paper.
Two pieces of copper wire (taken from any electrical wire or flex).
Malt vinegar.
Salt.
Bowl.
LED – a light emitting diode (available from model and hardware shops).
Masking tape.
The copper coin will be the cathode, the foil the anode.
Cut the foil and blotting paper into circles so they can be stacked on top of each other. The blotting paper will be soaked in the vinegar, but it is also there to prevent the metals touching – so cut those paper circles a little larger than the foil or coins.
1. Mix vinegar and a little salt together in the bowl. Vinegar is acetic acid and all acids can be used as an electrolyte. Sulphuric acid is found in car batteries, but don’t fool around with something that powerful. It eats clothing and can burn skin – unlike vinegar, which goes on your chips.
Common salt is sodium chloride, a combination of a positive and negative ion (Na+ and Cl–). These will separate in the electrolyte, increasing its strength.
2. Soak your circles of blotting paper in the ion-rich electrolyte.
3. With the masking tape, attach the end of one wire to the underneath of a foil disc. This is the negative terminal. Now stack in this sequence – foil, paper, coin, foil, paper, coin. Each combination is its own tiny battery – but to light even an LED (light-emitting diode) you’ll need quite a few. A car battery tends to have six of these, but with a much larger surface area for each ‘cell’. As a general rule, the bigger a battery is, the more power it has. (Power measured in Watts = amps × volts.)
All the positive ions will go to one terminal, all the negative ions to the other. In effect, you are charging your battery.
4. When you have a stack, you can attach a wire to the last coin with tape. This will be the positive terminal. They can now light an LED, as in the picture below, or with enough coin batteries, even a small bulb.
There may come a time when batteries go on to a new generation, but if you can understand the battery you have just made, you can understand every type of battery currently available, from nickel-cadmium, to lithium-ion, from rechargeable phone batteries, to the ones that drive toy rabbits. You won’t hear acid sloshing in alkaline batteries, where a paste or gel is used, but the principles are identical.
THE FIRST THING TO DO is spend an autumn afternoon throwing sticks into the branches of horse chestnut trees. For conkers, the bigger the better is a good rule and any that still have white spots should be given to friends – they are useless. Collect more than you need. This is only your practice year. Next year, you’ll take out all the ones you prepared and win constantly, but this is the year you learn your skills.
The trickiest part is making a neat, small hole. You will be tempted to use a nail, a spike or anything else with a point. This does work, but there’s always a chance of spoiling a good conker in the process. Better to get your dad to use a drill on them. Don’t try that one yourself. The conkers spin round at high speed, or crack when you put them in the vice. Much better to ask an adult to do it, but give them your worst conkers to start with until they have learned the knack.
Once you have your holes, you need a strong trainer lace. Don’t waste time with the ones from school shoes – they just cut into the conker.
Getting the lace through is always tricky and takes patience. Start by licking the end and twisting it into the hole, pushing and twisting to feed it in. Once you have it started, you’ll need a bit of stiff wire to poke it through. Don’t be tempted to use a fork, they never worked for us. Prod and twist until you can see the other end and then tweak it through with the wire. It’s a good moment when you can finally pull the whole length through.
You need a big knot to stop it slipping back into the conker. The classic is the simple overhand knot, but you’ll need three or four of them to be sure of avoiding catastrophic match slippage. (Loop it over itself and then put the end back through the hole. Everyone knows this one and it’s too basic to put in the chapter on knots.)
Now you should have a conker that looks a little like this:
Yours will be round and shiny where this one is like a bit of wood, but that’s because this is a year old and has been hardened using the techniques at the end of this chapter.
If you can find a lot of old laces, you might think of taking ten or twenty conkers to school and selling them for 10 or 20p each. The aim is not to make money, but to create an instant conker club one lunchtime. You are going to need people to beat, after all.
NOTE: Sell them ALL before you start playing. People won’t enjoy losing to you and then having to buy another conker from the same person.
The Rules
1. Choose who goes first by tossing a coin. Wrap the conker securely around your hand. If it goes flying away on the string when someone hits it, the rule of ‘Stompies’ comes into play. Anyone, including teachers, can stamp it flat and laugh in a menacing fashion.
2. When it is your turn on strike, keep the string tight with two fingers under the conker. Wallop your opponent’s conker as hard as you can.
3. When you’re being hit, let it dangle a little less than the length of your forearm. Any shorter will be too easy to send into a windmill. (See Rule 4.)
4. Windmills. If your conker is sent in a complete circle, your opponent gets another go. Whether this rule is applied or not is agreed before starting play.
5. Strings. If the strings become entangled by a bad shot, the person on strike loses their go.
6. Take shots in turns until one conker is destroyed.
Scoring
There is an element of trust here, but if you win one contest, you now have a ‘one-er’. If you win another, you have a ‘two-er’ and so on.
If a ‘three-er’ beats a ‘two-er’, you
