What's the Coolest Thing You've Ever Built? 535
Josh Lindenmuth asks: "In high school I was involved in an engineering competition where we needed to create a machine that could move 100 lbs of groceries from a disabled person's car up and down a set of stairs, and then into their kitchen. It was probably the coolest thing I ever built (there were only 3 of us on the team), even though the wooden treads started splintering halfway up the stairs (we didn't have a metal shop, so it was made entirely out of wood, spare boat parts, and conveyor belts) and then it completely destroyed the stairs on its way down (it weighed over 300 lbs)." That's Josh's story, now he wants to know yours. Cool computers, cars, hovercraft, handheld devices, fusion reactors — what is the most interesting gadget, product, or device that you've ever built on your own?
My Son (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My Son (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My Son (Score:5, Funny)
Built? If you are the average Slashdotter, you merely did half of the design.
Although...
Getting that far can be already be seen as a great accomplishment over here. :-)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My Son (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My Son (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of a joke (Score:5, Funny)
That reminds me of a joke:
A scientist goes to God and says, "We don't need you anymore. I can create a human from nothing more than a handful of dust."
"Alright then, let's see," God replies.
"No problem," says the scientist, and he bends over to scoop up some dust.
"Hold on," God interrupts. "Get your own dust."
My Son My Period. (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
At best you provided half the design, the manufacturing space, the materials distribution chain, and the delivery system. Your son did the rest him self (which when you think about it is rather resourceful of him).
However, this being Slashdot - I'd bet on the former over the latter.
Re:My Son (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
With a name like that he's in for nothing but grief.
I gots you all beat (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I gots you all beat (Score:5, Funny)
Dude ... the joke's on you. (Score:5, Funny)
Your self are living in one of my own collection of home built reality simulators. I'll give you credit for being the only one of my simulated worlds to develop a reality simulator inside your simulation.
Greetings,
Your Lord and Creator.
P.S. If you think that's strange you should see the 4D Holo-presentation I got the other day attatched to a subspace mail message. It's from a giant lizard like creature who claims that I am living on a planet in a miniature universe he carries in a little marble on his keychain....
Satellite Parts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Satellite Parts (Score:4, Interesting)
That's really neat.
My "coolest" thing was related to ham radio also.
I came up with some ideas for a mix of hardware and software for the Amiga that would do SSTV, as well as a new SSTV mode that would provide a degree of noise resistance not present in then-current SSTV modes. Previously, I had written a PCB CAD system that did circuit trace layout. I designed a microprocessor-based board that would do the modulating and demodulating, but I didn't have a schematic capture system which I really wanted to use since I had seen them in magazines, so I wrote one and then used that. Then, when it came time to write the code for the CPU, I didn't have an assembler; so I wrote a cross-assembler for the Amiga. So that code had to be burned to the EPROM in the CPU; as it happened, I had worked for a company in Ft. Lauderdale and designed a burner for that CPU and I still had one of those, so I used that. I wrote the host program in C -- lucky me, I had the Lattice C compiler and 68000 assembler that came with the Amiga. :-)
What was cool about this, to me, is that I kind of picked myself up by my bootstraps almost every step of the way. The PCB design system and the schematic capture I wrote, the board I designed, the circuit I designed, the 68705 assembler I wrote, the code for the 68705 I wrote, the 68705 burner I designed, the C host code and all of it running an SSTV mode I designed... that is the most varied set of tasks I ever had to do for any one project and to this day I have one of those gadgets hanging on the wall to remind me that if you can't find what you need... you can do it yourself.
Eventually a HAM radio company (AEA) bought the design and it went on to do pretty well for the kind of widget it was. It was in the ARRL handbook for a while, might still be for all I know. It won technical achievement of the year at the Dayton hamfest, too, for the noise resistance. Almost everything about that project (except the FCC approval process) was fun. Although the device passed first time out, the bloody Amiga itself was noisy as hell; we just got in under the wire. That was my first real lesson on just how unreasonable and silly the FCC can be. Since then, I've learned... they're even worse than I thought. :)
Stealth Roach-Clip (Score:2)
So, a little epoxy and an old aligator clip...I have a stealth bottle-opener and roach clip.
