Category: DIY

Posted on

Instant Glue (Cyanoacrylate) tips and tricks

Although I prefer to use solder, hot glue, duct tape and, more recently, plastic filler to bound two parts together. The instant glue has some great uses, here are some techniques used by me for some time.

As usual, before gluing, sand the surface to make it rough and make sure to clean it from any oil or oxidation.

Baking Soda

Pour some instant glue drops on the surface and sprinkle baking soda over it, then pour instant glue again.
Useful as a quick fix for a guitar nut, as a filling when repairing wood cracks or to help gluing some metals or plastics.

HDPE Plastic

My guitar pickup screw hole stripped. To fix I poured some drops of glue and a little of ground HDPE plastic(from bottle caps). After the cure I just drilled a new hole. Still working for over a year, even taking out the pickguard two times.

Removing from a surface or skin

Rub acetone or nail polish remover. Don’t use that on wood furniture.

Improve useful life

Put the instant glue bottle inside an air-tight container with silica gel, calcium chloride or even rice. Low temperature helps too.

Prevent and treat blisters

Can be used as a protection to prevent or to seal a popped blister caused when playing instruments, running or doing any hard work.

 

Posted on

Reviving dead Ni-MH batteries

I’m using the Microsoft Desktop 800 for almost 4 years. In an effort to reduce the E-waste I’m using rechargeable batteries. Unfortunately two of them just died a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me to find a way to recover them. After some time reading I found a way to bring them back to life and I will tell a little about that.

img_20161023_132738910First try charging your batteries two or three times, if they still don’t charge up, you can check with your multimeter in the dc voltage setting. You should get a value like 0 volts, but I read somewhere that some chargers start charging after some threshold, so you may read something below 0.8 volts.

Battery charger and batteries in parallelAfter you make sure that your batteries are dead, you can try the procedure. Do this the same way you do with a car battery, connect the negative terminal of one working and fully charged battery to the negative of your dead one and do the same with the positive terminals. Keep them connected for 20 to 30 seconds. I used my (unplugged) charger and a coin as the negative are a common ground.

Charged batteries multimeter readingWith a full charge I got a 1.38 volts reading and my two batteries working again.

Posted on

Organizing electronics parts – Resistors

In order to have electronics parts ready to use in my projects I started to order batches from China. They have the same quality of the components sold here in Brazil and are a lot cheaper.

I purchased 2500 resistors (50 pieces in 50 different values). On my first projects I struggled to find the right values due to ugly handwriting in the tape connecting the resistors. I decided to buy some resealable plastic bags (also from China) and classify every single value.

img_20161010_015118826
ice cream plastic container and sharpies

My decision was simple and efficient: crepe masking tape and permanent markers. To help finding the values I created four different ranges for the values and defined a color flag to each range. After all that classification I put all the plastic bags in a container.

TResistors in ziplocksoday it’s very easy to source the resistors for new projects. I use the ziplock bags left over in the same way with the sourced components with a label with the project name.