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Slowly over the next few months I hope to scan in this wonderful book from Popular Science Publishing Co. (1937) The Amateur Craftsman's Cyclopedia of Things to Make without destroying the original. You can find this old book on eBay once and awhile (I did) - it's a time machine, filled with things like how to make a mercury barometer for your home. I have a few ideas to automate the scanning, so we'll see what happens.
Related:
Blast From The Past: Prewar Maker's Primer by H.B. Siegel. Exploring the world of Amatuer Craftsman's Cyclopedia of Things to Make. MAKE 05 - Page 182.
See previous old and amazing Maker books - Link.
Awesome! Will you post scannings as they come or all at once?
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i hope to post as i scan them.
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Be careful of some of these instructions. One description of a mercury barometer showed an open pan filled with mercury and an upended glass tube. While it won't kill you right away, mercury is recognized as a cumulative neurotoxin. While I am fully supportive of taking some risks to learn new things, one needs to weigh these risks realistically.
Now . . . I'll have to see about pressurizing my soda bottle flamethrower with a second bottle containing Drano and aluminum foil . . .
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This book looked really cool so I did a search on abebooks.com and found a bookseller with a copy at a reasonable price. Lee Valley has 3 books in it's reprint series that people may be interested in: 1800 Mechanical Movements and Devices, 507 Mechanical Movements and 970 Mechanical Appliances.
http://www.leevalley.com and search for "Mechanical Movements"
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