once again
i couldnt sleep last night i dont know why i just couldnt sleep … Id lay down and my mind would start racing a mile a minute and i couldnt fall asleep. i think im going ot way too much stress.
its amazing what they will try and sell to you on late night telivison as i was channel surfing i saw three different infomercials selling the exact same thing at three different prices?!! it was amazing i didnt think it was possible to ever see that.. i had to pinch myself to to make sure i wasnt sleeping and having a whacked out dream. but eventully i settled on cartoon network i found out that late at night is when they play the good old cartoons like popeye and loonytoons and stuff like that.
Also i reformatted my roomate’s girlfriend’s computer (wow that was a mouthful) for some reason it kept blue screening and since it was xp that means that there was somthing really bad since xp very rarly blue screens.
News and progress
day 2 update now available
Radio Project
its up and running. this site is for those who may not have access to the ftp and want to know the progress of the project.
And so it begins…
My radio arrived today!
I plugged it in, and I can at least tell the circuitry is intact. Loud humming as I had suspected. So I need to get the filter capacitors replaced. Plus an inductor across the back is busted to all hell (you can see it dangling in the underside picture). So that’s gonna need fixed. And it’s possible that those two things will restore the radio part of it to working order. Then again, some other capacitors may still be bad.
I didn’t test the turn table, but the description stated that it did run, however only in the 78 RPM setting. My first goal, however is to fix the radio. Then I’ll tackle the phonograph.
I put the full set of pictures on the FTP if you’re interested. I’m trying to soak it up, because this thing is about to get dismantled for a good while. I’ll try to keep updating that folder with pictures and text files of my progress. Not that I expect you to care, I’m doing it mostly for myself, but in the event you do care, you can see how I’m doing on the project.
Only one request. Don’t give me any “tips” unless I ask for them. My goal is to tackle this by myself. =)
Wish me luck!
Getting Rediculious
This has been the third day in a row that I have had to re-cut a commercial that I had already previously cut the day before. A couple times I admit it was my fault. But sometimes I wonder how they’d think that I magically know words like Okuma are actually pronounced “ah-CUME-uh”.
But enough with the complaining, my radio should be here tomorrow. I’ll impatiently wait for that instead. =)
05.3.05Mmm. Pancakes.
9:30 or so right now. And the smell of pancakes dominates the nostrils in my small little apartment. In a place the size of mine, it doesn’t take long for the scent to filter to every corner of every room. The washed out sound of an AM radio, with the occasional pop of static. But oh how much better it would sound on my Admiral radio. He he.
If course it’s only Tuesday. It’s hardly possible that they could have shipped the thing yesterday, and it travel from North Carolina all the way to Kansas in one day. But even though I haven’t even seen the radio with my own eyes yet. I’ve already learned quite a bit.
For instance. I figured out how traffic light sensors work. I always thought that when your car drove over the sensor, it sensed that pressure on the road and sent a signal to the box on the light. Entirely not so.
If you were to take a coil of wire, and wrap it around any metal that can be magnitized (like iron for instance), you can hook up a battery and you can store energy in that coil of wire in the form of a magnetic field. The more energy you “pump” into the coil, the stronger the magnet you make. It’s called an inductor.
Well, you can see a big oblong marking on the road at an intersection, right? Well this is actually a big coil of wire that is planted in the street, which is hooked to a powersource at the light. This coil of wire doesn’t store much energy on it’s own, since there’s no metal core. But when your car pulls over that coil, your car is the core, and suddenly a greater amount of energy is able to be pumped into the coils of wire beneath you and is stored as a magnetic field. The box on the stop light senses this power change, and then knows your car is there waiting for the light to change!
Pretty cool stuff, no? The way a radio reciever works it makes use of the same kind of inductor, but along with what is called a capacitor, which stores energy, but only in a different way. It’s a bit more complicated, but really interesting. So even if I don’t get the radio, I guess I can’t write it off as a complete loss.