Rant Things

Every now and then I get a hankering to watch old, somewhat classic TV shows. Unfortunately, the ones I want aren’t out on DVD, because they’re not the standard pablum everyone else seems to watch.

• Parker Lewis Can’t Lose — Clone spin-off of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that was better than the official spin-off
• WKRP in Cincinnati — with the original music, mind you. Depending on who you listen to, the music is either too expensive to license, or the production company is too cheap to pay for it, and they’ve substituted crap muzak that ruins some plotlines and generally makes the DVD pressing bad.
• Almost Live! — Sketch comedy that didn’t get tromped like SNL did in the 80s
• Night Flight — like MTV before there was MTV; goofy, offbeat, and experimental

I’m sure there’re more. I just know I’m not excited by “Chico and the Man”, “Everybody Loves Raymond” (how amazon decided I might like that, I have no idea), or “Full House”. I realize asking for something exciting, intelligent, and entertaining from TV is sort of like asking a llama to spit a fine cognac, but those shows are out there — somewhere.

Last week, Make posted a link to a doorbell that I saw a few years ago that got me thinking. The doorbell — an exposed electromagnetic solenoid and two wine glasses — is basically just the mechanism from a standard hardware store doorbell with wine glasses instead of the metal xylophone-style (or metallophone, for the picky) bars that make the ding dong noise.

Upon seeing that, I thought it was rather neat, and tried to come up with something I could make that would be similarly cool, and far less pricey. In the course of random shopping, we found a singing bowl with a pleasant note; and it made the perfect candidate for a doorbell mod.

So we bought that, a wall platform at Cost Plus, and a cheap electromechanical doorbell at the hardware store. I think the total cost came out to about $70. It turned into this:

It really wasn’t too hard to make; it’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it sounds good, and is enough of a doorbell to make the dogs go nuts when they hear it.

Here’s how I did it:
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