Bob Brown’s Readie Machine
During the last week I’ve been working on building a replica “e-reader” inspired by a concept from the 1930’s, initially designed by Bob Brown, an american inventor and writer. The project is being spearheaded by Eric White of the American Literature department of Brookes University. To get a better feeling about the scope of the project please see his talk at TEDxWhitehall earlier this year. I first started with a delivery of gramophone motors appropriate for the time which were quite grimy and rusty. We picked the smallest one that looked in a good enough condition. From there it was a slow process of loosening screws with WD-40 and photographing the process so that I can reassemble it back after cleaning. WD-40 wasn’t the best at soaking the grime so after quite a bit of cleaning I resorted to using Evo-Stik Adhesive Cleaner which I had laying around and says it’s a good cleaner. And clean it did. I even disassembled the spring mechanism but didn’t want to have the ribbon spring on me so I only cleaned as much as I could. On some of the exposed components there was