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"BIOS problem" solved
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:54:16 -0500, Paul wrote:
Char Jackson wrote: On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:16:09 -0500, Paul wrote: Gene E. Bloch wrote: OK, then there might be a problem with the old suggestion for an electric car that could go hundreds of miles on electricity, as long as the extension cord was long enough. We'll just have to try it. Here, let me get my car out of the garage. I have a 240km cord around here somewhere... I did actually build an electric car as a kid. It used a washing machine motor. The pulleys weren't geared right, so I couldn't use it regularly. But I did get it to go about 20 or 30 feet around the side of the house. I can see me driving that baby to work now. And having the rubber belt snap halfway through the trip (because it wasn't geared right). I would have needed another pair of pulleys to get the ratio into the right range. My brother and I built an electric 'car' when we were kids, using modified plans from Popular Mechanics. The drive motor was an electric starter from an early 1960's Dodge and was powered by 4 used car batteries wired in parallel. The concept was probably a lot better than our execution, but it was fun while it lasted. Sounds like you had a better junk yard than I did :-) In those days, the city dump was wide open and less than a half mile away, and it included everything from common kitchen food waste to entire cars. We spent an awful lot of time out there, finding and bringing stuff home that was still 'good'. Partway through the 70's the town built a fence around the area and declared it a no play area, but I was ready to leave home by then. Mine didn't involve nearly as much planning. It started with a go-kart type project. And then I spotted the washing machine motor... So there was no plan from day one to make it electric. Just an opportunity presented itself in the form of a surplus motor. We went through a fair number of washers at our house, and at its peak, there were three washers downstairs. Two wringer washers, and a washer with spin dry. Many people aren't familiar with those things. The wringer was the kind that could crush your fingers. The rollers up top, you put wet wash through them, and it "squashes" out the water for you. Funny thing is, we never had any finger crushing accidents at home. When these would rust out, that's where your surplus electric motor would come from. http://atthemanse.files.wordpress.co...ger-washer.jpg We had that kind. My job, for a time, was to stand on the receiving end and grab things as they came through so they wouldn't try to wrap around and get caught inside. Mom would sometimes get a bit eager and feed too much in at once, which would cause the top wringer to pop up and disengage. Before that generation of washing machines, they were powered by small 1 HP gas-powered motors. My older brother had a half dozen of those motors that he'd reclaimed from the city dump. We used to run them in a closed shed until it was so smoky inside that we couldn't see our hand in front of our face. That seems unhealthy now, but it was fun back then. Anyway, a family friend with a welder helped to mount one of those little gas motors onto a bike frame. That was the first 'motorcycle' I ever rode. I was way too small to reach the ground, so I had to start and stop from a 'leaning against a wall' position. -- Char Jackson |
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