Make your own electronics from parts made by yourself!!!

i've been thinking that it would be very nice to make something by myself... and when i say by myself, i mean it, because i want to make a gadget from parts that i made by myself it would be very nice if someone would share the knowledge with me... THANKYOU

Get yourself some magnet wire and make yourself a little motor using the wire and several nails plus a small magnet.

Make your own headphone and build your own crystal radio using a crystal (cat wisker).

Ron

Somewhere on net I found a text file (or something) describing how to make a (very inefficient) transistor (using salt water and canning jars, IIRC). There's also making batteries and such.

If you're really interested in this, go to Lindsay Books and buy a copy of "The Boy Electrician" by Alfred Morgan; its a very old book that should be up your alley:

http://www.lindsaybks.com/

Alfred Morgan wrote several of these kinds of books - most of the projects can still be made today, but some are impossible to get the materials for (they're restricted or no longer for sale to individuals) - some are downright dangerous (in the book mentioned, there's an x-ray flouroscope described which would probably raise your chances of getting cancer).

Lindsay Books also has a ton of other "old-timey" books that may interest you.

There are also people out there if you search around who homebrew their own vacuum tubes; you can fairly easily make certain kinds of capacitors and resistors as well.

Finally - a couple of other possibilities: Go to google books, and look up old Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Popular Electronics (and Electronics Now) magazines - a lot of the older stuff has been scanned, and is free to read; provided you stay in the range (for certain mags) of 1900-1980 or so - you should find lots of interesting articles (oh - don't forget Scientific American's Amateur Scientist columns - there's a DVD of them available out there as well).

Also (if you can stand the decidedly un-PC nature of it) - check out Kurt Saxon's "The Survivor" series and others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Saxon) - The Survivor is interesting in that it is a set of ten volumes of a somewhat haphazard nature collection of articles, anecdotes, designs, encyclopedia, etc - of various bits, trivia, apocrypha - you name it, its in there - collected from a ton of "old-timey" magazines and other sources; you'll be amazed at what is in these books (there's also a PDF collection available).

Try a crystal radio. Many differant types, fox hole radios are made with a old razor and some wire. Andy

Here's a guy who makes his own triode vacuum tubes:

**broken link removed**

More realistically see: The fox hole radio (https://bizarrelabs.com/foxhole.htm)

John

popsik said:

I want to make a gadget from parts that I made by myself.

Click to expand...

It would help if you would define the level of technology that you want to start from. Do you intend to start by mining copper ore or are you okay with using existing manufactured materials that aren't yet assembled or what?

thank you very very much for your advises they really helped me!!!

Capacitors, why not?

Solar cells. Crude but workable.

Look for scitoys. Nothing simpler than what you will find there.

Five years from now you could be posting that you had spent LOT of your TIME on all that. Be warned!

if i cant make my own materials i'll definetely go buy some, i created this article because i wanted to know more about how circuit's parts work an how are they built

http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/els/borax-el.htm

on that page you can find a device called an "electrolytic rectifier" and some mention of the capacitive effect of the device. these devices were used in early battery chargers. further research into the capacitive effect resulted in the invention of electrolytic capacitors using much the same materials, but maximizing the capacitive effect. electrolytic caps will actually show properties of a rectifier, as they are a capacitor when forward biased, and begin to conduct when reverse biased. unfortunately, electrolytic caps produce a gas when they are in conduction, usually resulting in the cap blowing up.... but with the materials shown in the article, and some ingenuity, you can use the materials in the article (plus some blotter paper) to make something resembling the modern electrolytic cap.