As part of my overall quest to push back the chaos in my kitchen and elsewhere, I made some lid hanger bars out of oak for my pot and pan cabinet. This represents something of a new beginning for me: it's a return to uploading videos to YouTube, but at a much higher level of quality, length, and I hope, entertainment value. This is also a sort of debut of my newly revamped home workshop; I was lucky enough to acquire quite a lot of new tools and machines early in 2020 and I've been integrating, improving, and setting those up ever since. Now it's time to actually make a few things, and hopefully get some interesting videos and other documents out of the experience. Enjoy!

I'm informed by google's doodle that today is the 131st anniversary of the invention of the hole punch. Here's a lovely example from my office:

Some years ago my mother found on the side of the road a small steel patio table, rusted, with original black paint in desperate condition. She brought it to my house, thinking that someday I might want to do something with it. Someday was last weekend.

Here's something I made recently. For many years my house number was marked by stainless steel numbers from Blomus that have bosses on the back so that they float off of the wall surface somewhat. When we painted the house gray the stainless just didn't have enough contrast against that background, and since I had done a gray-plus-wood sort of theme in the recent bathroom renovations I decided to extend this to the exterior of the house with a sort of wood plaque behind the house numbers.

Lately I've been elbows-deep in some broken Playstation 3's and found myself wanting to test their cooling fans. These have a three-wire header with leads colored brown, black, and gray; you may be tempted to conclude that this is a brushed DC fan with a tachometer lead, but you'd be wrong. These are brushless fans, and the third wire is a PWM signal that you supply to control the speed of the fan. The two PS3s (both “fat” style) I've opened recently have compatible fans from separate manufacturers; one is a Nidec G14T12BS2AF-56J14 and the other is a Delta Electronics KFB-1412H.

Nidec and Delta models

It's not trivially easy to find datasheets for these fans, but no matter. If you just want to test them or need a good centrifugal blower for one of your own projects, do the following:

• Apply 12 volts across the brown and black leads; +12 V on brown with return on black. The fan will probably jump a little but it won't start spinning.
• Drive the gray lead with a TTL-level pulse train at 25 kHz from a signal generator or 555 timer circuit or microcontroller or whatever.
• Control the duty cycle of this pulse train to adjust the speed.

That's it!