and then the graphics engine blew again. I sold
all the guts for $200 to a broker. This machine was so far
beyond obsolete it wasn't funny. 68020, I think.

My VAX just died this year, after 20 years of operation, and a
number of upgrades. It is also mighty far out of date, 0.9
MIPS, 4 MB of memory. I had one last application running on it
for the last 7 years, an energy/environment monitoring system
that has a couple LCD displays around the house that show time,
inside and outside temp, humidity, etc. and also logs a whole
bunch of info on furnace and air cond operation to a file every
15 seconds. I finally migrated the code and interface over to
my server PC. Every night it summarizes the day's data. Used
to take 3 minutes on the VAX while the displays froze. On the
PC it takes 0.7 seconds, so the clock display never misses a beat.

Jon


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:01:59 +0000, Mark Rand
wrote:

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:

What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?


I'm afraid that it's got to be listening to my neighbour when he suggested
that we could clean up the corners of the pit that we had excavated for under
my workshop, by driving the mini-backhoe into said pit (water table is very
high in my garden). The result cost me a week's work about $3000 and a lot of
stress:-

http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html

The pit does the job it was intended for, but is neither as big or as deep as
I had planned. If I were to do the job again under similar conditions I would
dig out trenches and immediately fill them with concrete and rebar before the
ground had a chance to move. Once the concrete was hardened I would excavate
the ground from the centre section, pumping as necessary to control water
ingress.

Mark Rand
RTFM

My cousins use that technique all the time. Pour a concrete ring,
sink it, excavate, pour more on top, keep going. My middle son just
started working for them and really likes it. I think and hope he's
found something worthwhile.

Here's their website showing the technique in use.

http://www.peltierbros.com/job_sites.htm

Pete Keillor

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:33:17 -0600, Ignoramus11731
wrote:

On 2007-11-25, SteveB wrote:

"Ignoramus11731" wrote
http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html


Mark, of all bad projects mentioned here, yours is the most
spectacular. If anyone has not yet seen the pictures, it is highly
recommended to take a look!!!

i

It's got my vote. It hurts just to LOOK at the pictures. Musta been some
week.

My condolences to your wife.


Same here. I also appreciate Mark sharing these pictures with us. It
must have hurt!

i


I think that the feeling after getting that mini-backhoe our of the pit was
one of the biggest rushes of my life. I had been seriously considering
demolishing the garage to allow access for a full size backhoe or 50 ton
crane, but in the end we managed it with a 5 ton Tirfor winch with one end
attached to the axle of the dumper truck. I had buried the wheels of the
dumper in the ground up to axle level to give some traction and was relying on
2 bights of 1/2" rope to break before the axle broke, it did a couple of
times. The sense of relief when the backhoe got out of the mire was
incredible, we were dancing around in extasy. There were pictures, but I lost
them in an un-backed up server crash, That'll teach me.

Only took a day to pressure-wash all of the mud out from the backhoe.

The workshop Is still work in progress. I WILL get the windows done next year
and I will get the three phase wiring done by Christmas. Fed from an invertor,
for now, but eventually from the utility.

I'm now officially famous. I'm on Google Earth and live.com (it's the white
trapezoidal building) :-

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?t=h&hl...1878&z=19&om=1

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=...6660&encType=1


If I had my time again I'd still do it. But I'd do it bigger and better :-)


Mark Rand
RTFM

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:19:41 -0500, Pete Keillor
wrote:



http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html

The pit does the job it was intended for, but is neither as big or as deep as
I had planned. If I were to do the job again under similar conditions I would
dig out trenches and immediately fill them with concrete and rebar before the
ground had a chance to move. Once the concrete was hardened I would excavate
the ground from the centre section, pumping as necessary to control water
ingress.

Mark Rand
RTFM

My cousins use that technique all the time. Pour a concrete ring,
sink it, excavate, pour more on top, keep going. My middle son just
started working for them and really likes it. I think and hope he's
found something worthwhile.

Here's their website showing the technique in use.

http://www.peltierbros.com/job_sites.htm

Pete Keillor


20/20 hindsight time. That's the way to do it :-). Maybe in the next life or
after I win a lottery.

The important thing to tell the children is "don't ever buy a house on clay
soil near the bottom of a hill". If they get that bit right, they can
experiment with shed building as an art form :-)


Mark Rand
RTFM

I didn't know roofs from what, and made a 12 - 12 pitch, which turned out
to be terrifying for nailing on the shingles.

http://home.comcast.net/~glyford/shed/shed.htm
and scroll 3/5 of the way down.
http://home.comcast.net/~glyford/shed/Shed-06.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~glyford/shed/Shed-roof09.jpg

A contractor friend showed me how to make the staging and loaned me
the roof jacks. Without them, I'd have spent a lot of wasted motion
moving ladders back and forth. The other trick I've seen is a bar
that mounts to a ladder that then lays flat on the roof, and the bar
hooks over the ridge...

