@Mellow Hudson Mike posted:Agreed whole heatedly.
There's nothing more frequent, on any thread on this forum, than the comment "in my opinion your wasting your time", or the insinuation of same.
Steve, I 'd like to thank you, profusely, for your original post, your comments above in summary, and especially for getting us to expend significant energy on something not that is not that terribly important, and perhaps more easily solved in a more modern way.
Yes it probably was a poor use of a limited resource -- but it was also a lot of fun.
Now where did I put my box of vacuum tubes?
Mike
Thanks for the sentiment, Mike, and I'll see your vacuum tubes and raise you a DIY relay! Well, at least the attempt . . . 
Not having anything remotely resembling a suitable relay, neither as a discrete part nor in something I'd be willing to sacrifice to the effort, I decided to go full old-school science project and wind my own (an homage of sorts to my paternal grandfather who, as an auto mechanic in the early 20th century, looked down his nose at mechanics who just *replaced* ailing generators, rather than *rewinding* them!). So, with a bolt secured through a paint stirrer and about twelve feet of the smallest diameter wire I had at hand wound around it, I made my very own electromagnet! Initial tests with a single AAA battery were promising, and the coil easily attracted steel strips and other items. However, when I connected the flasher and bulb in series with the coil, the magnetic field being generated dropped to the point that it was too weak to move a relay contact. *sigh* Obviously, more windings and thinner insulation (and probably a *much* better design (or designer)!) would be needed before any of the rest of the relay design issues could even be tackled.
"Sorry, sir, the snipe evaded capture yet again!" 😜
