Re: crude childhood submersible death-trap fun

[David Buchner <Buchner@wcta.net>]

Michael B Holt wrote:
[responding to: How many kids did this stuff, and are any of them very
successful (i.e., do they spend all week pounding nails into dad's boat and
then it keeps tipping over and sinking and they give up and leave it on the
bottom?)? And are kids still doing things like this, or is it all TV and
videogames now?]
>
>Nothing I ever did worked right.   Well, it sort of worked right.
>
>I tried to interest my son and his buddies in this sort of thing.   He
>never did anything.   Spent too much time playing Star Wars games.

The sailboat with the outboard didn't sink, but it tried to come apart
going that fast, and a fountain of water shot out of the centerboard box
and ten feet into the air. We wrapped our ultralight wing frame (of
expensive cedar and styrofoam reinforced with fiberglass) in bedsheets and
flew it as a kite until it was smashed. We spent more time in less-clever,
more-destructive projects, like smashinig up $50 cars and dragging stuff
down the road behind 3-wheelers to see how long it would last. Baby
strollers. We made cannons to fire tennis balls propelled by black powder.
And we blew a lot of stuff up. And we built a hot air balloon out of
plastic dropcloths, which flew into the next county and was chased by the
Civil Air Patrol and widely reported as manned, as a flying saucer, or as
on fire (the most likely). But that all probably accounts for at most a
month or two of my life, if you total up the hours. The balance I think we
spent watching "Magnum, PI."

What does this have to do with personal submersibles? I'm not sure, except
maybe just random recollections about the roots of crazy tinkering and
inventing and having people at the hardware store ask, "What are you going
to use it for?" And parents naively ask, "You boys aren't doing anything
dangerous, are you?" And how it's much easier for a person of my...
generation or whatever... to imagine and talk about doing something than to
actually spend money and work out problems and actually assemble it.
Possibly safer that way, too.


---------
David
buchner@wcta.net
http://customer.wcta.net/buchner
Osage MN USA