I was talked into making it 10x12 by the board of health, who didn't
want to hassle with a permit for a mere shed. If I had to do it
again, I'd say "heck with that!" and make it at least twice as big.
Second thing I'd do is not have the roof drip water in front of the
doors that don't ever face the sun. I threw cheap gutters on it this
fall, but I'm pessimistic that will help much.
--Glenn Lyford

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:01:59 +0000, Mark Rand
wrote:

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:12 -0600, Ignoramus689
wrote:

What was the most ill-conceived, unsuccessful, and worthless/expensive
DIY style project that you undertook (I would say without counting any
injuries as they could outweigh everything else)?


I'm afraid that it's got to be listening to my neighbour when he suggested
that we could clean up the corners of the pit that we had excavated for under
my workshop, by driving the mini-backhoe into said pit (water table is very
high in my garden). The result cost me a week's work about $3000 and a lot of
stress:-

http://www.test-net.com/workshop/day6.html

Ouch! Now you can see why getting more than one opinion on your
idea and the implementation can be a good thing...

The pit does the job it was intended for, but is neither as big or as deep as
I had planned. If I were to do the job again under similar conditions I would
dig out trenches and immediately fill them with concrete and rebar before the
ground had a chance to move. Once the concrete was hardened I would excavate
the ground from the centre section, pumping as necessary to control water
ingress.

That's a small and odd-shaped lot - I can see why you wanted to fill
every available square centimeter...

No, the nifty trick would have been a small crane with a hydraulic
vibratory pile driver, and some corrugated sheet steel piling - it's
just like driving those corrugated nails with a palm nailer, only
bigger. And the edges of the pile have folded grooves to interlock.

http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/esc/constru...eet_piling.pdf

I've seen them turn sandy running soil that is impossible to
excavate into a nice square pit for the fuel tanks at a service
station in a half day. They formed and poured a concrete bathtub
inside the piles. Pull the piles, drop in the new fiberglass storage
tanks and backfill with pea gravel. And the next time they go to
replace the tanks it'll go easy and simple.

You would have to clear out all the tree stumps and "stuff" out of
the backyard first, then pull out the fences and make darned sure
there aren't any underground utility lines there.

The crane drives the sheet piling just inside of the side and rear
property lines, and you can either drive it flush and leave it in
permanently, or leave it proud and pull it after the basement walls
set before building on top. Dig the pit and place compacted gravel,
place rebar and forms and pour the walls and footings.

-- Bruce --

Good input.

Cummings Industry - are they still part of Cummings Truck depots where they
rebuild the tractors that drag long trailers over the country.

Martin

Martin H. Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
TSRA, Life; NRA LOH & Patron Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot's Medal.
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder
IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.
http://lufkinced.com/


Jon Elson wrote:
Martin H. Eastburn wrote:
That nasty Red Canode spotting dye - Now I understand.

Oh, the Canode isn't bad at all, it washes off skin real easy. It
doesn't wash off clothes as well, but the Prussian Blue NEVER washes off
anything! I have clothes that must have been washed 100+ times, and the
blue is still there. The blue on your skin comes off because you grow
new skin!

Jon

I had hard sector floppy version of CP/M on my 8080B from Altair.
I had gotten it from Lifeboat and it was on soft sector. But knowing
the hardware I could copy soft to hard and viola. Config time then!

I had Forth as well and naturally Cobol, and extended Basic, and Fortran.
All this on the 8080 and it ran just fine. I created Fortran routines
for a company using larger mini machines. Nice to have home computing.
This was in the latter 70's. By Mid 80 the 8088 IBM PC floppy and Floppy/HD
came out. The AT was later an 8086 machine along with other business models.

Martin H. Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
TSRA, Life; NRA LOH & Patron Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot's Medal.
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder
IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.
http://lufkinced.com/


NoOne N Particular wrote:


Close -- CP/M. The PC term did not exist until IBM started
using it for their initial 8086-based system, IIRC.

It was used on their 8088 based computer.

Wayne

DoN. Nichols wrote:
Jon ELson wrote:


My VAX just died this year, after 20 years of operation, and a
number of upgrades. It is also mighty far out of date, 0.9
MIPS, 4 MB of memory.


