How Do You Best Learn About Mechanical Stuff?

[Adam Y.]

I just got a new TV! I get to take apart the old one. mabie i could use the cathode ray tube for a Laser beam?

Umm cathode ray tubes emit electrons. You can do some funky stuff to a black and white tv with a magnet though that you can't do with a color television. You can actually warp the picture with the magnet. You might want to try that with your old television too but if you do want to save it don't do it.

[Tytus Gerrish]

the CRT Magnets were fried, Thats why its an old tv

[Al Skierkiewicz]

What you are calling an"electromagnet" did you take that off the neck of the CRT? If you did that is the "deflection yoke" and it has windings that sweep the electron beam left to right and top to bottom. The yoke is optimized for particular frequencies (vertical and horizontal sweep). If you took the coil off the shield that wraps around the back of the CRT that is the "degaussing coil" and it works for 60Hz with the shield steel running through it. If you have managed to get all that apart and did not get shocked, consider yourself very lucky!
For those of you just catching up on this thread, I want to remind everyone of the classic frog leg and electricity experiment. This experiment demonstrated that a frog's leg would react (by contracting) when connected to an electrical circuit. Your arm, hand, or even chest contain muscles that will react by contracting when subjected to electrical impulse. To carry this one step further, your heart is a muscle. As such it will also contract in the presence of electrical stimulus. Your heart may take a while before it begins to react to the millivolt signal being supplied by your brain following a kilovolt pulse. If you don't know what you are doing, you can be seriously hurt or worse. Don't fool around inside a TV without an advisor who knows how to handle these lethal potentials.

[Amber H.]

I know I don’t seem like the type, but I regularly take stuff apart just to see what it does. I used to strip my old sewing machine down to do a complete service on it regularly. Boy was that fun to see my ex-mother in law freak out when she walked in on me one day while taking it apart. It was always in great shape and worked well.

Yes, I’m a closet engineer! I admit it! Just promise you won’t tell any of my artsy friends!

I also have a bonus on learning about stuff because my father is the older grouchier variety “Dean”. He’s even 5’6” with dark hair and always wears denim work clothes even though he’s retired. He was a fabricator/mechanic by trade and now invents all kinds of crazy stuff (usually just to cheese off the neighbors). He is currently working on his own old fashioned type sterling in the back yard, just to see if he can do it. It will be the size of a small room when it’s finished. I get exposure to mechanical stuff, because he insists that I and my freakishly small hands are available to reach into tight spaces for him…….MEN!

[Tytus Gerrish]

that tv had not been pluged in for 5 or 6 weeks and i had removed the compacitors first

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Originally posted by Tytus Gerrish
that tv had not been pluged in for 5 or 6 weeks and i had removed the compacitors first

I know this may seem a foreign concept, but the Picture Tube is a big capacitor. It's dielectric is the glass envelope and it can hold a 40kV charge for years. (Yes that is years not months!) The other capacitors should have circuitry to drain the charge but they also may hold a hundred volt charge (or more) and should not be handled indiscriminantly.

[Tytus Gerrish]

lucky me then

[Dan Richardson]

Originally posted by monsieurcoffee
Hm, I'll either talk to dad or research online...

Most research somehow ends up here:

www.howstuffworks.com

praises to mr coffee ... Howstuffworks.com is pure genius

Fixing stuff in my car, in my home... but always "TRYING" to respect the ULTIMATE RULE:

"He who brakes a thing to find out what it's, has left the path of wisdom",

I always tried to have some knowledge about stuff that I tried to fix or develop.

[Arefin Bari]

learning new stuff using technology is most likely a hobby for me.... i love to do those kind of stuff such as making new stuff out of parts that i can find. but basically in the team there was 3 senior students who has taught me a lot and got me really interested in mechanical engineering. my whole career and my thought has changed after i joined first and started thinking more practically. the best way to learn about mechanical stuff is if you really be interested in mechanical engineer and if this kind of stuff doesnt get you bored. that is how i have learned a lot and now running the mechanical subteam for my team.

[kmcclary]

1) Develop a healthy curiousity! Don't be satisfied that the "car thingy works", find out WHY whatever you have works. So many times having a REAL understanding of how things work can save your heiny when it fails at a critical time.

