http://www.instructables.com/id/Handy_Tricks_8_Island_Handy_Tricks/
To see even more of them check out Handy Tricks 8: Island Handy Tricks
and Yet More Handy Tricks
and Australian Handy Tricks
and Guatemalan Handy Tricks
and Handy Tricks Volume Six!
For a bunch of things that didn't work, check out How Not To.
First Trick: "Instant Hummingbird Food
My mom makes her own hummingbird food. It's really easy. She pours white sugar into the feeder bottle til it's 1/3 full, then fills it the rest of the way with warm water. Then she shakes it up and hangs it outside. Pretty simple and the hummingbirds love it.. I'd worry about where they get their vitamins, except they're always rushing off somewhere, and don't seem to try to get all they're day's food from the feeder.
You could make your own hummingbird feeder without any trouble. It's just an inverted bottle stuck into a covered dish with some holes in it. The "flowers" don't have to be there, a red dish cover works fine. My mom's other feeder lost its flowers and the birds don't seem to care. That's the unit in the third picture.
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I don't usually do instructables that involve welding because someone might not have a welder.
But this rack is so cute I couldn't resist.
If you don't have a welder, flatten the ends of the tubes with a hammer, drill holes in them, and bolt them to your bike frame.














































































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First: Metal balls, usually with a flat spot on opposite sides, come primarily in primers and very small cans. They rust, yes, but only after having been exposed to the air. While in the pressurized can, full of paint which would solidify if it was exposed to air, they are fine.
Second: You normally get only one marble, some cans have two. I have never found a certain brand that always has two.
Third: Yes, they can be dangerous but you can open, semi-safely, a full can. They can fly out of your hand though as they act like a large, angry, directionless, heavy bottle rocket. The can doesn't explode though. It is unnecessary to spray out the remaining pressure, but you can if it makes you feel safer.
Lastly (fourth): Yes, they are glass marbles. They seem like marble "seconds" as they are usually not totally spherical and some have grooves in the glass. I have found very few opaque marbles which were not black. Many have bubbles throughout them. Blue is the most prevalent color.
I made a special tool out of a piece of 1.5" angle iron that I use to open the cans and extract the marbles. It is also beneficial to have a pan of paint thinner or stripper to drop the marbles into upon their birth into air as it is awfully hard to remove the paint once it has dried.
On a personal note. It always disturbed me that there were no other people who collected the marbles from spray paint cans. It is nice to see that there are at least a few people with the interest.
They're on the front porch in the sun, and hope it doesn't take more than a day or two.
Thanks for the idea.
Unfortunately, it's much harder to build an electronic speed control for DC -- the simplest way is to use a whale of a variable resistor in circuit, but then you have to throw away the waste heat somewhere. The next simplest is to use a DC motor and AC generator (alternator, for instance), with a variac to control the voltage that then gets fed to a rectifier that powers you drive motor. The problem with this is that the motor and generator in the converter have to be about as big as the drive motor, or they burn up. What's actually used in most modern electric vehicles is a "chopper" control -- it's got a huge, well cooled transistor of one sort or another that's turned on and off very rapidly, and the ratio of "on" to "off" is varied to control the motor speed. Small ones are cheap and come on a single chip; big ones are expensive and can be complicated to wire up -- and a go cart like this one is getting into the "large" category.
LOL
Plus he got them too big so he could wear them over normal clothes, and they didn't damage his normal clothes (at least not enough that he cared about it).