Was also involved with 'Odyssey/Olympics of the Mind', but that was lame because every team had parental help and the money rules were shat upon constantly
Re:Stealth Roach-Clip (Score:4, Interesting)
I built an entire assembly line with pick-and-place, SMT hot bar, etc for memory modules (single-sided only) out of parts from old printers, floppy drives, tape drives, typewriters, hard-drives, and assorted other junk. This was back in the early 90's when 72-pin modules first came out and were expensive as hell even though they weren't really any different technology than 30-pin. It only produced about 10 modules per hour (with frequent stops and starts for various reasons) at a time when commercial lines produced 50k an hour, but it worked dammit!
That one time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That one time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That one time (Score:5, Funny)
That depends.... Was it wearing an astronaut's suit?
I hate to (have to) ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I hate to (have to) ask... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I hate to (have to) ask... (Score:5, Funny)
Cool! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I hate to (have to) ask... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I hate to (have to) ask... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I hate to (have to) ask... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
And 300 pounds is a bit over 20 stones, if that helps your imagination any.
While in my engineering college ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I don't build cool stuff I just write code.
Ronja project (Score:2, Interesting)
Mine (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mine (Score:4, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Airplanes are very fulfilling projects, well suited for this crowd.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'd hold off on having your tombstone inscribed just yet. You might not finish the plane until 2008.
Biodiesel Reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Biodiesel Reactor (Score:5, Funny)
have you considered a rewarding and successful career with the United States Government?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
amstrad Teletype (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote Morse-code modulator/demodulator software and set them up as a simple text-based comms system down the garden...
A custom kernel (Score:2)
Couple of things (Score:4, Interesting)
Nowadays, I build more hardware stuff, but it is not as cool because I am an adult and should know how to build it. For example, I built a 180 gallon saltwater reef tank with an oak cabinet, aut water replenisher, Carbon doser, protein filter and all kinds of other accessories, and plumbed the sump down to my basement.
A few years back, I built a 20X40 swimming pool with diving board and slide, and built a 70X40 concrete deck (yes, I mixed and poured it myself) with cedar railing to surround it.
an IM client on a TRS-80 (Score:5, Interesting)
It worked well, but of course was very slow.
Then there's the joystick-controlled typewriter...but that wasn't as cool.
Re: (Score:2)
* ft tall water balloon slingshot (Score:4, Funny)
Burningman (Score:2, Interesting)
A partial computer! (Score:5, Interesting)
an project in physics class where we could write about anything we wanted to. As a group of three students
we chose to write about digital logic. In the beginning, we only planned to write about digital logic theory,
circuit design theory, and so on, but we soon realized we wanted to build an actual circuit design.
After spending days or even weeks designing the thing, we finally had our ÜberMachine - we called it the
DALO (Digital Arithmetic and Logic Unit). It was essentially an ALU with support for addition, subtraction,
logic "or", logic "and", and logic "not".
Now, in this day and age of computers, it would take most programmers just a few minutes to make such a program
in most programming languages. But this was done entirely in hardware, with no fancy integrated circuits! We
used about 15 simple chips (classic phillips 74xx-series), which only contains or, and, not and the occasional
full-adder.
For the input, we used manual flip-switches, connected directly to the input legs on the microchips.
For output we used a series of LEDs to output each of the 4 digits in the A-input, B-input and the result. At
the same time, we used a classic 7-segment display for each, driven by a 7-segment-decoder chip.
In the end, the things actually worked, which was quite amazing to see. We hadn't received any formal training
in digital logic, electronics, or circuit design - and yet it worked. The entire machine was soldered with more
wires than I ever wish to see again, and it took a lot of blood, sweat and... time - but we did it!