I have a friend who might have been able to sell you the parts
to get it running again. But he strips machines and sells parts to
dealers, so the prices would probably not be too friendly. :-)

Either the hard drive or the 3rd party controller has died, or
the drive cables got a bad connection. This was a 1 GB 8" hard
drive I literally pulled out of the dumpster and was astounded
it worked for 5+ years. I just haven't had the need to get into
it to try to get it running again. I was in the process of
pulling the files off it. Some are for historical interest,
some are daily environmental data that is only of a little use.
I have much of the data on mag tapes, but don't have a tape
drive hooked to the PC. I have a Pertec formatter to SCSI
adaptor that might work for that. Again, haven't gotten around
to fooling with it.
Out of curiosity -- were you running VMS or a unix on the VAX?
VMS. I was a card-carrying Unix hater for years. I tried out
Unix-derived systems starting in 1976, and was supremely
unimpressed, time after time. I cloned a National Semi 32016
system that I talked a department at work to buy, running Genix,
and used it for a while. (My clone had slow memory on it that
made it quite a bit worse than the bought machine.) It was
spectacularly slow, but it worked for some of the stuff I was
doing. I ran it for a year, I guess, back in the mid 80's. I
tried to write a printer driver for it for my salvaged Versatec
electrostatic printers, and it worked OK in character mode, but
it was WAY too slow in graphics (raster) mode, and took 10
minutes or something per page. I just didn't have the knowledge
to hack a driver properly, I think it was allocating and freeing
storage one byte at a time for the print FIFO.

Then, finally, Linux came along, and while it still had the
taint of C and unix commands, which grew like topsy in typical
hacker form, a lot of improvements have been made. This is the
first Unix-derived system I used that ran X, maybe that is the
difference. Or, maybe it is the first system that I made the
move to write in C, rather than trying to use historical
programming languages like FORTRAN and Pascal with poorly-done
translators or hobby-level compilers. (Metalworking content:
The way I got dragged into Linux was through the EMC project
and I got on board as the second outside user (outside NIST,
that is) in 1997. I had it running my Bridgeport in 1998.
Maybe it was having a real, complete, running project on Linux
that got me inside, and learning how to compile, use make,
emacs, Tk/Tcl, and etc.) Linux has come a long way in 10 years,
too!

Jon

On 2007-11-26, Martin H. Eastburn wrote:
I had hard sector floppy version of CP/M on my 8080B from Altair.

Hmm ... wasn't that machine called the 8800B instead?

I had gotten it from Lifeboat and it was on soft sector. But knowing
the hardware I could copy soft to hard and viola. Config time then!

Nice trick. Some controllers would only work with soft sectored
disks -- if the controller didn't see an ID sector, it would give up.
The hard sectors got more data on the disk -- but you lost flexibility
in sector size.

I remember having problems with the distribution floppy disks
for OS/9, and having to copy them to other disks (It turned out that my
only double-sided 5.25" floppy was suffering from a dying (and massively
overloaded) set of spindle bearings. They had used flanged bearings,
but ball and not designed for axial loads, but the pulley end of the
shaft was secured by a screw and washer into the end of the shaft,
compressing the bearings seriously, and then locked with Glyptal. I got
some replacement bearings and turned a spacer sleeve to go between the
inner races to keep the load down to a reasonable level, and that drive
became usable again.

In the meanwhile, the copies were done on a track-by-track
basis, and wound up totally scrambled because of different interleave. I
had to figure out how to unscramble the sectors before I could load OS-9
into the system -- from the 8" floppies which worked, not the single
double-sided 5.25" one which cogged and thus changed the speed enough so
the data was unreadable.

I had Forth as well and naturally Cobol, and extended Basic, and Fortran.
All this on the 8080 and it ran just fine.

The FORTRAN for the SWTP 6800 with SSB DOS-68 never worked for
me for whatever reason.

And no COBOL either. Lots of versions of BASIC, including
(later) ones with good random file access support, when DOS-68 got up to
a version which could handle that.

I created Fortran routines
for a company using larger mini machines. Nice to have home computing.
This was in the latter 70's. By Mid 80 the 8088 IBM PC floppy and Floppy/HD
came out. The AT was later an 8086 machine along with other business models.

Wasn't the AT based on the 80286, not the 8086? Yes, I agree
that the original PC was on the 8088 not the 8086.

And there *was* an 8088 based CP/M for the original PCs, but it
would not work on anything from 80286 on up. :-) I had one to play with
for a while. (Actually, I probably still have it somewhere.)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2007-11-26, Jon Elson wrote:
DoN. Nichols wrote:
Jon ELson wrote:


My VAX just died this year, after 20 years of operation, and a
number of upgrades. It is also mighty far out of date, 0.9
MIPS, 4 MB of memory.


