A Miniature Gas Plant
IF YOU happen to live outside the city and do not have access to local gas mains, you can nevertheless enjoy the use of gas-operated equipment by constructing the miniature gas plant pictured here. The amount of gas constantly “on tap” will depend on the size storage chamber built. Coal, corn cobs, or similar fuel is used as a source of the gas.
Chain Whittler is A.E. Powell, over 60 years old and a retired Colonel of the British Royal Engineers. Each link is whittled from a single piece of oak, birch, apple wood or mahogany with a small non-folding knife. “Never cut myself,” he says.
THE POOR MAN’S TELESCOPE
AS EVERY astronomer knows, a steady mounting is a must when using high magnification. Generally, to obtain the required steadiness, it has been considered necessary to build a strong, heavy instrument, made with high precision, often mounted on concrete piers. The disadvantage of such instruments, in their lack of portability, has led us to develop the six-inch reflecting telescope and mounting shown here. We feel it combines features especially suited to the needs of the amateur.
BUILD THIS Beer-Keg Radio FOR YOUR GAME ROOM
By ARTHUR C. MILLER
NOVEL as well as serviceable, the beer-keg radio described on these pages will make a useful addition to the furnishings in your game room. It can be used either as an end table or as a refreshment stand, and, since it is an entirely self-contained unit, operated by dry batteries, it can be carried onto a porch or even into the yard when warm summer days and evenings make this desirable. If you build this five-tube set carefully, it will give excellent reception from stations 1,000 miles or more away.
Glass Artist
For centuries the Hammesfahr family has been blowing rods of glass info wee objects of art.
BY LESTER DAVID
THE place is a Brooklyn workshop, the year, 1947. George Hammesfahr blows gently into the hollow glass rod and a wine-red bubble puffs slowly outward from the middle of the hot, pliable glass. The bubble grows, the deep red mellows into a soft vermilion as it presents a larger surface to the light. Deep inside the bubble a vision starts to take shape, a mind’s eye vision which only George can see. …
The place is a workshop in old Bohemia, back in the middle ages.
420 cans eh?
Home-Made Metal Furniture from Beer Cans
420 cans soldered together produced the garden furniture shown in use below. Bernard Dier of Chicago made it in ten days.
Boys Can Have a Carnival of Fun with This Simply Built High Striker
By George S. Greene
THIS diminutive “high striker,” to call it by the correct carnival name, will compete with baseball in interest when boys gather on the sand lot or in the back yard. It requires but little ground space and is just the thing, along with homemade “rides” and chutes, for staging a successful children’s carnival.
In all but size the striker follows the construction of professional carnival and fair models. The similarity can be further carried out by offering big, long chocolate cigars for ringing the bell, if prizes of any kind are considered necessary.
That is one scary looking, stereotype filled tree they’ve got there.
Tips From Santa
Santa says there’s no real Joy like making things with your hands. Let’s start with Christmas decorations.WE HEARTILY agree with Santa. Making things with our own hands is one of those fundamental satisfactions in life— and it is one that our mass-production age has almost eliminated. This Christmas, if you want to add some real cheer to an event that has become far too commercial, try making your own yuletide decorations.
How TO CONVERT OLD ELECTRIC LIGHT BULBS INTO CHEMICAL GLASSWARE
By Earl D Hay
EXPERIMENTS in an amateur chemical laboratory are much more interesting when they are made with the same kind of apparatus as that used in professional laboratories. As a rule, however, the home chemist experiences a great - shortage of flasks and endeavors to use various kinds of bottles as makeshifts, little realizing that he may make from burned-out electric light bulbs a great variety of useful flasks like those sold by chemical supply houses at from 20 to 75 cents each. The lamps used in the average home vary in size from 25 to 200 watts and are suitable for small Florence or boiling flasks. Larger flasks are made from 300-, 500-, and 1,000-watt lamps, which can be obtained from the janitors of stores and linemen of the city lighting companies.
Peanut Persons
INGENUITY, a sense of humor and a bag of peanuts—that’s the new recipe for fun with color photography. Put a peanut on a peanut and you’ve got a torso. Add a few more for arms and legs. Bits of bright cloth or crepe paper make fine dresses and pants. Stick a tooth pick in your model’s hand, tie on a piece of thread and he’s a fisherman. Water is a pocket mirror. See? Now it’s your turn!
Dry Ice-Capades
Dry ice is very interesting stuff! Get yourself a chunk (handling it with gloves) and perform the simple experiments illustrated here.DRY ice is solid carbon dioxide. It’s very interesting stuff. For one thing, it sublimes at room temperature; that is, although a solid, it evaporates to form a gas without passing through the liquid state. The mist you see formed by dry ice is water “squeezed” out of the air because it has been chilled below the dewpoint.
Glass Making Easy for Home Chemist
By Raymond B. WailesBECAUSE of its importance in glass making and other industries, silicon opens a particularly interesting experimental field to the home chemist. In nature, silicon is almost as plentiful as oxygen. Yet, it hides itself well in its compounds. It never is found free and uncom-bined and can be separated from its associates only through clever chemical thievery in the laboratory.
Industrially, silicon is obtained by heating sand—a compound of silicon and oxygen—and coke to a high temperature in an electric furnace. The white-hot coke steals the oxygen from the sand to form carbon monoxide and frees the silicon. Although the amateur chemist will have no electric furnace in which to duplicate this process, he can obtain a similar result by heating sand and powdered magnesium over his ordinary laboratory gas burner.
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