Some years later, I was employed as a teaching assistant at the university. One of my classes were in machine
architecture, a course which most students couldn't see as relating to reality very much, because they didn't
believe anybody except large companies could build computers or circuits. On the day of my last class, just a
few days prior to the exam, I brought our high school project with me, and showed them how it was built.
Several of them were amazed by it, and it really seemed to make a difference. Computers were no longer magical
devices crafted by dwarven builders, they were simply complex machines, free for anybody to build.
That's the greatest thing I have ever built. Now, if we were talking about programming, that would be
another matter...
A robot that can traverse staircases (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here are some pics: http://www.junction.bafsoft.com/telebot2/ [bafsoft.com]
A 'clue meter' for the office (Score:2)
Not Cool (Score:3, Informative)
Nixie tube display for a computer (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a Nixie tube display, with 7 nixie tubes. I built an RS-232 reciever/sender out of 4000-series logic ICs (not a CPU or microcontroller in sight) - mostly counters and registers, and a few AND gates and inverters.
Pictures of the project's progress are at http://www.alioth.net/pics/nixies/nixies.html [alioth.net] (two pages of photos - the working project is on page 2). I've also kept a journal of building and learning in my Slashdot journal.
The hardest part of it was probably getting the 170 volt switch mode power supply to work correctly (mainly getting it to regulate) and not put so much noise back into the 5 volt supply to cause latches and registers to lose their values. Some help from the NEONIXIE-L group on Yahoo was invaluable here, and I now have a decent 170 volt supply.
I'm now learning how to make things with microprocessors, and once I've done some breadboard experimentation, my next project is to build a logging weather station for the glider club, using a Z80 processor, a flash EPROM, some RAM and probably compact flash for mass storage (not that it'll use a lot of it!), and a small graphics LCD module for display. Currently, I'm at the stage where I've breadboarded a very basic Z80 system that can output values on a crude output device. But it works!
Re: (Score:2)
Lego (Score:2)
An AM transmitter (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a Coral link to it:
http://www.mymorninglight.org.nyud.net:8080/ham/6
The best part about it, is that I built it entirely from stuff that was headed to the scrap heap!
There are other interesting or unusual things I've built, which can be seen by following the links. In one especially unusual project, I used the analog circuits from a fried SoundBlaster card, and a CD drive as a modulator for a tube-based, low-power AM transmitter. Combining 2000's technology with 1950's. It worked, too!
Igloo (Score:2)
Sorry...(ducks)...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Built, but never tested (Score:3, Funny)
My best - the Abtaser (and my other IP flops, too) (Score:5, Funny)
Been working on a list of my biggest inventions and intellectual property items that flopped in a big, big way. My coolest inventions and IP flops are:
But my all time coolest thing I have built, and my biggest tech flop, is one I called an abtaser:
Abtaser [thearmedcitizen.com]
Automated Monorail (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the coolest thing I ever built (or designed and programmed) was a self-contained turntable system for an automated monorail part transport system. The thing had multiple stop points that could be programmed, automatic homing, and built-in accel/decel ramping. Used a mini handheld pendant to program the stop points - you could literally walk under the thing and see the alignment as you made your adjustments.
To the best of my knowledge, it is still in production at Caterpillar today. It was designed and built in 1998.
The second best coolest thing I ever built was some software for interfacing a Linux based PC to an Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLC. The real cool bit is knowing that this software is being used in multiple production facilities around the world from making baby formula in Canada to being used in a mix simulator for the AirBorne Laser program.
Cheap supercar (Score:4, Interesting)
Cost me a total of $15,000.00US and a year tinkering. the car costs $350 a year to insure and takes everyone by suprise that tries to race that slow old 80's wannabe sportscar.
Biggest drawback? touchy to drive. if you sneeze while accelerating slowly you suddenly burn the tires hard, have the nose lifting off the ground and are starting to go sideways. It's dangerous for anyone that doesn't know how to drive insane levels of Hp to weight ratios.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cheap supercar (Score:4, Informative)
Cool part, engine is near indestructable because it was made for power and over engineered. The go-fast parts are way cheaper and with a simple adapter plate It was easy to adapt it to a strong 6 speed FWD tranny.
