My Welding Cart
Having finished up my welding table, the next step was to have something to actually put my welder on rather than having it sit on the floor. So, I built the following which is based on a plan from "Welding Complete" from Creative Publishing International (available from Amazon here). However, I needed to modify the original plan to make it a bit wider so my plasma cutter would have a place to stay.Here is the drawing- which omits the wheels which were just purchased from the local home center:

Welding Table Construction
In honour of Monty Python's 40th Anniversary... And now for something completely different!I believe way back in the original start of the blog, I explained that I also did a lot of machining including designing & building steam engines a few years ago. I had always meant to take a welding course, and on a whim I decided to finally do that this fall. So, the last few Saturdays I have been struggling out of bed at 6:30 AM to get into to weld with a huge stick welder (Shielded Metal Arc Welding - SWAM) process. Naturally, I have gotten totally obsessed and decided to get a welder for myself!Originally, I wanted to get a 240 VAC stick welder, but my friendly neighbo

Exporting contacts to Lixin e80 and i9
I recently had a question on my YouTube page about importing contacts into the Lixin phone. Now, I'm NOT Lixin Tech Support, but I have worked out a way to do this that works for both the i9 & the Lixin e80 phone. I am afraid these only apply to Windows. I have no idea if there is a way to do this on Mac OS or Linux.After cruising around the i9 support forum, I found a piece of software called PhoneSuite (available from here). This is a piece of software supposedly from MediaTek that allows communication with the MKT6205 phones similar to phone interface software suites from other manu

Further on the POP3 email checker
Well, since this project has been a bit of a surpirse hit, I thought I would include a few further notes and refinements.This is a small change to the updateClient function that just flashes the LED rapidly four times to indicate the network is down:void updateClient() //This function contacts the POP3 server{ if ((millis() - updateTimer) > 5000) { Ethernet.begin(mac, ip);// Serial.println("connecting..."); delay(1000); if (client.connect()) {// Serial.println("connected"); client.println("user Pop.User"); //Insert your usual email login name client.p