What is the craziest build idea you ever had ?

[amashinga]

Inventors, tinkerers and many farmers are lateral thinkers. They have to be, since they are attempting to solve problems with the materials at hand, unless they are fortunate enough to have a lot more cash than most.

I tend to be one of those folks who come up with the idea first, and then think it through and research the details. Many many of my "projects" never get past this phase. Boy have I had some crazy stupid ideas

Probably the worst: I figured I could build a post digger by attaching an auger onto the front of a FEL with a ratchet drive mechanism similar to a yankee screwdriver, using the weight of the tractor and fel box to drive it .... yeah maybe not. That idea was scrapped when I realised how unstable the whole rig would get when the front started lifting, and that it was impossible to brace against this lift

So what are some of the craziest ideas you have had. Stories involving actual explosions get extra rep

 

[WantedWolf]

Until you mentioned the explosions I thought you might have ties to the patent office .lol
when I was a kid probably the craziest thing i ever "built" was a 3.5hp mower engine go cart the wheels were plastic the engine had some metal but EVERYTHING else was wood
???no one wanted to ride in it??? I still have the cart and engine although now 2 seperate parts
this could be a good thread

 

[amashinga]

Until you mentioned the explosions I thought you might have ties to the patent office .lol
when I was a kid probably the craziest thing i ever "built" was a 3.5hp mower engine go cart the wheels were plastic the engine had some metal but EVERYTHING else was wood
???no one wanted to ride in it??? I still have the cart and engine although now 2 seperate parts
this could be a good thread

Hahahaha, reminds me of something every kid had in my part of the world, a ball racer. It was a low profile simple go cart with ball bearings as wheels. The steel on asphalt meant that turning was one huge arcing slide. 5 kids drifting down the meanest hill we could find was some sight. ****, we invented this drift racing concept well before the video games people caught on

 

[Farmerford]

In the mid 1950's, as a young teenager on a Georgia farm, I secretly built a submarine out of 55 gal drums and put it (with me inside) in the farm pond. I could not even spell center of gravity or center of buoyancy, much less understand the concepts, and, naturally, with no keel to offset the conning tower, it immediately turned turtle and sank (with me inside) in 10' of water. I managed (barely) to escape drowning, and thought my secret was safe. Then, several days later lots of dead fish (like all the fish in the pond) started floating on the surface. Dad drained the pond to clean and restock it and there on the bottom lay my DIY submarine, made of cotton defoliant drums. Mom was thrilled I had not drowned, but Dad took a different view.

I still have not figured how the residue in those drums killed the fish, but had no effect on me. Then again, maybe it did.

 

[jimmer2880]

I don't know if this qualifies. But - about 15 years ago, my (now ex)brother-in-law & I built this for moving mobile homes (14'x75') to "high ground".

It's a 1969 (or '71 - I can't remember) Chevy C50, with a junkyard Chevy 305 7-cylinder (originally 8, but one cylinder has very low compression). We then welded a forklift mast onto the rear. It still runs and the forklift mast has come in very handy for more than just moving trailers.

On the front, we welded 2.5"x2.5" square tubing, and have 2"x2" inside to hold the mirrors on. This gives us the ability to move the mirrors to 16' apart.

She isn't pretty, but it gets the job done. When the river is coming up, there's no better truck. We can hook onto a 75' mobile home, fully blocked and have it in higher ground in 15 minutes flat.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Marshmall

 

[bobodu]

My wife found this go cart frame down the road with a "FREE" sign on it. God Bless her heart,she called me right away. It needed an engine but I had a fan cooled 440 Kawasaki snowmobile engine....
I thought I had the torque converter geometry messed up because it felt like the drive wasn't catching up with the engine rpms. Finally got it moving around the yard FAST.Got back to where I had started and saw the ruts....
After playing around with it for a few weeks,I put the motor back on the shelf and dismantled the thing for parts to use on a safer project.

 

[bobodu]

The fully automatic car stopper didn't work either.

Nor did it work when applied to a locomotive!....RATS.

Both of these pictures were taken within half a mile from my house.

