Priceless Paintings from W7

You might know that I drive very little. Working from home, regular use of public transport, and doing most of my day-in day-out shopping on foot means that my car is pretty stationary. I think I last used it in early January.

Which explains why I wasn’t surprised to find its battery flat. The car has seen little use and the battery got little charge thus. Add an unusually long and cold season, and it makes perfect sense. Inconvenient, but not alarming.

What’s next?

Find the old battery charger, and descent down onto memory lane just once again. I made this charger myself, back in ‘86, as part of my vocational training. When I say “made it myself,” I mean it: made the transformer from scratch (a hand-packed E-I core with self-calculated and wound coils), made the case from scratch (starting with a handful of screws, a welding kit and a piece of sheet metal). Fitted the electronics, engraved the front, – just about everything that one can make by hand in this thing is made by hand.

Which means that the charger must be worth an absolute fortune. I must have been working a week or more on it. To me, it’s worth much more still, and it is something I was immensely proud of when I took it out of the cupboard and brought it to good use on my flat car battery.

Prouder still when I re-connected the battery in the following morning. One turn of the key, and off we were.

Thoughts, Web/Tech car, human