Problem is, IT eats axles. IF I sit still and floor it in first I will get about 200 feet before I rip a standard axles apart. I have a set of suctom made racing axles that are supposed to be 5X stronger and hope to get them installed this winter.
Kegerator (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Mine was built out of an old fridge that was just large enough to hold a keg. I then just drilled and put the tap in the door. I shaved off the handles and cleaned up/painted the outside to make it look nice, then painted the inside with a gold spray paint. Figured the keg should sit in a bed of gold. Only other thing I wanted to do was make it so when you opened the door, angelic music would play. You know th
several machines (Score:3, Interesting)
http://24.251.127.62:8088/gallery/vacformtable [24.251.127.62]
I have used this thing to make several diffirent things from speaker boxes to Stormtrooper armor. It has been a blast. The latest project I have made has been a rotocast machine.
http://s14.photobucket.com/albums/a331/arsonsmith
I started by building the lego mock up at the bottom of that link then started aquaring the other parts. It has been used to make several diffirent things from replica guns to costume masks and helmets.
Re: (Score:2)
This came from an article in MAKE Magazine
http://24.251.127.62:8088/gallery/PotatoLaunchers [24.251.127.62]
This I got the idea from slashdot back 5 or 6 years ago when the Mame cabinets were all the nerdy rage:
http://24.251.127.62:8088/gallery/MAME_Arcade [24.251.127.62]
The one with the Mame across the top was built from scratch.
This one is still in my garage and is on the back burner right now but needs to be completed:
http://24.251.127.62:8088/gallery/JeepUpgrade [24.251.127.62]
Please go easy o
Linux from scratch (Score:2)
A Human Powered Submarine. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I didn't actually see the end of the project, but we got a lot of it done. It was an awesome design, carbon fiber shell, aluminum frame and cool prop.
The Ghetto Router! (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/articles/howto
A couple of things... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Building an airplane (200+mph 4 seater version of a Burt Rutan design)
2. Flamethrowers (the response time of the Culver City police department to 40+ foot flame mushroom clouds is 5 minutes)
3. TankCams - I've explored the crawlspace under my house from the comfort of my living room via teleoperation.
4. A couple of neat costumes, this year I was written up on slashdot about my Aliens walking forklift costume.
5. An inertially coupled autopilot for R/C planes I built years ago as a cheap UAV so I could send a plane someplace, take pictures, then have it fly itself back, all without crashing.
There are lots of cool things to do out there, I'll be dead when I stop working on them. Instead of being a "remember that time back when I was held the football record at Polk High" thread, I hope this thread focusses not just on past accomplishments, but also mentions things people are still actively doing, otherwise it'll be terribly depressing.
Tunneling Scanning Electron Microscope (Score:5, Interesting)
With the help of a electrical engineering group at Michigan State University we overcame the problems and I decided to modify the original design to use GXSM, a powerful open source electron microscope software package that is Linux only. This required adding a sranger digital signal processing board and stepping up the input/output voltages for the piezo crystals. Amazingly, almost all the work was done by myself or fellow students, MSU only guided us in understanding the circuit diagrams, making small adjustments, fixing the errors in the plans and designing/building the stepping circuits for my modifications.
I have some really great memories, spending all day in the basement lab I had set up, eating pizza while skipping all my classes with permission from the principal, "accidentally" burning my long time enemy with the soldering iron, ripping a chunk of my finger off jumping a network wiring cage to connect the main computer to the internet.
Working with the electronics and science was very interesting, but the most valuable experience came from lobbying for the funding from local government, assembling a team of fellow students to work on the project and starting a Nanotechnology elective class to actually use the damn thing. Eventually, former State Senator Virg Bernero (now Mayor of Lansing, Michigan) convinced BioPort (the company that makes the Anthrax vaccine) to provide the majority of the funds.
