DIY USB Anchor Light and Foldable Anchor Ball for a Small Boat

These little side projects are so much fun. By law you need a anchor light for the night and an anchor ball for the day, if you're using the anchor. But since my boat is just a small one it becomes very important to keep these things light and easy to stow away.

The anchor ball was quite easy to make. It's two black plastic holes with a slit cut to the center so they join together to make a ball. It folds flat and I've drilled holes in them to attach it to my flag pole.

The anchor light was a bit of a headache. First I looked around for quite a while to find a small but bright light in a housing that allows the light to be seen from 360 degrees around. I finally found such light on Ebay. It's powered with a standard USB connector, 5 volts. Which is handy cause I plan to take powerbanks and a solar charger with me on the boat.
I then cut a wooden rod in half and hollowed out the center for the power cable. Glued back together with epoxy and I have a mast with a small light at the end.

Now all I have to find out is where to put this mast on the boat. It should be removable and not permanently on the deck but I am also very hesitant to cut any holes in the deck. Need to think about that some more.
In the meantime check out the photo's of the build and the result.

French Miner's Pocket Knife Part 4: Finished

Putting everything together is a lot of fun and also a bit nervewrecking as I have spent quite some hours on this one.

 The spine is now flush with the handle and sanded smooth. Putting the blade on it requires putting tension on the spring (the spine) so that the blade can be locked open or closed. The last thing to do construction wise is to hammer the pins down. As it turned out I left the pins too long and bent the pins. Very disappointing but this is a lesson to remember for next time!
Now all there is left to do is coat the knife with linseed oil and it's done! The oil does a lot, it gives the grey-light color of the ashw ood a deep brown orange shine.
Later I sharpened the blade as well, it's pretty sharp. Really pleased with the result and will sure continue making some other french knives. Thanks for watching and enjoy the final shots of this knife.

French Miner's Pocket Knife Part 3

The wood has cured to the stainless steel parts, now I have to shape the wood. I used a grinding disk and hand viles. The grinding disk goes fast but it burns the wood so I use it to begin with and finish with the hand viles. At a certain point you get closer to the metal parts and the two start to merge together. I then drill holes for the metal pins and I can now begin to test fit it together to see how the overall shape will turn out. It's still too thick, more wood has to be removed for it to fit nice and comfortably in my hand.

When I get close to the final shape I wet the wood and grain will show up and protrude, you let it dry and sand off the fibers that are sticking out for a smoother finish. From now on I can just use sandpaper. I'm not worried about the top part, the spine of teh knife, it will probably need some viling to get the metal spine to sit flush with the handle pieces.

In the next part we will put everything together and finish the knife with a coat of linseed oil.

French Miner's Pocket Knife Part 1

I have done pocket knives before, usually american types and some fake french, chinese made Laguiole knives. But while searching for other knife kits I happily stumbled upon a french website that offered knife kits from various french regions. I like the designs, they look pretty solid, something worthwhile spending your time on making it. So I ordered some and this is the first one I'm showing. It is called a "miner's knife", it's very simple but good quality 12c 27 steel. First, the choice of wood, I had some ash wood still lying around and it fits perfectly cause I don't want a showy knife with expensive wood, I want it to look like a tool. Here's some photos of all the pieces after I roughly shaped the wood to fit the handle.

Leather Watch Case With Lighting Part 4: Finished

It took me about a week in total, mostly evenings, to finish this project. I'm very pleased with it I must say. Could it have been done better? Yes, especially dealing with the faux leather around corners, next time I will have to think about how to do that better. There were still some small jobs to do after it was basically done. For instance, I had to make a cover to hide the battery that powers the lighting. The acrylic sheet had a lot of scratches, which I buffed out mostly at the cost of it being no more shiny. The underside has some velt feet to keep the leather from being scratched. The closing mechanism needed some more adjusting cause I could barely open it. All in all quite some work but it was worth it. Now I can start collecting some watches! :)

Leather Watch Case With Lighting Part 3

This is another fun part, making a latch for the case. Here's some photos of the bottom part of the latch, I forgot to make photos of the top part because I was so enthousiastic about making it :)

Fabricating the bottom part of the latch

It's a brass plate that's cut in a way so I can fold it along the case edge. Holes are drilled for screws and the brass rod. This brass rod is used to hold a triangular wire that will clasp to the bottom part of the case. The rod is soldered to the brass plate but it also extends into the case wall to give it extra strength.
Then the parts are screwed into place and I filed the bottom rod part of the latch so the triangular piece will slide and hold easily. Very pleased with this result, it's not the cleanest looking thing but I like the handmade quality it has. Next post will show the end result of the watch case!

The finished latch on the case

Taking Time To Destroy A Clock

Today I did something odd. I went to buy an alarm clock and as soon as I got home, took it apart. Which was easy at first, you have the display with almost invisible LED's, there's an adapter converting 220 Volt to... something lower. There's buttons, a speaker and of course the main PCB holding the brains of the clock.

In case you want to do what I'm doing, the donor clock I'm using is a Denver EC-33, costs about 8 euro's. But I reckon you could use any alarm clock.

I realize it's not going to be easy making the display work, 4 numbers separated by jars, each needing wires to the main PCB. It's gonna be messy.

For the housing I found oak strips of wood, 4 x 35 mm and decided the width of the housing should be 3 strips wide, 105 mm.

In the supermarket I selected jars that hold a spicy sauce called "sambal", which I happen to like, so no wasting here. Put the contents in a bigger jar, washed the 4 jars and they're ready to go.

While I start on the housing I'm going to have to figure out which wire out of the PCB connects to which LED eventually in the display. I took a photo of the original display and will trace the lines to get a schematic view of the different power lines.

Next time hope to have some of the housing ready and a single number display test to find out if this could actually work, since I have no clue how much power the display is using now and if that's sufficient for the upscaling I'm planning using powerful 3 mm red LED's.

Poor Man's Nixie Clock

Hi everyone, welcome to my blog. Ever seen a Nixie clock? They are the coolest of the coolest of clocks. I instantly wanted one. But they're expensive. How about building one myself? Well, you could, you can buy a kit for about 100 euro, but it's only a real tiny clock. And I'm worried about the high voltage that the tubes use, I'm kind of inexperienced with electronics and electricity, I might kill myself...

So, why not make a clock that looks as cool as a Nixie clock but is more manageble in terms of safe use of power? That's why I want to build the poor mans Nixie clock, not cause I'm poor but because I need to find an alternative way to get the same cool clock using simple parts and low current.

Let's get to it. I made a drawing and I'm gonna use oak wood for the housing, as well as aluminium and the tubes will have to be substituted by small jars :) In which I will put 7-segment displays which I will also make myself, don't know yet how.

Next time, handling wood and chosing a donor alarm clock.

See ya soon.