Mechanical ability

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How many others enjoy fixing , making things and just generally tinkering with stuff
Like this
http://www.hackaday.com/
http://hackedgadgets.com/
http://www.makezine.com/

I enjoy both of those sites and try some of the projects curious if there are others out there
If anyone is really interested PM me

Me. I tinker with everything...broken lawn mowers, computers, digital cameras, game consoles, vacuums...the list goes on and on. If I can find a way to get it apart I will.

It isn't broken until I say it is...then I usually save the parts.

My dad used to give me broken clocks and some tools...kept me quite for hours.

Wow, those websites rock butt.

As I've stated in a few of my other posts, I LOVE working with machinery.

Oh sweet Jesus HELP ME THEN!

I only went to special make up effects school because I KNEW I needed to learn animatronics hands on.

They did not teach cable control work like they were supposed to. I'm curently taking a correspondence Advanced course with a private Mentor but I CANT get it.

I'm a puppetter . I want to improve my puppets to the point of being like the Gremlins.

I have dyscalcula, never took algebra and failed every math course I was ever in.

For months I've been trying to figure out how to do a left to right eye movement . I've emailed the local ventriloquist dummy museum and beggeed for a tutor. I email my mentor and hes no help at all.

I finally took all the explinations I've gotten at RC airplane hobby stores, my Engineer landlord, other guys locally whove done special effects and have half a dozen eye mock ups that PARTIALLY work. What I really need is to try to figure out a way to make them blink.

I can sculpt and mold just about anything, but I cant put it all together.

I even ordered a dozen "punching Nun " puppets to reverse engineer here at home.

I need hands on. Normally I could care less about math and stuff. It has limited my job choices and such but THIS is something I've always dreamed of being able to do.


How I eveny you guys. I tried. As far back as a teen when I would make space ship models. i went to raido shack and bought the books and diodes and what not. Never took. Its my major learning disability.
Damn That school . . . .

Made anything lately? Here is an example of some projects
Home foundry that melts Aluminum

I'm pretty much the same way. It amuses me that I have a greater than 50% success rate fixing random things I might have never even fiddled with before. I love general troubleshooting.

My autistic son is very rough on DVD players; their expected life with him is in the neighborhood of months; I have a stack of dead ones stored in the loft, with other various dead things waiting to be cannibalized. Recently I noticed that they're not putting tuners in DVD/VCR units anymore; I like to look at that stack of dead DVD players and see a stack of tuners which are no longer standard issue; surplus stockpile score!

Good fortune,

- Icarus is a serial tinkerer...

Oh, I certainly do.

I've done a lot of projects, including a small hovercraft (using a leaf-blower for power an a drop-cloth skirt), a remote-controlled robot, and I'm currently working on a more advanced robot with some basic autonomous capabilities.

Cool hand casting parts!

Haven't been tinkering too much as of late...fixed the neighbors digital camera and mom's dryer that's about it. Been a bit cold for "curbside pickups" too I think...nothing good out lately.

Need to have a yard sale as soon as the weather warms up...get the herd of vacuums, mowers, and gas weed eaters thinned out a little.

Still looking through these sites...

My parents always refered to my bedroom as the lab/workshop when I lived at home. I always have a dozen projects going.

*jaw drops*

Cool!

I fix things for a living... given time, and some peace and quiet, I can usually do ok...

Since I'm stiil trying to figure out animatronics I keep my eye out when ever a holiday come by. I missed a couple of GREAT halloween decorations.

I saw at Wal Mart today a singing frog with lsft to right eye movement and rubber skin. I also saw a flirting cat with blinking action. Hopefully theyll still be around by the end of Valentines Day becaus eI'm not paying full price for them.

Now how to combine those two features on the same puppet. PLUS the blinking cat had the problem I was afraid of. He eyelids are hard platic ans theres a big gap at the top of the eye socket where it rolls back into the head.

I've thought about buying that Chimps alive but its all done with servos. I want cable control!

By the way nice foundry work with the aluminum. Thats how I first discovered mold making and thinking in the negative.

i love putting together Gundam Modelkits and figureing out how to Transform Transformers lol

joke time: id10t error!

When at festivals last summer, there were thousands of used nitrous cylinders littering the ground, so I collected up a couple of sack fulls, bought a MIG welder, and proceded to make sculptures from them. Never done welding before, but it's come in handy for a few other things (and I love my huge red leather gauntlets).

I've found over the years that I have no use for a toolbox, as my tools spend more time out of it than in it, and besides, they wouldn't all fit, so I got an old office desk and filled all the draws (5 on each side and a big one with 2 layers in the middle) and shelves around it with tools. My screwdriver has 60 bits, and there are only a couple I've not used.

Fixes of notable mention: A 19" monitor that lost all green signal, fixed by switching parts of the green circuit with the red, and tracing along it until I found the broken component. Soldering a broken surface mount scale connector of over 100 connections in a laptop computer, using pipe screen as solder wick. Stripping the Briggs and Stratton 1.2HP petrol engine on a non functioning cylinder lawn mower at the age of 12, and getting it working on the first pull of the pull-crank.

My childhood heros are Richard Scarry's Mr Fixit (The Fox), and Ted Glenn from Postman Pat (theme tune 'Leave It With Me'), and I was reading technical manuals and understanding how machines worked before I could understand the writing. I had my spacial awareness tested as part of an assesment by an employment psychologist, and scored higher than 99% of university entrants for art, design and engineering courses (the test didn't have a 100%). When I was a child my parents had to go to great lengths to hide any screwdrivers, or I'd disassemble the VCR to find to out how it worked (it still worked after I'd put it back together again, in fact half the time I can fix things just by taking them apart and putting them together again).