The project eventually inspired local university and government leaders (I wouldn't stop bugging them
I'm 19 years old, and thanks to the Slashdot article "build your own electron microscope" I've actually become something I'm proud of. I've built a tunneling scanning electron microscope, lobbied for funding and government support, founded a Nanotechnology class at Everett High School with help from a amazing science teacher who now is inspiring the class to even greater things while developing a soon to be accredited curriculum, hired as a contract consultant by a company in silicon valley, been sent overseas, all expenses paid to a nanotube conference in Japan by the same company and I now work at M.S.U. as the only employee in a new Nanotechnology supporting office at the college of Engineering. (There is also some other stuff I'm not allowed to speak of.)
I've met very important people from NASA's JPL, IBM, Oxford, Harvard and founders/pioneers of Nanotechnology.
In my free time, I lobby for the creation of a Michigan Institute of Nanotechnology, which will become the center of Nanotechnology in the state, facilitating the cooperation of private industry, research, academia and government to create jobs, businesses, breakthroughs and secure a portion of the world economy for ourselves. It already has a extremely wide and powerful base of support.
Not bad for someone who graduated with a 2.5 GPA.
Links (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Pneumatic scat launcher (Score:4, Interesting)
An NPR demo reel. (Score:2)
Back in 2001/2002 or thereabouts, there was a film festival in the art department. I spent several weeks making a nonphotorealistic (cartoon-style) demo reel. I wrote some PHP scripts to generate the RIB files, wrote a pair of shaders (for cel-color and edge generation), and generated a couple of megabytes of scene description to feed into BMRT. (I even wrote a shader which made that red-yellow-and-blue Pixar ball, the one in the lower-right here [wikipedia.org], procedur
I built a model Maglev. (Score:4, Interesting)
Fast forward to college. Senior project and after taking all the courses in logic, programming, processors, etc I then found out what I could use to make my toy work. So, I spoke to my advisor, he loved the idea. I spent that summer winding coils with 26 gauge wire. I made a length of track two feet long and I it used 48 coils. I used sewing machine bobbins as the sizing. I cut a 3/4" pvc pipe so that I could slide in each coil and get to the leads. This gave me four sections of track, each with 12 coils. The coils were wired in series so that we had a pattern ABCABCABCABC. The logic I built would pulse the A group at 12v, the B group at 9v and the C group at 6v. This created a "wave" that would "push" the train in the desired direction. To go the other direction, all you had to do was flip a DPDT relay and switch A with C.
The brains were provided by a Parallax Stamp 2. This thing was great. I could have multiple inputs and outputs to make everything work. I used som buffers to make sure I didnt kill the chip with draw and I used logic to drive transistors that tripped 12v relays for the juice. When working, the train could go one direction or the other, depending on how the coils were energized. Since the track was only 24" long, I used optical led sets to detect where the car was. These inputs were fed into the stamp. Based on direction and track section the car was on, the group of 12 coils were the car left was turned off, and the section the train was about to enter was turned on. Of course, there were always two sections on so if the train was in section 2 going to section 3, then the stamp knew to switch off 1 and turn on 3, leaving 2 running. The car was pulsed slow, so it had time. Was not as smooth as I liked.
Had to use a huge power supply, 12v 30a, tho I think it only used between 8 and 10. I still have it on a shelf behind me. Maybe one day I'll dust it off and see how I can improve on it. It blew away everyone else's project. Once I started the car rolling, it would happily go back and forth all day long. It was stable (temperature wise) and if you ignored the clacking relays, it was fun to watch.
It is not the coolest thing I've ever worked on or designed, but in terms of what I put into it and the fact it was my brainchild, I'm totally thrilled with it to this day.
A Yurt (Score:2)
Yup. A yurt.
It was actually a pretty geeky project, too. I designed most of it in Maple.
An ethanol still (Score:2)
Previous to that, I built one of the first carputers (the DashPC [dashpc.com]) back in 1999 (it was slashdotted 3 times).
