10/15/4

Here I sit in frustration. My daughter is sick with a soar throat that's come and gone for over a week now, and put herself to bed quite early. My son ran off with my foster-nephew (for lack of a better definition of his relationship to me), so I'm stuck here. Stuck only in the sense that I'd like to go somewhere, but can't. Not that I know exactly where I need to go to solve my problem.

My problem? I'm working on Halloween. I dismantled and discarded the remains of a broken pinball machine, the culmination of a serious garage cleaning last week. But not before removing and saving ten of the electric motors. Not really motors, just a pin on a spring with an electro-magnet, so they pop in and out a couple inches when turned on and off. The problem is powering them: in an initial test I just ran bare wires into a power-strip (excusable when I did such things as a twelve-year-old, but "I should know better" stupid at thirty-five) which activated the switch fine, but then the circuit-breaker in the strip clicked it off and the wires were sorta burnt together. Okay, I get it, use less than 120 volts.

So I pay my brother a visit to request switches and a power supply from his avid model train stockpile. Once I get that all wired up, it sorta works: If I push the pin in, it will hold, but it's not strong enough to pull it in itself against the springs resistance. The power supply is 20 volts, so I need more. But even if I could leave, I have no clue where to seek out some kind of power supply that kicks out more than 20 volts but less than 120 volts (I'm guessing around 80, although the largest of the three types of pins I've got says 115 volts on it, and the others don't say anything).

I've pretty well decided to blow off the whole music video thing with The Band until after Halloween. With so little free time at the moment, I need to focus my energies. Of course, here I sit at the computer instead of in the garage figuring out something else I could be doing until I can tackle my electrical problems later.

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