2016-03 Bread

Almost too easy this time: I had wanted to try a bread-maker for a while and found one at a garage sale for $5. It came with books too.
Bought some yeast and had a go at a basic white loaf. It all worked very well. I tried adding some rye meal flower on the next loaf. 1 cup of rye and 2 cups of white flower. A bit dry. This loaf: half a cup of rye and 2.5 cups of white. Very good.

Here's the  machine. It had some small scrapes in the loaf container where the Teflon had been damaged by using a knife to loosen the loaf but it didn't look too bad and tha price and books made it worth a go.

 Nice simple display and controls. The time is a count down and you can set a start delay and the total time for the loaf to be ready is then shown.

 Here's the dough ball being kneaded after the first rising.

Let it cool for 1 minute before tapping it out on a board.	... and it seems to come out quite cleanly.	I eat the end that had the stirring blade in it first.

With some olive oil, sharp cheese, tomato and basil .

2016-01 Book shelf system

It's been on my todo list for a while and books are getting out of control. I have the time over the hols for a big project so here it is.
I really like lundia but I can find it as thin and tall as I want.
I like another particular  type of shelf that has adjustable shelves using an easily available fitting.
I decided to combine the top-bottom shelf lock the uprights idea of lundia with the adjustable shelves.
I also decided to abandon the need for them to be unattached to the wall. They will be too high and thin to stay upright by themselves.

 I added a fixed shelf in the middle as I thought the uprights might bow outward if books were forced in then the shelves would drop off their brackets.

Lots of holes to drill. Measuring and drilling them so that they are right on and clean took the longest time by far. Over 10 hours at a guess.	This a unit frame. I was thinking I might need a X brace and had planned to use wire and turnbuckles. This was just needed to keep the frames intact while handling them into place and  screwing them to the wall. They were more then stable enough to handle so I did dropped that.

Screwing the frame to the wall. That's a complete one to the right of the window.

With the shelves clipped in.	And a double wide set for the bigger stuff.

2015-12 Repair Solarvox speakers

This was to be an easy one. HA! Anyway... I have a number of HiFi speakers from the '60s - '80s and they take up space. Sorted them out and found this pair have a sound I like but a blown tweeter.

The label on the back is interesting...

I found an appropriately rated tweeter from JayCar and fitted it. It sounded very very bright. A series resister would be all that's needed to reduce the level of the modern more efficient driver but doing that by listening and changing the resistor seemed fraught.
I decided to try measure it :

• Make sweep and noise files and play them  on the left then right channels
• Use the Tascam recorder to grab a recording 
• Have a look at the spectrum of the recordings and adjust until they match.

Generate tone:  sox -n sweep1.wav synth 10 sine 10-20000
Generate noise:  sox -n wn1.wav synth 10 whitenoise

Then play it back and record it on the tascam.

Script:

while true ; do for F in *.wav ; do echo "Playing [ $F ]" ; play $F ; sleep 1 ; done ; done




Note the rug on the chair to create a special sound proof recording area.



After some trial and error the spectrogram of white noise seems the best way to see what's going on. Got these from
sox infile.wav -n spectrogram outfile.png
after trimming the tascam recordings down to just the white noise burst.

This is the new tweeter 

This is the original.













An 8 Ohm resister seemed to be about right:

I did both speakers as the high end is clearly better.