My next project is to make our new project car run on my own homemade E100. It's a 1995 Ford Festiva that gets about 50 MPG right now.
My coolest... (Score:2)
Car stuff (Score:2)
Though a lot of people think it's that incense burner I made from a pringles can.
A clock radio! (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course they were accidents waiting to happen and I am surprised we never burnt our respective apartments down. But hey for 12 year olds back in 1973 it was great fun!
Material things? (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a tie-breaking rule -- if no objectives were completed, whoever got furthest up the hill won.
So, figuring that nobody's machine would work perfectly, we built a car that ignored every objective but was lightening quick and used all of the allowed mousetraps to either propel itself or flip the other car over.
Our plan worked flawlessly, and in the last round we knocked the over car almost completely off the hill.
I see it as the ultimate engineering victory -- finding the easiest/cheapest way to accomplish a task in a competitive environment. Although I do think the organizers were a bit disappointed that we won.
Matrix BulletTime on the cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't build it all myself, I was just on the team, but we made a rig that simulated the Matrix BulletTime effect using 32 $20 Mattel Barbie digital cameras. The cameras were mounted on foam core and corrugated plastic, arranged in a big circle, and we used truck mirrors to get a wide angle effect. All the cameras were wired to a central triggering circuit, and we used a garage door opener as a remote control. You would go into the center of the circle with your friends and some props, do something crazy, and hit the remote. The cameras would fire --- then all the pictures would be sent to a printer which would print out a flip-book on cardstock so that you could see a low-tech animation of yourself spinning around doing whatever.
Here's some propaganda about the project. [maya.com]
In the 5th grade (Score:3, Interesting)
they were essentially the bottoms of paper dixie cups, I crammed powdered coal into them with electrodes at each end and taped them up. Ran a current into them. As you spoke, the sound waves compressed the carbon allowing the current to run faster or slower through the carbon.
Worked great. Wasn't too sensitive so it didn't pick up whispers and stuff.
Sferics Recorder (Score:5, Insightful)
It also got me a college scholarship to get into a physics program, which I wouldn't have gotten any other way. So, now you know how I came to be spending my Saturday afternoon typing into Slashdot.
FPGA integer factorization implementation (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Lenstra's Elliptic Curve Method (ECM) of integer factorization.
2. Fermat's method of integer factorization.
It turns out that the ECM design was far too large to fit into any existing FPGA, so I now have two different FPGA development boards running Fermat's factorization method on RSA-704 and RSA-768 respectively. Yes, I know the Sun will engulf the earth before either FPGA development board comes up with an answer, but they both display a lot of pretty colored blinking lights while doing the calculations so they make a great conversation piece - Har.
Fusion reactor (Score:3)
I win (Score:5, Funny)
Smoke screen on my car. (Score:3, Funny)
I was interested in putting a skywriting system on one of my RC airplanes. The kits were expensive so I looked into the methods used by the old-timers on real airplanes. A common DIY method back in the day was to pump a 50/50 mixture of diesel and transmission fluid right into the engines exhaust headers. My first thought was "Forget the airplane, this would work on my car!" I ran down to the hardware store and bought some brake lines(metal tubes threaded on the end), fuel hose, 1-gal Gas can, etc. Then I ran to the wrecking yard and pulled the first electric fuel pump I found. The whole project was easily under $20 at the time.
I drilled holes in all 8 exhaust headers of my Firebird as close as I could to the manifold and tapped them so I could thread in the brake-lines. I ran them all back to the electric fuel pump, which then lead to the gas can. I filled the gas can up faithfully following the 50:50 Diesel/Tranny-fluid mix and set out to test it on some abandoned logging roads.
On the drive there I was thinking about what I might need change to improve it. Would the fuel pump be enough? Will I need to slightly constrict the shorter hoses so the mixture reaches all the headers simultaneously? Will I need to adjust the mixture?
The first test worked so ridiculously well that I never bothered optimizing anything. Thick, white smoke filled up both lanes of the access-road nearly to the tops of the trees. I had to wait several minutes for the smoke to clear before I could drive back through it..
