De-Rusting

I just watched an old episode of Trucks that was on my PVR, and saw a spot on removing rust.
You need

1. A plastic tank with enough space to hold your part.
2. A battery charger capable of at least 2 amps of constant current.
3. Sodium carbonate, also known as washing soda.
4. Water
5. Steel rod to act as an anode.

• Mix the washing soda in the tank at a solution of 1 teaspoon of washing soda for every pint of water.
• Place your part in the solution and hook up the negative lead of the charger to the part itself.
• Hook the positive lead to the steel rod and set that into the solution. Make sure that the steel rod is not touching the part to be de-rusted.
• Set your battery charger to a constant 2 amps, and walk away from your part for a couple of days.

Make sure that you are doing this in a well-ventilated area because hydrogen gas is produced during the de-rusting process. This is extremely explosive.

When the process is finished, the part will look black. All of the rust will be gone, and none of the original metal will have been removed.

1935 Chev

What do you do with a retired hobby car?
I saw this solution in Hotrod Magazine last month.
This 1935 Chevy Master was a circle track car in a previous life.
At least the body was.

What I Do

This is perhaps the best description I have ever seen of what I do in my 'day-job'

R/C Lawnmower

Reading gizmag this morning and ran across something that might make a cool project.
Evatech has come up with an R/C lawnmower that is powerful enough to drag a fertilzer spreader or plow snow! It uses a gas-electric hybrid drive system that gives it plenty of power.

I just happen to have a couple of those right-angled DC electric motors in the garage and a brand new 6.5 hp motor in the shed....

1922 Dodge

I found this 1922 Dodge while trolling the user images on hotrodder.com and fell in love with it.

Low, simple, raw, and slightly odd-ball. Dig those wide and skinny wires and the "three carbs on a six" power plant. Chopped windshield and rad shell and channeled body.

Something like this would be great for cruise nights and the odd trip to work.

Head on over to Hotrodders.com and check it out.

SharpZipLib

#ziplib (SharpZipLib, formerly NZipLib) is a Zip, GZip, Tar and BZip2 library written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. It is implemented as an assembly (installable in the GAC), and thus can easily be incorporated into other projects (in any .NET language). The creator of #ziplib put it this way: "I've ported the zip library over to C# because I needed gzip/zip compression and I didn't want to use libzip.dll or something like this. I want all in pure C#."

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/

Creating a Shortcut on the Start Menu

When you are using MS Developer Studio to create an install setup program, dev studio doesn't automatically create shortcuts for your application—you have to create these yourself.
Most applications create a shortcut in the Programs folder on the Start menu (or in a subfolder of the Project folder).

Open the Files view of your installer project. Click the Application Folder to view its contents. Right-click the Primary Output from your application item and choose Create Shortcut to Primary Output from 'your application name here'. Dev studio creates the shortcut item and places it in the Application Folder. Drag the shortcut to the User's Programs Menu item in the left pane.

Now, when the user installs your program, a shortcut will be placed in the Programs folder on the user's Start menu.