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More tinkering with electricity... It kills me that I can't go to Radio Shack anymore and buy odds and ends for projects like this. In recent years I have scavenged components from castoff household junk. Today I took apart an old set-top TV antenna that should have been in a landfill years...

Saw this at a flea market today and thought of your resto project

1964 Hornet, converted to Nexus 3-speed with wheels off a women's Trek cruiser. This ended up being an all-Schwinn ride.

ok so I took apart the tank on my current project and found this. It's marked 1.5V and it works fine on a single AA battery. It also seems to work fine, albeit a little louder and higher pitched, on TWO AA batteries. I am wiring the tank up to run a 3V LED headlight system with those two AA...

One of our Thursday night regulars is a high school kid. He just casually ripped these off on his iPhone this evening.

I think those are off a Schwinn Collegiate, but they are similar to bars off any middleweight Schwinn from the '60s. I have a '68 Panther, a '64 Hornet, and a '63 (I think) Fleet that all came with similar bars.

I don't know why I have this obsession with keeping the old parts anytime I take something apart, but there it is. Case in point: I built up a 24" Speedster into a Manta Ray tribute several years ago. I felt horrible about taking apart a nice 24" Speedster, so I carefully saved the original...

So I didn't need to buy the sockets. These little guys threaded right in where the light bulbs were. And apparently the reflector that the outer contact threads into is still well insulated from the bar that touches with the center contact, because this all still works: So I need to attach...

That's kind of what I ended up doing. I'll post pics of it on the bike soon.

I did see in several Amazon reviews of the bulbs and sockets I ended up buying that the polarity of the LEDs is the reverse of traditional incandescent E10 bulbs, so I will be sure to look out for that.

yeah, I worded that poorly, now that I look at it... I figured the batteries would be in series to get 3v. I'm wondering if the bulbs should be in series or parallel. I also don't know if that answer changes based on the use of LEDs or incandescent bulbs.

So I got to playing with the foil tape. I hope I didn't overdo it. I wasn't as worried about how it looked on the bottom, since it won't show as much.

Two questions for the electrical engineers in the group: 1. Looking at my goofy diagram above (reposting here to make it easy to find), if I am using two LED bulbs that say they should be run on 3v, and I plan to use two 1.5v AA cells, I should wire them in parallel, correct? I believe that's...

Now the fun stuff. I want to get some modern LED lighting in this tank without changing the external look. For starters, I think I am going to reinforce the inside of the light housing with foil tape. It's still holding together, but all those cracks make me nervous. In fact, I might just do...

24 inch BMX style cruiser

I have whacked a few of these together since the two Murrays I posted about 5 years ago. This was my first build-off bike, I think: It was eventually dismantled and most of the parts transferred to this one (still waiting for the right opportunity to reuse the frame): This was for a later...

I love this group. Throw a couple of BMX bikes in and it'd look like the group I ride with on Thursday evenings.