I used it responsibly for the most part (if that's even possible) but you just can't have something like that when you're in High school. I remember one friend borrowing my car at lunch and completely shutting down traffic for about 10 min. on the highway in front of our High-school. Another time I was at the movie theater parking lot and a crowd of "popular kids" from school begged to see it. I revved the engine and fired off a "small puff" while parked. Two police cars showed up when the saw the 300' "mushroom cloud" over the theater and I had to convince them that the rings were going bad but the car only smoked "sometimes." Yet another time a "friend" hit the switch when I wasn't looking at a stop light in downtown Portland. I looked back to see what all the honking is about and I see no cars, no buildings, just a while cloud. The rest of that story is a calamity that I don't care to elaborate on. I will say that nobody was hurt, though.
I dismantled it after that and never made another. The fun/stress ratio wasn't even close to being worth it.
Rockets (Score:5, Interesting)
The best rocket I ever made was a scale model of the BOMARC, one of the first cruise missiles in the US arsenal. I spent weeks making sure every detail was perfect, it looked beautiful, even the paint job was polished to mirror-like perfection (very difficult for a 12 year old kid like me to achieve). The aerodynamics looked good, although scale model kits were notorious for poor flight qualities since sacrifices were made for the sake of accurate design. But I managed to static test the rocket until it worked right, this was done by attaching a long piece of string to the rocket's center of gravity, then whirling it around at the end of 20 feet of string, watching its flight dynamics until you puked from dizziness. A little trim balancing here, a little added weight there, and everything was perfect.
In fact, so perfect I didn't want to launch it. I hung the rocket from my bedroom ceiling, where I fondly gazed at it every night as I lay in bed. Eventually I decided I had to see it fly. But to minimize the risk, the first flight would be a small rocket engine, I didn't want to shoot it up 2000 feet and maybe never see it again, a small 200ft flight would be sufficient. Whenever I set up my launch pad, all the neighborhood kids would suddenly show up to watch the launch. 3..2..1.. blastoff! It popped up, the engine ejected, and the BOMARC flew in a perfect spiral about one block in diameter. All the kids started chasing after it, back and forth, as it lazily spiraled around up out of their reach, I laughed and laughed. I stood right by the launch pad as the rocket started coming down, it looked like it would land almost at my feet.. and it DID! And then one of the kids chasing it STOMPED right on top of it, smashing my beautiful rocket to bits! Dammit!
I think I gave up building rockets after that, my heart wasn't in it anymore.
Oh yeah.. I do recall building one cool rocket, once I was an adult. I found out that ultra high performance engines had come on the market, I think this was the late 1970s. No more wimpy Estes D engines, these were E, F and G engines. I heard there was a 2 stage rocket kit that would break the sound barrier, so I ordered one. IIRC, it was a G engine with a D on top of it. No sense in buying more than one set of engines, this kit would go up thousands of feet and come down miles away, I'd never see it again. The fins were made of composite balsa plywood, regular plywood would just break apart when it hit the sound barrier. The fins had to be epoxied carefully to the body tube with perfect fillets, construction details were crucial, the kit instructions said that the slightest flaw would cause the rocket to break up and smash INTO the sound barrier, rather than through it. It also recommended not painting the rocket as the least imbalance (i.e. more paint on one side than the other) would have an adverse effect.
So I built the rocket, and my friends got together so we could launch it. We had to find a big field because you were supposed to stand at a specific distance away (~250 ft IIRC) so you'd be in the right spot to hear the faint sonic boom. We brought a long tape measure to mark off the distance precisely. I only had 20 feet of wire to run to the electronic igniter, so we drew straws on who would launch, the poor sap who pressed the button woul
MFG machine (Score:3, Interesting)
** cement is fed into a spinning mold by a complex feeder (my part of the project) that rolls on small train rails, then put in to a steam room. 4 hours later you have a pipe outside the mold "curing" in the sun.
A Pan flute. (Score:3, Interesting)
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