Retro Thing

Crafters Love The U.S.A. One Stitch At A Time

As night falls this July 4th, lots of Americans will hit the streets to set off all manner of fireworks and (unfortunately) illegal ordnance. Calamitous events of recent years have renewed patriotic ostentation - especially the kitschy kind. We've featured many classic examples of such - we still get email about the Marx Plastic Presidents from my earliest days at Retro Thing. It's easy to see that this country has a long rich history of political & social innovation... commemorated by tacky crap.

My mother is a witty little knitter. I mean it, she's a machine at the artful tangling of yarn and thread and turning out breathtaking artisan work. That's why I've never understood plastic canvas cross-stitch. A staple of the roadside craft fair scene, these plastic canvas productions always seemed like a project for juveniles or the recuperative set on their way to more advanced crafting. Clearly this is a far more popular hobby than I thought as thrift stores are piled high with this stuff. Mostly you find these opuses in the form of decorative wall hangings, but occasionally these projects take advantage of the plastic canvas' stiff structure to build 3D functional objects... like a patriotic tissue box cozy for example.

For a country that is very sensitive about display of the flag, and what is and isn't appropriate behavior around Old Glory, we're sure content to put our flag on darn near any piece of junk. I don't begrudge anyone for expressing their patriotism through their craft, but it seems odd to think that the drippy-nosed among us will feel our souls stir every time we reach for a tissue.

"Ah-choo!"
"Bless you."
"God Bless America, too..."

related:
Puzzle version of the U.S. by Hasbro
Presidents immortalized as aftershave
Cross-stitch your own heirloom clock

Atari 2600 Cartridge Wallet

While some Atari 2600 games are rare and precious artifacts, some carts are crazy common. There's practically a DIY genre focused on finding other uses for the stubby chunks of 70's plastic.  This video shows off one crafter's idea for turning a typical Atari cartridge into a wallet. What makes this particular design interesting is that it re-uses every part of the original game except the screw that secures the two halves of the cart shell.

These carts are for sale on etsy.com, but I'm sure that some of our ingenious readers can ad lib something a bit similar. Just get in touch if you're going to hack up a Chase The Chuckwagon cart.  I'll trade ya a couple dozen Combat games.

Etsy store featuring these wallets

related:

Atari 2600 joystick TV remote DIY project
Wicked DIY arcade cabinet kits
DIY: upgrade your iPod Nano screen the retro way

The Sound Lab Ultimate Analog Synth

It takes a lot to get me excited about music gear these days, but Ray Wilson's Sound Lab Ultimate modular analog synthesizer kit is amazing. This instrument is the followup to his original Sound Lab mini-synth. It features three musically accurate oscillators, white noise generator, active mixer, a 12 dB/Octave lowpass filter, envelope generator, dual low frequency oscillators and more.

The $130 "Deal Clincher" kit includes the PC board, two faceplates, three axial compensators (to keep the oscillators in tune as the temperature changes) along with a Wall Wart power supply board. You can order nearly all of the other project components directly from Mouser for just over $225.

This definitely isn't a beginner's project, but anyone with a bit of kit building experience should be able to assemble this incredibly cool instrument in only a few evenings.

Music From Outer Space Sound Lab ULTIMATE synth kit [via Matrixsynth]

related:
PAiA: Affordable DIY Synthesizers
Build An Analog Synth With A Screwdriver
Join The "Synth Module Of The Month Club"

The Lego Turntable

The inexorable march of time means that those precious devices that defined our lives become the curious playthings of the next generation. Where you and I might debate the finer points of turntable manufacture, the youths in this video figured out how to build one out of Lego.

Here's a great little project using advanced Technic Lego blocks, a Lego motor, and a few other sundries that might have come from the kitchen drawer. Their unlikely device does work. The spindly fellow plays barely audible music (good music choice, by the way) using the same principles as the earliest limited fidelity platter spinners.

Will the be the future of records? Relegated to science fairs, and celebrated as an arcane oddity on morning chat shows? No matter what the future may hold, the boys should be very proud of keeping vinyl music alive in their own way.  Though I wonder how quickly that pride will transform to abject fear once Dad sees what they've done to his Ozzy records.

related:
Build your own turntable
The DIY Audio projects blog

Wooden Widget Folding Dinghies

Benjy Benjamin from Wooden Widget writes, "I thought you might be interested in mentioning my folding dinghy designs. They are after all an old design from the 30s that has been vamped up a bit, quite retro really. You might also find my newest design, the Deckster, amusing as well as it uses a mad new propulsion system and has a hole in it!"

