Sunday, February 24, 2008

Brain Cup and Finger Lights

The neck support, brain cup, finger light end caps and finger light cam are from Norm Sockwell. They are very well made. The finger light shafts are 1/4" brass tubing (see Craig's finger light drawing on the club website for exact details, length, etc.). I decided to use Tom Wisnionski's brain light kit so I have to have 2 wires coming out of each finger light rod. They can not have a common ground. The sockets I used were from Mouser. They are the best ones! If you get the Radio Shack ones they will be too long and will stick out beyond the end pieces even after you grind them down. What I did was use liquid tape to insulate the hot wire from the ground wire. I found that trying to use electrical tape or heat shrink tubing did not allow me to seat the sockets correctly and added too much weight to the end of the finger lights. I also used a silicon type glue from Home Depot to keep the sockets in place.
I know there is a simpler way to do this but I wanted the option to be able to change the blinking pattern and rate. If that isnt a concern for you you can use the finger light rod as the common ground and just have the hot wire coming out of each socket to a central power source. Make sure you use a conductive, electronic glue so the barrel will have a good, solid, non-insulating contact for the ground. Then the only thing you would need to do is get yourself some auto flashing bulbs and your done.
In the neck support I drilled out additional space for the wires that Tom's unit requires. Remember there is a 7RPM motor that sits in the neck support so I had to make additional room even after shaving the outer sheath off. I am not a fan of drilling through the Hankscraft Motors but even after doing that with my first motor there simply wasnt enough room to pass all of the wires from the brain and the finger lights through the motor. The brain cup drawing is by Craig Reinbrecht while the upper assembly drawing is by Mike Joyce.

2 comments:

Jim said...

Superb work Jerry. You certainly have created a unique and very feature rich B9.

I remember when you first joined the B9 club and someone asked if you had any building skills and if you thought you could build a B9.

You replied "Well, I have lots of tools, and I am not a door knob so there is a chance ....."

Anonymous said...

Thanx Jim!
I remember that (amazingly). I think I hve come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. The key is LOTS of research and patience (not my best trait) :)