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I've been having a series of grumpy old man thoughts recently. Part of it is just part of being 35 years old, I expect, and closely tied to the fact that I'm technically old enough to be the parent of high school students entering college in the fall.
However, I'm terribly afraid that people are losing the interest, and with it the ability, to build things. Don't get me wrong. I like certain aspects of the super-consumer society. Between Google and Ebay I can figure out a way to buy almost anything that I can possibly conceive of.
But sometimes I want something that I can't buy. No company would build such a thing because the volume would be too small to justify the cost of tooling up to manufacture. And maybe it might be something that only I've thought of. I am interested in spending the time to design, engineer, and build something. If it's something electronic, I have enough expertise that I'll probably be able to build something that does what I want to and works properly. In other areas, maybe not so much. My point is my instinct is that if I can't find something, than I build one.
Owning a vintage car has given me great incentive to excersize this aspect of my personality. My grumpy-old-man feelings lately have been that society is losing this skill. I don't have any direct evidence to back this up, and I worry that my age is driving a knee-jerk reaction to what "kids these days" do or don't do. (They do listen to crappy music. Back in my day, music was good...not like what they listen to now. :-) But I digress.)
My indirect evidence is that I find it harder and harder be able to do that kind of work myself. I recently went shopping for what 20 years ago would have been a part that I could have found at Radio Shack or a small electrical/electronic parts store, but to buy one now I will have to go to one of a couple of very obscure electronic parts houses that mostly sell wholesale. (By the way, I was look for an isolated output DC-DC voltage converter; car voltage in, 5V out).
Computers are another area that are becoming more integrated and less module. 10 years ago, when I shopped for a computer I was rabid about making sure that it had lots of bays for extra drives and slots for expansion cards. The coming of USB has pretty much made it possible to buy a fully functional computer with only a few external connections.
My thoughts on this were stirred up a few weeks ago when I was putting the brake master cylinder back in my beetle. The wall just beyond the driver's feet is two walls of sheet metal separated by about an inch and a half. The brake master cylinder mounts to the layer of the wall farther from the driver, but the bolts go through both layers and the heads of the bolts are behind the brake pedal. There are supposed to be sleeves that fit around the bolts so that the two sheet meter walls aren't squished together. Well guess what--the old master cylinder was installed without the spacers, and so the wall in my beetle is bent inwards rather alarmingly.
I decided to try to manufacture something to act as the spacers, but also to make a metal plate that would re-enforce the wall on the driver's side and keep it from bending further. However, bending a shaping metal isn't something that I really have the capability to do myself. So I went and hooked up with a friend with the proper tools and materials and we made the proper pieces and I installed them in the car.
Here's the conceptual drawing of what I needed:
It's basically just a triangle of material that matches the panel behind the pedal cluster in the beetle. The big hole is where the rod goes through from the brake pedal to the brake master cylinder. The smaller holes beside it are where the bolts go through the wall to grab on to the master cylinder.
Here's my cardboard template to locate the bolt holes in relation to each other.
I don't have the larger hole marked on the template. Since only the outer part of the hole is defined by a rubber dust cap, its location isn't absolutely critical. The slot is necessary to slide the eventual piece of metal around the brake actuating rod to put the final plates into position.
And here's the following piece in the car:
The camera is right at the tip of the brake pedal looking down and away from the driver. The metal rod that goes away from the camera goes into the center of the brake master cylinder dust cap and in the connects to the working part of the master cylinder.
Something else I've been working on lately is a set of circuits for the beetle's warning buzzer. The way the stock system is wire, if either door opens, the dome light goes on (if the dome light switch is set that way). Additionally, if the key is in the ignition and the and driver's door is opened the buzzer sounds. I think that is imminently sensible...however, I also very much want to have the buzzer go off if I open the driver's door and the headlights are on. And there is the additional requirement (solved before) that the driver's door switch that I got in the car doens't work and I can't find a replacement.
So I'm building a set of circuits that will solve these problems. I sketched this up in a waiting room a few weeks ago:
The dotted box on the left is a double-pole, double-throw (DPDT) relay. The two dotted boxes in the right are single-pole, single-throw (SPST) relays. This design sets up a circuit that duplicates the original functionality of the dome light and buzzer and adds the buzzer sounding with the headlights on.
Here's a small "perf board" from Radio Shack upon which I've mounted the relays. The black box is the DPDT relay, and the three tubes are reed relays, which are SPST relays. There's three so that there's an extra.
And I've begun soldering the connections together:
So I guess all this is saying I hope that there are people like me, who have gone through school and have good technical knowledge about their subject, can be inspired to become someone who makes things, and doesn't settle for what they can buy, but that what you create yourself can be infinitely more satisfying and leads them on an eternal quest to find out more about the world and make it a better place. I guess part of that this the scientist in me talking. I really do believe that you can understand anything if you really put your mind to it, and that in doing so your knowledge and wisdom about the world will be profoundly impacted for the better.