The neatest feature of the Deckster is its clever pedal-powered Mirage Drive, which uses two flexible blades that swing from side to side like fishes' fins to generate forward motion [here's video of it in action].

If you'd prefer to take advantage of the wind, the Origami sailing dinghy is a brilliant little design that folds down to a size small enough for most roof racks and weighs only 20 kg. Plans cost £25-£30. Figure on spending about £200 for your supplies, plus a few glorious hours in the workshop constructing your new sea-faring vehicle.

Wooden Widget Folding Dinghies

DIY $33 Oscilloscope Kit

I know it's not Retro, but you can certainly use this clever DIY oscilloscope kit to repair vintage gadgetry. It has a maximum analog bandwidth of 1MHz with 8 bit resolution, includes auto, normal and single trigger modes, adjustable vertical position, frequency counter, and a built-in 500Hz/5Vpp test signal.

It runs on 9-12VDC and weighs in at a featherweight 70 grams. The big downside is that there's no case, but I'm OK storing it in a cardboard box when not in use. The kit requires surface mount soldering, but you can also buy the little beast fully assembled for only $49.

Ultra-Affordable Digital Storage Oscilloscope

Build Your Own Turntable

Charles Altmann is a German DIY fanatic. His creations include a diesel motorcycle, natural sound hi-fi speakers and the Altmann DIY turntable. He says, "After the success I had with my homebrew tonearm, I decided to build a turntable that is able to fathom the sonic delicacies that the tonearm is able to produce.

Those who visit my sites regularly already know that I am a sucker for natural tone. Therefore the turntable is made to large parts out of wood. Wooden base, wooden motor base, wooden turntable-platter, wooden tonearm. Some ideas make this turntable easy and cheap to build. Depending on your local price for wood, and your ability to find some surplus parts, total cost can be as low as $50.

The turntable consists of two separate massive plywood-blocks (glued together from boards). One supports the platter and tonearm (main base), the second supports the motor (motor base). The platter is driven by a simple thread out of mom's sewing box. This way the motor is decoupled from the main base.

Between the main base and the motor base, there's a gap. By moving the motor base away from the main base, you can adjust thread tension."

Visit his site for pictures and a description of how a handful of Harley Davidson components ended up serving as a turntable platter bearing, along with details of his other ambitious projects.

The Altmann DIY Turntable

DIY Mopeds For Under $130

Fifty years ago, American manufacturers like Whizzer produced thousands of quirky motorized bicycles. Similar motor bikes are returning to the road, driven by the ailing economy and a healthy dose of nostalgia.

The most affordable way to get your hands on one is to modify an existing bike. Zoom Bicycles offers a range of bolt-on 49cc and 80cc 2-stroke motors. You can expect maximum speeds between 30 km/h and 50 km/h, depending on the engine displacement and overall weight. Fuel economy is up to 150 mpg, although these little motors demand 89 Octane fuel premixed with 2-stroke synthetic motorcycle oil.

Wicked DIY Arcade Cabinet Kits

Mameroom Designs in Cincinnati, Ohio makes an impressive line of arcade cabinets, ranging from massive standup MAME cabs down to incredibly compact bartop units. Their Ultimate Arcade Bartop Kit (above) sells for $149.99. It includes professionally milled panels that are pre-drilled and ready for assembly without requiring power tools. All of the necessary assembly hardware is included, eliminating the need for expensive hardware store visits.

This little arcade console has room for a 15" CRT monitor and includes a removable rear panel, clear marquee plastic and a tinted monitor cover. You'll have to add your own panel art, control buttons, and electronics to bring this little beast to life. It looks like the perfect home for my $150 MAME Brain project, although their $249.99 head-to-head cocktail unit looks great, too.

MAMEroom Designs Arcade Kits

Diego Stocco: DIY Musical Machines

Diego Stocco is a composer and sound designer who's not afraid to incinerate a piano to get a few good sound samples. He's also a prolific instrument designer, although you're unlikely to find his crazy contraptions in any orchestra.

My favorite is the TypoSonic - a custom built musical typewriter. He tells us, "I made this instrument by taking apart parts of an old typewriter and then adding a new mechanism, bass strings and mechanics and a sound board." Needless to say, it looks and sounds wicked.

