Great site: http://www.sci-toys.com/index.html with lots of science projects you can do at home. In fact, with just stuff I had laying around the house and this site I had a neat high voltage demonstration to wow my grandkids with big blue sparks. But I did get to explain some science to them too. Now granted, I have a lot of strange things around my house, but honestly the only odd thing were jumper wires with alligator clips on the ends. And I bet you could rig it up with some ordinary wire just as well. Look at http://www.sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro4.html#franklin for more details on that project.

There are plenty of others:

• A simple ion motor
• Your own 3D pictures
• A gauss rifle
• Homemade radios from household items
• World’s simplest steam boat
• Making a spectrometer from a CDROM

Lots more and most needing no real exotic parts. This excellent site does sell kits for some of the projects, but all the details are right there on the Web site — no need to buy anything if you don’t want to.

Well done!