Subject:
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Practical Application for LEGO
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.fun
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Date:
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Sat, 5 Aug 2000 15:32:00 GMT
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This one isn't 'fun' in the 'fun' sense, more the 'off-beat' sense. :)
When we moved into our new house, we noticed that the clothes dryer didn't
work very well. We figured the exhaust pipe was full of lint. We were
right.
In this house, the exhaust goes up from the dryer, across the basement
ceiling (in amongst the joists), all the way across the house. That's
about 20 feet of 6" duct/pipe. I did *not* want to dismantle the ceiling
to get the pipes out.
So what I did was ask my son to build a LEGO-crawler, out of a battery box
and a BASIC motor. He put basic Technic wheels on both parts, connected
them with a towball hitch. Very simple, but effective. He wanted to put
the R2D2 head pieces (from Mindstorms) on the front, as a kind of plow, but
I pointed out that it wouldn't fit the shape of the pipe.
We opened up the pipe at one end, tied a string to the back of the crawler,
and sent it through the pipe.
It got stuck a few times. Whenever it did, we pulled it back out of the
pipe. It always brought some lint with it. :) Sometimes a lot of lint. :)
:)
At one point, the crawler got stuck in the middle of the pipe, and the
motor separated from the tender. The good news was, this was at a joint in
the pipe. So we moved a couple of ceiling tiles, opened the pipe at that
point, and retrieved our crawler.
Once we got the string through one section of the pipe, we tied a heavier
line onto it, and pulled that through. Then we tied a couple of towels to
the line, and pulled those back and forth, until the pipe was clean. :)
So that was how we spent our evening -- playing with LEGO, and cleaning
lint out of our dryer exhaust.
I'll post some pictures of the dusty crawler when I get some time.
Steve
--
I'll be on vacation from 8/5 until 8/12 - and totally offline.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Practical Application for LEGO
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| Steve Bliss <blisses@worldnet.att.net> writes: ... (...) ... I'd love to try that. I suspect my air pipe is darn near plugged solid, given how long the dryer takes to dry things. Unfortunately, I live on the 6th floor of a condo building, and the (...) (24 years ago, 5-Aug-00, to lugnet.fun)
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