The Burning Piano is also strikingly impressive, especially since few of us would have the nerve to do something so destructively creative. "I set the piano on fire and sampled it," he explains mischievously. If you're after something a tad less dangerous, the Bedside Table Bass - crafted from a 1960s vintage night table - has a hauntingly beautiful tone. His other designs include a musical clothes drying rack and the Sonic Washer - the result of an unholy union between an electric guitar and a washing machine.

When he's not designing whimsical musical instruments, Stocco serves as Director of Sound for Epic Score, a Los Angeles-based music production company. His sound design credits include work for Nokia, BMW, Samsung, Panasonic and General Motors. And - as if he wasn't busy enough - Stocco is one of the creative geniuses behind Spectrasonics' Omnisphere virtual instrument software, which he presented earlier this month at the AES show in San Francisco.

Diego Stocco's official site
Explore Stocco's instrument portfolio on the Behance Network

Modding a Fisher-Price Movie Viewer

The Fisher-Price Movie Viewer Theater shows just how far kids' entertainment has progressed since 1978. The compact plastic film viewer shows silent Super 8 movies on a blurry little screen. It can also project a 10-inch image onto the wall.

Its best feature (speaking from personal experience) is that the film is hand-cranked, allowing kids to morph everyday Warner Brothers cartoons into bizarre reverse slow-motion cinematic works of art.

The only thing cooler than owning one of these would be to have one loaded with your own movies. Super8man was up to the challenge, and loaded his own Super 8 home movies into the F-P viewer, enabling his kids to manipulate their flickery images on-screen.

Conveniently, the viewer is compatible with standard Super 8 film. Super 8 film is still available, and it'll cost about $25 to shoot and process a 50 foot cartridge.

The next step is to carefully pry open one of the old yellow cartridges and replace the film inside with your own Oscar-worthy footage. Super8man reports that the cartridges come preloaded with about 12 feet of film, but he thinks they'll accommodate up to 50 feet, giving a maximum running time of 3 1/2 minutes at 18 frames per second.

Before it can be loaded, the new film needs to be spliced into a continuous loop. Loading it into the cartridge is guaranteed to be a fiddly process, and paying careful attention to how the prepackaged film is positioned will definitely make the replacement process easier.

The Fisher-Price Movie viewer was also available in a hand-held version that resembled mom & dad's real Super 8 camera. It requires no batteries, you simply point it at a bright window of lamp and turn the crank. Both models turn up frequently on eBay, although prices vary considerably.

Visit Super8man's how-to page for full instructions
Browse Fisher-Price movie viewers on eBay

Build Your Own Mechanical TV

Here's an opportunity to build and own a televisor similar to the device created by Scottish inventor John Logie Baird in 1924. Middlesex University Teaching Resources have released a clever £28.56 kit that includes everything necessary to build your own vintage mechanical television.

The unit measures 260 x 195 x 70mm and includes a CD encoded with compatible TV footage. Simply plug your CD player or iPod into the televisor to view the video. The kit design is vaguely reminiscent of the most popular commercial televisor, manufactured by Plessey in the early 1930s. Around 1,000 of these tin-encased devices were sold at a price of £18, qualifying it as the first commercial television.

The British Broadcasting Corporation transmitted experimental televisor broadcasts between late 1929 and 1932. The tall 30 line image measured 2 1/4 inches high by a mere 3/4 inch wide. Televisor images were a ghostly shade of black and red, thanks to the neon lamp used for illumination.

An unimpressed 1928 viewer remarked, "The Baird machine may be said to give a recognisable human head. It is curiously unlike any particular face. I suspect that the eyebrows were heavily made up. Only very slow movements are possible, any thing of even normal speed producing a wild blurr. The impression is of a curiously ape like head, decapitated at the chin, swaying up and down in a streaky stream of yellowy light."

Check out the video to see the device built and operated before your very eyes.

The MUTR Televisor Kit Product Page
More Baird Televisor information

Super 8 Projector Kit: Now Shipping Worldwide

Gakken's new 8mm movie projector kit [first mentioned in March] is now available for export from Retro Enterprises in Tokyo. The unit costs € 79.99 ($125) including worldwide shipping, English instructions, an empty take-up reel and bonus splicing tape.

