Finished Longboard Repair

By the way, that longboard repair I was working on earlier turned out quite well. Here is a quick follow up for Brenden, so far the only confirmed reader of this blog…

Once the divinycell repair was cured and sanded back to a smooth uniform surface I masked off the board with newspaper, found some (sort of) matching spray paint from the Repco shop down the road and went to town.

After a few previous failures painting surfboards I decided to spray the paint directly onto the foam then glass over the top. I had some concerns that a layer of paint between the foam and the glass would weaken the bond and the end result would have less strength, but it does  looks as though this is what is typically done in surfboard construction. This might be a good argument for buying unpainted boards though….

After spraying a number of very thin coats of paint, in fact heaps of white coats of paint to cover up the dark coloured divinycell, I applied resin and a couple of layers of glass. After squeegeeing out the excess resin I left what looked like a very neat repair to cure. But when I came back to my horror there was a large air bubble. It seems that there was a small void somewhere in the divinycell which heated up during curing and blew a bubble under my glass. Arggghhh!

So, next step was to drill a couple of small holes in and around the bubble then syringe in a brilliant two part expanding urethane foam I have in the shed. About 20ml of mixed foam completely filled the hole plus about 2 litres of whatever buckets I could find to contain it! After curing, I sanded back and applied another glass and resin patch to my glass and resin patch.

So after sanding this final patch back with increasingly fine grades of wet and dry sandpaper I have the fairly pleasing result shown here. Not as neat as I would have liked, but not too bad considering!

Technorati Tags: Fibreglass,surfboard,diy,repair,divinycell,foam

DIY Null Modem

I know serial ports are heading  towards obsolescence but I still need to use them occasionally. One piece of hardware often required for serial connections is a null modem. The following describes how I made a DB9 null modem.

I started off by purchasing two cheap plastic DB9 shells, a DB9 plug and a DB9 socket.
Next I screwed the shells together and hacksawed through the cable side of the screw holes on one shell and the plug side of the screw holes on the other shell.
After gluing the two cut down shells together I had a shell with a space for installing a DB9 connector in both ends.

From here it was a simple soldering job following the null modem pinouts from nullmodem.com and I had a compact DB9 null modem to put in my toolkit!

Technorati Tags: null modem,serial,DB9,RS232,DIY,electronics,hack

 

 

 

Transfer Drivers When Rebuilding a PC

A colleague of mine was recently rebuilding a pc for a remote site with no internet access. He had installed pretty much all the required software he could think of in the office before taking the new pc to site and we were talking through the job when he realised he would need a driver for an obscure serial PCI card.

Without any precise details of the card he was unable to find a driver to download before heading to site. And with no internet access on site he couldn’t rely on windows to find a driver online.

The card in question was still installed in the existing pc which could be run for 15 minutes or so without blue screening so I suggested that it may be possible to extract the driver for the card from the existing pc and transfer it to the new one. A quick Google showed up a couple of excellent driver backup utilities that will find all installed drivers on a pc and back them up to a folder.

I tested a few of these applications. My favourite is Driver Backup which is a tiny c# application that doesn’t require an install. Just beware that because this is a c# application the .net framework needs to be installed on the pc you are grabbing drivers from

Technorati Tags: driver,backup,computer,rebuild,c#,dotnet

Technorati Claim

I’m claiming this blog for my Technorati profile, using token QV9BTY3WFXZU

Recording a Webcast

I often register for webcasts with the best intentions of attending, but they often end up running at times that conflict with other work of a higher priority.

Today I decided to record a webcast so I can watch it at my leisure. I did this using a very nice screen recording utility called CamStudio which costs absolutely nothing!

CamStudio captures the graphics and audio currently occurring on your PC and records them to an avi file. So I was able to simply join my webcast, start CamStudio then run off to a meeting. When I came back from the meeting I stopped the recording and used Windows Movie Maker to trim the excess from the end, add a title and export as a .wmv that I can watch and pass around to my colleagues.

One thing I had to work out before I could start recording with CamStudio was how to get sound to record. A few things have to be done here:

1. In CamStudio select Options–>Record audio from speakers
2. In Control Panel–>Hardware and Sound–>Sound select the Recording tab. Right click on Stereo Mix and Enable the right click on Microphone and Disable (on Windows 7)

Now the sound recording will be from whatever is sent to your PC speakers rather than your microphone.

Technorati Tags: Screen,Record,Capture,Webcast

Steve Irwin in Fremantle

The Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin is currently docked at C shed in Fremantle making preparations to head off on Operation Waltzing Matilda in early December to disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet.

We took a family trip down to Freo yesterday and went on a fantastic guided tour of this imposing black ship. Our tour guide was a Sea Shepherd volunteer who will be heading south on the Steve Irwin in December.

One thing our guide made clear was that the Sea Shepherd crews are not engaging in anything illegal. It is international law that the hunting of endangered species is illegal. The problem is that no country is prepared to enforce those laws in international waters. So it is up to an independent organisation to enforce this law.

Sea Shepherd relies completely on donations to continue its operations, and the donation must be generous with the Steve Irwin costing in excess of one million dollars a year to run. The majority of the running costs are for the fuel required to intercept and harass the Japanese whaling fleet in the southern ocean.

Hollywood is heavily involved with Sea Shepherd. Anthony Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers donated a large amount of money to fund the initial purchase of the Steve Irwin while Darryl Hannah and Pierce Brosnan are among those who have made a voyage to the southern ocean.

Tours run Friday to Sunday 9:30-5:30 PM and I recommend taking a look while the Steve Irwin is in town.

Technorati Tags: Sea Shepherd,Whaling,Steve Irwin,Conservation,Oceans,Antarctica,Hollywood

Tether Your Phone Without Rooting it

Good news Android users, you no longer have to “root your phone” to tether it to a laptop!

A tidy little application called PdaNet makes this  possible. From what I understand PdaNet is actually a two part installation. The first part is a small application that you install on your PC. The second part happens automatically when you plug your android phone in via USB. The PdaNet application actually installs a small android app on your phone which is used to access its data (3G etc) connection.

I’ve tried PdaNet on a windows 7 laptop and it works beautifully. Now I need to investigate whether I can set my laptop to prevent such things as windows updates happening when I’m connected to my phone and using up the measly 500MB of my phone plan.

Technorati Tags: Android,Tether,Root,PdaNet,Mobile,Data,Phone