Your best Homemade Invention/Idea

Bill,
can you tell us more about this small pistol grip air compressor?

Cheers,
Dion.

Sure Dion.

It's called a 12 volt Cordless Inflator.
I bought mine from a Tool Supplier when they had a 50% off special. It was advertised in a sale catalogue.

Here is reference to the same product but the real colour is yellow.

Scorpion Cordless Inflator


Bill.

where do you get it

Hello Robin,

2Ah for starting is still a conservative figure:

250A*5s/3600s=0.35Ah

if you allow for 5 seconds of cranking ;)

I remember manually cranking an old Land Rover Series 3 'Santana' with a 2.25 Litre diesel - didn't take that much effort (was a bit younger then too).

BTW, definitely like your creative mind!
Don't worry about spell checking, you've got a fully error redundant spelling system in your own head ;)

Best regards, Peter

Hi Robin,
The tank idea is great. A friend did similar for his Hyundai wagon, with a nice digital readout. In calibrating it, his poor wife had to put in 1/2 litre at a time into the tank while he recorded the resistance values of the sender from empty to full, then programmed the values into a lookup table.
Have you posted the project, or is it company-confidential? :-)

cheers,
Gerry

Ha Ha Guys

That was the hardest part - searching for a wife like Gerrys friend, to pour in the petrol from a jug as I had to do the difficult part of recording the voltage at each point.

Its not a company thing so you can't buy it anywhere and unless you were a bit into playing with electrical stuff it probably isn't worth messing around with.

Always surprized me there is no commercial or even electronic hobbyist project like it.

If there was interest I could do a post about it as it is achieveable because rather than do my own design of the processer board I used modules from the Picaxe family which is a school hobbiest line of product designed to give a low entry threshold into this stuff.

What it basically entails is reading the voltage from your fuel gauge for every couple of liters and plotting a curve of your fuel tank.

A small Picaxe mirco reads the voltage and simple software inside the Picaxe converts this into a number and sends this to an LCD display (another Picaxe device).

Their are a number of real world issues solved by the software e.g. averaging the massive readings swings offsetting for loaded/unloaded vehicle and user inputs for expected fuel consumption in different type of terrain.

For instance in sand I use 22lt/100km, on the road 15lt, the gauge knows I have 100lt left and tells me I have 454 km or 666 on bitumen range.

Think he meant an 18ah battery :)

Wonder if my 10ah battery will jump start ?

Maîneÿ . . .

Not really but sort of Mainey.

An 18AH lead acid battery or smaller has to much resistance to start cars but what happens is that if you connect it across your flat battery for a minute or so it puts some of its charge into the cars battery and the refreshed battery starts the car.

A modern EFI petrol can consume less than 2ah starting a car.

Have once demonstrated starting the car with a pack of AA batteries in a holder but these days carry a small 2AH Lithium battery and a solar panel for this purpose instead.

Thats weird becuase this battery was dead flat, and i hooked little battery up to flat battery, walked around car, opened door and started it. I dont think it would of had time to equalise would it?

I would like to know how you do the AA trick though. I suppose you just link them together to make 12v or something?

Hi Muntoo

It could well have (must have) got enough to charge in that short time , the 18ah battery would of course be assiting and could supply maybe 100 of the 300 or so amps needed.

With the AA alkalines I always carry 10 spare and carry them in a plastic battery holder from dick smith designed to deliver 12v from nicad batteries (i.e. holds 10 not normal 8 )- this means that the 10 batteries are series connected in the holder and hence put out 10 * 1.5 or 15v and which hence transfers current to the main battery much faster.

Awesome, thanks for that Robin. Never knew that.

Hiya J&V
I would be interested in looking at pics of your soft 'overhead lockers'...
Could you post here, or on your blog??

Hi Signman,

Click on the link where it says "here in our profile" and they show up pretty well.
Cheers

Coooool- thanks for that.

This is smart.....I see a fishing rod nearly every trip & never would have thought of that!

Alan,

I guess you would need a bit of ventilation in the tent - is carbon monoxide a potential issue here?

And it would have to be a metal bucket ( once I cleaned out a fireplace using a plastic bucket only to have it melt around the top of the ash as coals came to life once they got some air!)

Val

EXCELLENT! I have several 4 seasons hatches in the sleeping areas of our bus. Quiet 24v fans mounted in the hatches would be perfect for getting fresh air in the bus or in reverse to get hot air out.

Cheers.

just make sure the fan is small enough to enable you to still open the hatch without having to move the fan -cheers