and it was

but it was not

it was what we all had to do
words fail me

1./ figure out how to get the motors out of electric toothbrushes (ask your friends to give you their old brushes instead of throwing them away).

2./ old cassette players are a good source of wheels that you (your child) can make into a little car which can be powered by a battery the right size for the electric tooth brush motor.

3. the above skills mastered you’ll next combine a little solar panel (cast off hand calculators have little panels) with a capacitor and a diode that fires when the capacitor is charged.

4. These little gadgets your child has made will come alive in sunlight as the capacitor charges and fires.

5. There are simple tricks you or rather he or she can learn so that the robot can reverse and turn when it hits something.

6. This is how and why Shannon was able to do the things he did such as SciFAX.

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THINK ABOUT IT. Home schooling at its best is not lecturing your kids it is more a setting them free but not exactly.

Years ago, when I bought a piece of electronic equipment, I’d get a proper handbook with detailed instructions, technical specs and a circuit diagram. Now, it’s a 60-page “userguide”, written in 30 different languages, with 2 pages in fractured English which don’t tell you much more than where the on/off switch is.

There’s an annoying insistence on only “qualified service personnel” being able to attempt a repair (the cost of which will invariably make it uneconomic), coupled with a fear of being sued if the user mis-reads the instructions and either wrecks the thing or causes an accident.

I say that as someone who writes manuals for a living. Mine are awesome, of course.

From the look of it, I estimate the dryer to probably be from the late 70s-mid 80s.

Phil