Your Creative endeavors

As a kid, I used to make FM transmitters to bug and eavesdrop on family members. Wish I never did.

I also built a beehive once out of old fruit crates, caught a swarm of them on my grapefruit tree and gave them a new home.

 

We used to raid Dad's workshop and find old pram wheels and planks of wood and build go-carts steered by rope attached to the wheel struts. Very basic, very fun, very painful when you came off lol

 

As a fairly young kid, I watched my mom making coffee, in an old fashioned messy percolator, and asked her why nobody made coffee in bags like tea. Some years later, Folgers came out with it.

As a teen-ager, slot cars were the rage, larger scale than the little home slot car sets, and there were large commercial tracks/hobby shops with BIG tracks, 8 to 12 lanes for fun and official racing for prizes/cash. I ended up making my own frames from brass rod soldered together, first, then rewinding my own motors, then balancing them, then shimming the magnets in closer to the armatures for more EMF, then epoxying the windings so they wouldn't sling off, then balancing the armatures, then buying hi-strength commutators because the high RPM was exploding the stock coms. Tinkered with electronic kits and projects some to. There used to be a LOT of DIY kits and projects out there.

 

LOL. Only if it's electric. Never got into rebuilding gas engines.

 

Peter Peter pumpkin eater,
had a wife and couldn't keep her
.......

Had one of those, been single for 12 years. Don't have and don't WANT 20 acres. Or ache-ers, as the case may be. Or my ex for that matter. Happy to do without both.

 

How about stupid? WhenI was about 8 or 9, me and afriend decided to make a pump out of an old vacuum cleaner. There was no plug on the cord, so we bared the wire ends and stuck them in the wall socket, got a shock doing it so gave up on the endeavor. Not sure what would've happened if we'd started pumping.

 

When I was about 11 me and a buddy found this giant piece of Styrofoam. It was about 4'x'4'x8' - it was solid too. Being that Styrofoam floats, we decided to carve it out and make a boat out of it. So . . . we carved it out and made a boat out of it. It was like a big, square, dugout canoe except it was Styrofoam. We promptly named it the Fartblossom.

Being experienced seagoing geniuses we took it for a maiden voyage at night, in winter, in a river, with gusty winds. One friend was almost swept away into the clutches of that dark and chilly night.

The following day we tried again with limited success. We soon learned to patrol the local rivers and lakes. It was quite the fun little pleasure craft. We did have a few adventures with it. . .

Once it was stolen. We discovered it in his neighbor’s backyard. We almost killed the guy. One day we decided to take it all the way across the river. It was about a mile. About halfway across, the biggest spider I have ever seen started running around the boat. We freaked out, screamed, and paddled to shore. I don't know what happened to the spider but as we got to the shore of a small island and gathered our wits we noticed we had pulled docked right next to a huge hornets nest. It was literally a few feet away. We scrambled back for home and called it a day.

On another day we were accosted by some older teenage thugs. They told us they were going to beat us up if we did not give them the boat. We had to give it up. It was funny watching these leather wearing, jean wearing, denim vest with rock band patches pinheads trying to maneuver the Fartblossom. We got the best of them though, we ran home and got my friends BB gun, hid in the bushes, and shot at them. His gun was lame though, it was one of those spring loaded kind (no compass in the stock). We always would kid him and say we could duck the BB's if he shot at us. I am sure they figured it was us, but they never caught up with us though. However, it sure did do a number on those giant yellow and black borrowing bees that paralyze locusts and drag them underground to lay eggs on (I think the larvae eat them alive). We used to drink beer and shoot at them all day long form his back porch (we were late teens at that time.) If one managed to make into it's hole one of us would run down and stick a firecracker in the hole an blow it out. One other person would follow with the "kill board" which was a piece of wood to whack any bees that would try to sneak up on the person handling the explosives. A third person would cover from the porch with the BB gun.


Unfortunately, we never saw our beloved Fartblossom again. I am not sure what ever happened to it. Sorry for the long narrative and for going off topic a bit in my story - but I was just reminiscing. I have done some crazy stuff in my day. I could write an interesting book.

Oh yeah - we never could figure out where that awesome piece of Styrofoam came from!

 

As a teen my cousin and I decided to take our bikes and make a bicycle built for 2 out of them. Took the front wheel off mine and fitted the fork over the rear axle of his. Worked fine till we went down a hill and his bike front wheel turned sidways and all we had left except skinned shins and elbows was a huge pile of twisted metal. Afte that all we had to ride was our horses and we decided not to try the same experiment with the horses. Realized later that was good thinking.

Jack

 

Speaking of bikes, I used to get a playing card and a clothes peg, and stick it on the front forks so it rattled against the wheel spokes.

Look out Harley Davidson.

 

My neighbors kids still do that

Jack

 

We used to do that too!!!!!...front and back...though we used carboard from an old Kelloggs packet, becuase we weren't rich enough to afford playing cards Maybe that's how my motorcycle mania started.....

 

I could fill this whole board theres hardley a day that goes by without a project I'm doing,first kinda mischief was building electric shock machines from old radio transformers and magnetic relays from bells when I was nine, I had it confiscated because it weighed so much my pants kept falling down the teachers were wondering why I was walking around holding my pants up all the time,then one morning in assembly it slipped out of my pocket "BOOM" about a pound of solid iron transformer and bell mechanism onto the floor in the middle of assembly during prayers non of the teachers could work out what it was I had to zap em

Ofcourse my antics went on into highschool and a larger scale,at one point I got around 150 pupils all holding hands in a daisy chain and zapped them all at the same time it was quite a feeling of power

One of my favourite projects as a child was an underground fort or Base as we call them over here when I was about eleven,it was around the size of a double bed 4 feet underground,I made the roof strong enough you could walk ontop,all that was visible was a small hatch,it had 12v electric lighting from a car battery and indicator bulb and an open fireplace and chimney made from an airconditioners steel tube,we used to cook sausage and bacon play cards,it got absolutely roasting inside and we all jockied for spot furthest away from the fire

Lately,well quite a few years ago now my favourite projects were my 1985 KTM 250 dirtbike and my 1991 Suzuki RM 250,I stripped the KTM engine down completely covered the floor in paper and drew around the parts checked every part replaced the damaged and rebuilt

My favourite of late is my computer, took me quite a few months to cut the case and get it all finished,stealthy wiring took another couple of months lol,welded up some stainless steel legs,I had to cut the window,top extractor fan and the front intake perfectly or the whole thing would be ruined,came out alrightThe front intake is my most prized achievement,I had to cut through the mild steel of inner case,the plastic front ssembly and the solid aluminium bezel and re-route the front LED's and switches,USB and headphone ports,looks like it'd suck your arm in 'which it probably would if I turned up the fan up its 115 cfm

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b214/Rikky_/case.jpg

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b214/Rikky_/side.jpg

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b214/Rikky_/Picture017.jpg

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b214/Rikky_/Picture021.jpg

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b214/Rikky_/Picture023.jpg

 

Nice case!!

I've been threatening to tie into a mod job but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Roger

 

He applied for the police academy, but they wouldn't accept him because of his haircut and height.

 

I was in the Green Beret's but was framed for a crime I didnt commit,I now survive as a soldier of fortune,if you want me,if no one else can help maybe you can hire Rikky

 

Yeah right, and you posed for those pictures because you needed the money?

 

I design and make guitar and bass pickups, does that count?

 

Sweet! I've also built a few rafts, only for very small rivers though... I usually ended up spending more time in the water than on the raft... I guess I didn't really have ships design in my blood, they never were very stable...