Cache Lake Country

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By using a pattern you don't run the danger of spoiling your leather, for the job of fitting is a little tricky. I found that the best way is to tack the leather on with the tacks part way in until you are sure it fits, especially around the handles where you-have to notch it. When it is all laid on you can drive the tacks home and then cover the edges with a binding strip of rawhide which not only protects the leather but helps keep it airtight. There should also be a binding strip where the leather fits around the point of the bellows.

Aside from brightening up my fire in no time at all, I use the bellows when I ready up my house to blow dust and crumbs out of the floor cracks where it's hard to get at them with the kind of homemade broom I make.

* * * * * * * * *

The Chief, Hank, and I have been having a wonderful time building a crystal detector radio receiver. It all began when a friend of ours, Mr. Beedee, a radio engineer, came up for a week's rest last fall and got an idea it would be a real achievement to build a radio from the odds and ends of material you could find lying around a camp in the north woods. Of course, we couldn't expect to find materials to make earphones, but he thought if we worked hard enough we could dig up the rest. Before he left he made a diagram for a set and said he would send the earphones. So we started a search for parts.

It was like one of those scavenger hunts you hear about. When the three of us put all our findings together we had some pieces of well seasoned pine board, various bits of metal, two or three dozen brassheaded tacks, an empty spool, a handful of assorted screws, and an old cardboard salt box.

The two main problems were the tuning coil and a variable condenser. Following Mr. Beedee's diagram we found we would need about 150 feet of insulated copper wire. Any size between number 22 to 28, or even finer, would do. For a while it looked as if we were not going to have any radio, but Hank got an idea and we snowshoed over to the old abandoned mine to see what we could find there. As luck would have it, in one corner of the blacksmith shop where it had lain for nigh on to twenty years was an old ignition coil once used for firing a gas engine. I certainly was excited when I pulled that thing apart and saw what was inside. Sure enough, there was a winding of fine wire, just the kind we wanted.

The salt box turned out to be just the thing for winding our coil on, so we cut off one end four inches long and soaked it in melted candle wax so it wouldn't take up moisture. Then we began winding, beginning one-quarter of an inch from one end of the box and put on a total of 166 turns. At the start of the, winding we anchored the wire by passing it back and forth through three pinholes punctured in the cardboard tube so the wire wouldn't slip. Every seven turns we twisted a little loop to make a tap until we had eight of them. Then we wound on 40 turns without any taps. From then on to the end we made, a tap every ten turns, scraping off the insulation on each tap to make a good connection. Those taps, connected by short wires to the switch points, make it easy to use any desired number of turns on the coil to tune in a station.

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