I have a friend who might have been able to sell you the parts
to get it running again. But he strips machines and sells parts to
dealers, so the prices would probably not be too friendly. :-)

Either the hard drive or the 3rd party controller has died, or
the drive cables got a bad connection. This was a 1 GB 8" hard
drive I literally pulled out of the dumpster and was astounded
it worked for 5+ years.

Was this a genuine DEC drive, or a third-party drive? I used to
work with 1GB 8" drives with SMD format cables from the controller cards
on Solbourne rack-mount systems running variants of SunOs 4.1.X at the
time. They shut down computer making about the time of the move to
Solaris, though I still have a couple of Solbourne desktop machines,
which were faster than the SS-2s of the same period. They are now
retired, as newer machines are so *much* faster. :-) Unfortunately, the
1GB SMB 8" drives moved into the classified area and were thus
"contaminated" with classified data, so they could never be thrown out
and put to private use. Instead, if they ever get fully retired, they
need to be slagged or otherwise destroyed.

My first v7 unix system wound up running on Fujitsu M2312K
drives, 8", and 84 MB with the SMD interface. Of course, that system is
also fully retired by now -- but I learned a lot from it. :-)

I just haven't had the need to get into
it to try to get it running again. I was in the process of
pulling the files off it. Some are for historical interest,
some are daily environmental data that is only of a little use.
I have much of the data on mag tapes, but don't have a tape
drive hooked to the PC. I have a Pertec formatter to SCSI
adaptor that might work for that. Again, haven't gotten around
to fooling with it.

So the 8" drive was SCSI, not SMD?

Out of curiosity -- were you running VMS or a unix on the VAX?
VMS. I was a card-carrying Unix hater for years. I tried out
Unix-derived systems starting in 1976, and was supremely
unimpressed, time after time.

While I took to unix very happily -- through the OS-9 path.
I've never used VMS, but the flavor of the commands which I have seen
(and the ftp format needed to get things from the original Simtel-20,
which was a DecSystem 20, IIRC) kept me convinced that I would not like
it. :-)

I cloned a National Semi 32016
system that I talked a department at work to buy, running Genix,
and used it for a while.

Hmm ... I've got a couple of Tektronix 6130s -- 32016 based,
with a BSD 4.2 flavor of unix.

(My clone had slow memory on it that
made it quite a bit worse than the bought machine.) It was
spectacularly slow, but it worked for some of the stuff I was
doing. I ran it for a year, I guess, back in the mid 80's. I
tried to write a printer driver for it for my salvaged Versatec
electrostatic printers, and it worked OK in character mode, but
it was WAY too slow in graphics (raster) mode, and took 10
minutes or something per page. I just didn't have the knowledge
to hack a driver properly, I think it was allocating and freeing
storage one byte at a time for the print FIFO.

Hmm ... SunOs 4.1.x came with a Versatec driver as one of the
standard ones. I just never had the printer to use with it. :-) (And I
did write to a Versatec from a CDC 6600 long ago, writing some 3D view
graphics files -- and I was not impressed with the quality -- just the
length of plot which could come out of it. :-)

Then, finally, Linux came along, and while it still had the
taint of C and unix commands, which grew like topsy in typical
hacker form, a lot of improvements have been made.

I've never really seen a linux that I like. I have been really
happy with both the old SunOs 4.1.x (BSD flavored) and the later
versions of Solaris -- especially Solaris 10, which you can download for
free from Sun's site. I also like OpenBSD for systems which are going
to be exposed to the outside net, though less so for workstations. They
make great firewalls, however -- and on just about any platform you have
around. :-)

This is the
first Unix-derived system I used that ran X, maybe that is the
difference.

Well ... most of my earlier unix machines had no GUI, or in the
case of the AT&T Unix-PC/7300/3B1, there was a GUI, but a rather klugey
one. The first X11 that I used was on the Sun 2/120, and on from there
continuing.

Or, maybe it is the first system that I made the
move to write in C, rather than trying to use historical
programming languages like FORTRAN and Pascal with poorly-done
translators or hobby-level compilers.

My first serious work in C was on OS-9, which did have a real C
compiler, unlike the Tiny C variants on the DOS-68 systems. By the time
I got my v7 unix box I was quite at home with C.

(Metalworking content:
The way I got dragged into Linux was through the EMC project
and I got on board as the second outside user (outside NIST,
that is) in 1997. I had it running my Bridgeport in 1998.
Maybe it was having a real, complete, running project on Linux
that got me inside, and learning how to compile, use make,
emacs, Tk/Tcl, and etc.) Linux has come a long way in 10 years,
too!

O.K. You got into EMC rather early allright. Are you using the
Servo-to-go card and servos, or are you using steppers?

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---