Last October we showed you a video from [LiamTronix], in which he applied an electric conversion to a 1960s Massey-Ferguson 65 which had seen better days. It certainly seemed ready for light work around the farm, but it’s only now that we get his video showing the machine at work. This thing really can farm!

An MF 65 wasn’t the smallest of 1960s tractors, but by today’s standards it’s not a machine you would expect to see working a thousand acres of wheat. Instead it’s a typical size for a smaller operation, perhaps a mixed farm, a small livestock farm, or in this case a horticulture operation growing pumpkins. In these farms the tractor doesn’t often trail up and down a field for hours, instead it’s used for individual smaller tasks where its carrying or lifting capacity is needed, or for smaller implements. It’s in these applications that we see the electric 65 being tested, as well as some harder work such as hauling a trailer load of bales, or even harrowing a field.

In one sense the video isn’t a hack in itself, for that you need to look at the original build. But it’s important to see how a hack turned out in practice, and this relatively straightforward conversion with a DC motor has we think proven itself to be more than capable of small farm tasks. Its only flaw in the video is a 30 minute running time, something he says he’ll be working on by giving it a larger battery pack. We’d use it on the Hackaday ancestral acres, any time!

A couple of years ago one of the Hackaday Prize finalists was a project to take highschoolers through building a direct conversion radio receiver for the 40 metre amateur band. It was originated by the SolderSmoke podcast, and we’re pleased to see that they’ve recently put up an overview video taking the viewer through the whole project in detail.

It’s a modular design, with all the constituent building blocks broken out into separate boards on which the circuitry is built Manhattan style. Direct conversion receivers are pretty simple, so that leaves us with only four modules for oscillator, bandpass filter, mixer, and audio amplifier. We particularly like that it’s permeability tuned using a brass screw and an inductor, to make up for the once-ubiquitous variable capacitors now being largely a thing of the past.

A point that resonated was that most radio amateurs never make something like this. Arguments can be made about off-the-shelf rigs and chequebook amateurs, but we’d like to suggest that everyone can benefit from a feel for analogue circuitry even if they rarely have a need for a little receiver like this one. We like this radio, and we hope you will too after seeing the video below the break.

Need reminding? See the Hackaday.io project page, and the Hackaday Prize finalists from that year.

Nissan started off with a massive lead in the electric vehicle industry — their Leaf was the first mass-market EV available and the highest-selling EV until 2020. But the company has begun to lag behind other automotive manufacturers and their more diverse, modern offerings. As an example, the Leaf still doesn’t have active cooling for its battery packs. On the plus side, though, these cars are pretty easy to work on and parts for them are widely available. This includes the battery pack and motor, which can be dropped in to other non-EV Nissan products like this Nissan Frontier.

For conversions using the Leaf battery pack and motor, [Paul] points out that it’s important to find the motor with the inverter and power distribution unit all integrated together, rather than sourcing them all separately since they don’t always mix-and-match well. There are several third-party parts available for getting these motors running in other applications, including a coupler to mate the motor to a transmission. However, this still needs some custom fabrication to properly attach to the Frontier’s drivetrain. With a new controller as well, the Frontier engine can be pulled, the Leaf engine dropped in, and the battery set into the bed and connected.

A followup video shows [Paul] driving his new EV down a neighborhood street, but it looks like there are still a few things to polish up before it’s ready to hit the open highway including a more robust housing for the battery. But, if donor vehicles can be found like a truck body and Leaf drivetrain components, this type of modification can be done for a surprisingly small cost. These EV batteries can also be put to work as home power banks as well.

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