 

[F.L. Jennings]

Being in the past a journeyman tool and diemaker and for the past 40 years involved in engineering design I have had plenty of good ideas and probably just as many sour ones. To take the cake though, the prize goes to a friend of mine, possibly now deceased since I have not seen or heard of him in many years. His name is Felton Brakebill.

Felton is a machinist and an amateur gunsmith. In his tinkerings he recalled the idiocy of his youth when he would make a sandwich of railroad torpedo material with two tie plates as the bread. This was wired together and dropped from a railroad trestle whereupon the resulting explosion would throw one of the tie plates 100 feet into the air while in true jackass tradition he would lean back cackling with deranged glee and youthful stupidity while observing its ascent and descent. You can imagine what the result would have been had one of the 8lb. plates landed on him. Of course he would have been safe had it landed on his head.

Felton took that idea and incorporated it into another dubious invention. As a reloader, he would take a 12ga. shotgun slug which has a hollow base and seat this same railroad torpedo mixture there. On top of this material he would lightly seat a lead washer wedged over the explosive.

The fearsome projectile was then loaded into a shotgun shell. He made up several of these and went with a buddy down to the Arkansas River above Litttle Rock to try it out. He sat a 5 gallon can of gasoline on the dirt road along the river about fifty feet or so away and then fired one of these projectiles at it. The result was a vertical stream of fire 50 feet tall with a large diameter fiery mushroom at the top of it. He told me "I thought that we had set the world on fire!" They ran and jumped into their pickup and sped into the night before the cops arrived and were sure every one within 5 miles had seen this huge fire ball in the dark night.

Felton loaded these red neck stinger missles up for several of his reloading customers. "Where ever you hit a deer with one, it killed him" he laughed, "in the leg, in the shoulder no matter, it just killed him on the spot. You never had to go look for one, they always just dropped in their tracks." Some deer were actually seen to be knocked sideways by the explosive force of the "torpedo slugs."

Good job Felton! They just don't make em' like you anymore son! Every time I think of Felton I can see him speeding away from that firey mushroom cloud.

A Laurel wreath for your head ( and a good hard hat) if you're still around!



.....FLJ...

 

[CurlyDave]

The absolute craziest idea I ever had was about 30 years ago when a friend and I had bought 60 acres about 2 miles from the CA coast.

We had dreams and plans for great wealth through subdividing the land and selling six 10-acre lots.

The first problem we had was that CA was in one of its periodic drought phases and we needed to have water for all the parcels. The previous owner had drilled a well on the property, but it had come up dry and he had abandoned the well. So we had an empty well shaft 300 feet deep and 1 foot in diameter.

My first thought was to fracture the surrounding rock with an explosion. Remember , this was the days before the internet, so looking up stuff for this kind of project was not particularly easy.

Since I am a Chemical Engineer, I knew the formula for Ammonium Nitrate-Fuel Oil explosives. We figured we would make up 200 cubic feet or so, maybe 8 cubic yards of ANFO, dump it down the hole, set a cherry bomb on top of it to provide a detonator, light it off and run like he11. Actually, I was smarter than that, and decided to put a layer of railroad ties in the bed of a pickup truck, and crawl under under the truck until things settled down.

Somewhere along the line sanity started to creep back in and I started realizing that this was going to be over six tons of explosive, and even though it might be low-grade explosive, that is still a whale of a lot of bang. And I realized that we would be making a giant cannon pointed straight up in the air. Then there was the cost of the raw materials. And, I remembered one of the rules I had made for myself in college, i.e. whenever making explosives for the first time make much less than a gram.

The last problem was that I remembered an experience with a pipe that had a lot of muddy corrosion on the inside. When pressurized with air, and suddenly released, the effect was something like a mud shotgun. I came to believe that the explosion would cause a massive discharge of dirt and rocks of unknown sizes, straight up in the air.

So, we chickened out before we actually bought the Ammonium Nitrate. Probably saved my life.

 

[john_bud]

Golf driver with a sliding face plate that can go forward about 1" on sturdy hardened steel pins captured inside the club head. A hole on the top of the club head where you would add in 2-3 drops of Nitro glycerine. Put in your ear plugs and make a slow putter style swing and POWWWW!~ you just out drove Tiger by 100 yards.

jb