FYI, during the blackout I watched people around the area panic within minutes of the power failure when their cell phones and other technology died, while I enjoyed a very nice time without power for days, kicking back in comfort with great food, gallons of clean water that I processed myself, light, entertainment, friends, etc.. I could even shower and shave with clean hot water without worries. Our block even threw a big party. I listened on my windup radio to the non-scientific mumbo jumbo flowing freely on the local FM stations, and called more than once to help correct misinformation. One entire FAMILY needed my help because NONE of them, even with the car manual in the car, could find and change a car fuse for the spare already there. <sigh> I'm confident ANY rookie FIRST student could've solved THAT one!

2) Tinker, tinker, tinker, tinker until you know the parts in your soul... (keeping safety in mind, of course!) What you read, you can easily forget. What you DO by practicing and experimenting until it's reflexive, is with you forever. Mess with unused kit parts. Explore the kit vendors' websites (like http://bimba.com ...) Tear apart that dead piece of technology and explore it. Quite often, once you understand it, you can easily fix it. Always TRY to fix your own widgetry before you throw it out. If you didn't use pneumatics at all this year on your bot, play with the air parts in last year's kit this fall until confident that you can whip together an actuator quickly.

3) Develop your "divergent thinking" skills. Find new uses for common household objects (like using a claw hammer as a weight ). Throughout life, whenever you have the time or the opportunity arises, explore alternatives to the traditional and PRACTICE THEM. Then, if "the normal way" doesn't work for some reason, you have instant "Plan B"s on hand in your mental toolbox that not only WORK, you've DONE it.

Do this enough, and you start looking at objects and materials with a "different set of eyes", seeing possibilities for those kit materials you never would have dreamed of before.

Ex: Just recently in a survival net group, I learned (then practiced to perfection) over a dozen unusual ways how to primitively start fires without matches in the wild with whatever is handy, including using: a chunk of found ice, a broken light bulb's glass (no electricity needed), a scrap of plastic sandwich wrap or zippy bag, slamming a stick in a tube, a wooden plow, a wooden saw, a hand drill, beating on a small piece of metal with a hammer, my belt, steel wool, or even a discarded cola can and some toothpaste or sand! VERY cool! By the end of the thread, we even started coming up with new variants (like a salad bowl), because we then all understood the underlying PRINCIPLES. I'll never think of fire starting in the wild as a "problem" in the same way ever again.

- Keith

[sanddrag]

I would definitely follow Kieth's suggestion's.

Recently, because I know a little about cars, I saved my mom from paying $685 for a $80 heater core.

Also, within the next week or so I will be changing my own spark plugs. Yay!

Another great place to learn about stuff is www.about.com particularly the automotive section

[Adam Y.]

Recently, because I know a little about cars, I saved my mom from paying $685 for a $80 heater core.

How hard is it to fix cars these days? I always thought with so much technology being put into the cars that it would be very hard to fix something wrong with it.

[FotoPlasma]

Originally posted by Adam Y.
How hard is it to fix cars these days? I always thought with so much technology being put into the cars that it would be very hard to fix something wrong with it.

Your comment got me thinking a bit (Yeah yeah, I know, mark the date on the calendar!) about how one goes about tinkering and hacking. According to my dad, and various other engineers (some being related to FIRST teams, some not), most people learned about electronics (among other things) by taking apart, and even fixing, things like television sets, for instance. It used to be that you could go down to a library or surplus store, and buy a copy of your television's technical manual, published by Sam's (as I'm sure many of you are familiar with their modern books). This manual would give you all of the intricate technical details of components and even the specific signals between components, and by which you could learn all sorts of great things. However, nowadays, in the age of VLSI and (dare I sayeth) ULSI, you can't just do that. It's disheartening, to some extent...

Worst of nightmares
Can a full human 'I'
Be stamped on a chip made
By VLSI.

These issues alarm me
And that's why I spoke
Not to answer all questions
But to prod and provoke

- Douglas Hofstadter
"Frederic Chopin versus EMI Chopin: Glory or Tragedy?"

[Adam Y.]

It used to be that you could go down to a library or surplus store, and buy a copy of your television's technical manual, published by Sam's (as I'm sure many of you are familiar with their modern books). This manual would give you all of the intricate technical details of components and even the specific signals between components, and by which you could learn all sorts of great things. However, nowadays, in the age of VLSI and (dare I sayeth) ULSI, you can't just do that. It's disheartening, to some extent...

Also, with appliances today wouldn't it be easier just to buy a new one instead of replacing the old one. Well truth be told I personally do not mind. Though this point does annoy me a bit that if my hybrid car ever breaks down I would have to take the thing to the dealer to have it fixed.