Pinewood Derby – Propeller powered

Posted on by RubenFixit
A week ago my brother invited me to join him for an Anything Goes pinewood derby race. I have great memories of building these cars with my Dad and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to relive those moments.
First I designed my car in Sketch-Up, and then built the car from a standard derby kit. (see image below)
The hardest part was building the propeller motor stand. I made that part separately and the glued it into place. Before I could glue it I had to drill holes and feed the wires for the motor through the holes.
Then to power the motor I used an old iPhone 4 battery I had laying around. To make the battery easier to use I soldered a new connector on the battery so I could easily plug it into the car and the battery charger. To finish the simple circuit, I added a switch so I wouldn’t have to disconnect the battery to turn it off.
And finally, to finish things off I added some tungsten weights to a cardboard cover painted to match the car.
I say the finished product always looks better than the sketch.

Dell Laptop Puzzle

Posted on by RubenFixit

Before I became a network administrator assistant at my high school I had a reputation among my peers that I could fix anything. So when the IT crew ran into a problem they would usually ask for my help.

In this case, they had to completely disassemble this Dell laptop to reset the bios. For whatever reason, the IT crew couldn’t figure out or didn’t care to put the laptop back together. So one of them approached me and told me that I could have the laptop if I could put it back together. In just over 30min I had it back together and booting.

The best part is that I have never taken a laptop apart before and had to figure it out on my own. Just like a jigsaw puzzle except I didn’t have a picture to look at. The hardest part was figuring out where all the screws went. So of course, there were a few left over.

Note: This great guide wasn’t available until 2010. Trust me I tried google first, It is amazing how far the internet has come in the last 10 years.