Shopping List: Experiments 1 Through 5
2 Chapter 1
Wire cutters
RadioShack Kronus 4.5-inch, part number 64-2951, or Stanley 7-inch
model 84-108.
Or similar. Use them for cutting copper wire, not harder metals (Figure 1-4).Figure 1-1. Generic long-nosed
pliers are your most fundamen-
tal tool for gripping, bending,
and picking things up after you
drop them.
Figure 1-2. Longer-nosed pliers:
these are useful for reaching into
tiny spaces.Figure 1-3. Sharp-pointed pliers
are designed for making jewelry,
but are also useful for grabbing
tiny components.Figure 1-4. Wire cutters, some-
times known as side cutters, are
essential.Multimeter
Extech model EX410 or BK Precision model 2704-B or Amprobe model
5XP-A.
Or similar. Because electricity is invisible, we need a tool to visualize the
pressure and flow, and a meter is the only way. A cheap meter will be suf-
ficient for your initial experiments. If you buy online, try to check customer
reviews, because reliability may be a problem for cheap meters. You can
shop around for retailers offering the best price. Don’t forget to search on
eBay.
The meter must be digital—don’t get the old-fashioned analog kind with
a needle that moves across a set of printed scales. This book assumes that
you are looking at a digital display.
I suggest that you do not buy an autoranging meter. “Autoranging” sounds
useful—for example, when you want to check a 9-volt battery, the meter
figures out for itself that you are not trying to measure hundreds of volts,
nor fractions of a volt. The trouble is that this can trick you into making
errors. What if the battery is almost dead? Then you may be measuring
a fraction of a volt without realizing it. The only indication will be an eas-
ily overlooked “m” for “millivolts” beside the large numerals of the meter
display.