-V- 43543 11mm 6pt socket

This is a Craftsman -V- 43543 11mm 6 point socket.

Card Storage Boxes

Let's say you play a collectible card game.  Naturally, if you do, you will collect many cards.

I made a box to hold cards!

The front and back are oak flooring from Re-Store.  The top and sides and dividers are 1/4" click flooring that I got ages ago.

Auction Find: Unipower UP-400 Vehicle-Mount Welder

This thing is terrifying.

Near as I can tell, it's a box you put inside your car, which bypasses the voltage regulator, allowing you to use high-voltage DC.

Also it is welded shut.

In one of my auction lots there were ten of these things in a basket.

Auction Find: Bandsaw

I bought a bunch of stuff from an estate sale auction.

The biggest item was this ~ 1976 Craftsman 12" band saw / sander.

Model 113.24350c: I think the c suffix is for Canadian market.

It has a cast iron table!  I think it suffered a fall at some point.  The bolts that retain the bottom bearing have no heads.

Luckily they are 1/4-20 pan head bolts so I can replace them easily.  Might be tricky extracting the old ones, we'll see.

I'll need to pick up the blade guard (part no. 69044) and lens (69025).

Millers Falls 9C Smooth Plane

Today I lucked out at the Re-Store (Habitat for Humanity's thrift store for home supplies) and got this little gem:

It's probably worth about $20 in good condition, so perhaps I overpaid, but they're a good cause.  I also got some clear fir trim for $2.50 so it balances out.

More info after the break!

High Scores, thanks to Logic Probotype

Solar Ride now saves high scores!

I don't need to use a post-it note on the glass any more.

I first got it going a month ago, by replacing the 5101 memory chip with a new one.  Things went fine until two weeks ago, when it reverted to its previous behavior of only accepting one credit and not remembering high scores at all.

I futzed around with the power supply, replacing capacitors in a shotgun approach to hope to luck out and find the problem, but that wasn't working out.

So I made a logic probe;

And I probed.

The answer became clear shortly thereafter - the 5101 chip wasn't being enabled by the MPU.  The enable circuitry is an oscillator (multivibrator) which, combined with a signal from the CPU, sets one of the wires on the RAM chip to logic high when the chip should be used.

The process went thus:

Pin 17 on Z22 was logic low.  That means the Z22 (5101 RAM) isn't enabling.
Examine Z1, a quad-input AND gate (4081).
Z1 pin 6 is high.  That's the CPU signal.  So, the CPU is telling us to enable the RAM.
Z1 pin 5 is low.  It's coming from pin 3 on itself
So, logically, either pin 1 or 2 is also low.  It's pin 2.
Pin 2 is wired to Z2 Pin 9, Q2.

The C2/R2 wire is fired by the CR timing from R158 and C32.  Oddly enough, when I measured the voltage drop across R158, the signal from my multimeter was enough to trigger C2/R2 and cause pin 9 to go high, enabling the RAM.

I replaced C31, C32 and Z2 and now we're getting high scores every time!

Things On Walls

This weekend I put things on the shop walls!

An air hose reel from Princess Auto!

A board! It's got the Cleco fasteners on it.

A fire extinguisher from Costco!