It will project Super 8, Single-8 and Regular 8mm film and runs on three AA batteries. Best of all, this thing is extremely small -- it measures a mere 21.5 cm high and weighs a only 190 g. Don't expect a huge image or perfect quality from this kit - it's hand cranked with a white LED light source, after all. That said, it looks perfect for art installations and crazy steampunk modding. 

The staff at Retro Enterprises speaks English and German and has many years of experience with small format film. They're also home to the only independent Single-8 processing lab in the world and stock dozens of beautiful Single-8 and Super 8 cameras and supplies.

Gakken Hand-cranked portable projector [Retro Enterprises]

Retroputing: Build A Classic RCA COSMAC ELF System

The original RCA COSMAC ELF appeared on the front cover of the August 1976 issue of Popular Electronics. It was a complete computer based on the RCA 1802 CPU and cost under $100 to build from a bare board. Another $20 would get you a B&W video display. Outstanding value, and these things lingered in the classified section of magazines like BYTE throughout the early 1980s. Spare Time Gizmos has recreated the machine, and even offers discrete logic replacements for some parts that might be hard to find. The price for a partial kit is around $100, but be warned that you'll have to key in programs using 12 switches on the front panel.

The secret to the ELF's success was its incredibly low price. It was sold through detailed display ads, catering to budget computing enthusiasts who wanted to try their hands at programming but couldn't afford something more advanced. The base unit featured a two digit 7-segment LED display and a mere 256 bytes of program memory.

By early 1979, Netronics Research and Development was offering an assembled ELF II with built-in B&W video and hexadecimal keypad for $99.95. Accessories included a $39.95 "Giant Board" with cassette I/O and various serial and parallel connectors. 4K of static RAM cost $89.95 and an ASCII keyboard was another $64.95. With a bit of forethought, it was possible to build a respectable system over the course of a few months without breaking the bank.

The 1802 processor is still manufactured by Intersil, leading Spare Time Gizmos to release an updated design as the Cosmac ELF 2000. The new machine includes 32K RAM and an optional 32K EPROM containing utilities and BASIC, FORTH and CHIP-8 languages. There's a six-digit LED display. It also supports the original video chip (no longer in production) and there are fully decoded I/O ports. A bare board costs a mere $20 and a partial kit full of the most important components can be yours for a very reasonable $100. Should you wish to add 80 column video, flash program storage or extended I/O, that's possible too.

Check out the Spare Time Gizmos COSMAC ELF 2000
The history of the COSMAC ELF

Presto Magix - Cartooning For The Artistically Declined

I've got to be a little suspicious of a plaything that never seemed to appear in any toy store in my neighborhood.  Presto Magix kits showed up in card stores, hospital gift boutiques, and where I grew up; the butcher shop.  Instead of theorizing about some cruel arts & crafts cartel, let's examine the friction based world of Presto Magix.

If you're a model builder, or perhaps worked in the publishing world P.M. (pre-Macintosh), you probably remember dry transfer decals.  These thin decals don't require water or solvents.  You simply position the carrier sheet, rub down on the decal with a pencil which transfers the decal to your model or rock zine headline.  Each Presto Magix kit includes a sheet of full color character decals, and a cardstock backdrop to use as a canvas to create your own fantasy scenes.

Presto Magix licensed all manner of movie characters, cartoon personalities, sports teams, etc. so that you and your trusty pencil can create custom cartoon panoramas without really knowing how to draw.  The best part is that once finished, there are usually plenty of transfers left over that you can use to populate your notebooks and folders.  The decals are fragile, so even a tough-as-nails squad of Star Wars stormtroopers can be beheaded with one careless swipe of an eraser.

Presto Magix are fun, but I hope that this isn't another plaything that barely passes as "creative".  Granted you get to use some aesthetic sense when placing the little decal people, but all you're really doing is burnishing the little guys into place.  We've written about a lot of DIY projects before here at Retro Thing, with varying degrees of creative value.  Even with paint-by-numbers projects, you do perform the act of painting, and there are opportunities for individuality.

Maybe I'm expecting a little too much from these little project kits.  My fear is that as the label "educational" is applied to more and more inane things, fun and cheap Presto Magix kits could start putting on airs.  I just like to think of them as probably the most fun thing that I ever found at a plumbing supply house.

Paint by Numbers kits
DIY Mona Lisa... sort of
Art-O-Mat - art dispensed by vending machine
Fine art with Crayolas