What is the craziest build idea you ever had ?

[mjncad]

I made a pop bottle rocket pistol out of wood when I was a kid to shoot at birds with. It was used once and that was enough to convince me that I had a stupid idea and was even dumber to build it, and even more idiotic to try it.

I was lucky I didn't lose an eye or two from the rocket exhaust since there wasn't much if any blast shield on it.

 

[chickenman]

don't know if its crazy, but i was crazy for thinking this would be easier to build and debug than it was

its a stone picker that wound up working surprisingly well

 

[EddieWalker]

Way back when I was still in grade school, I got the idea that all wires were the same and that telephones could be plugged into wall sockets. We had two phones in our house and I wanted to have one in the garage. I found an old extension cord and cut the end off of it, and then wired it into a phone. Before I could test out my little experiment, my Dad came home and stopped me. I don't know what would have happened, but I did learn about the difference between phone lines and power lines.

After Star Wars came out, I got the idea to build my own Battle Star. I gathered all sorts of wood and four wheels. During the build, it got so heavy that the axles broke. I had delusions of being able to pull it down the road with bicycles, but it was so heavy that it never moved from where it was built. We played in it for awhile, but it had to be disassembled to remove it.

Every attempt at building an underwater fort failed. Getting air from a pipe into a wooden box never worked.

Some of my recent failures include welding rebar onto the rake on my dozer to catch small branches. The rebar just fell apart within an hour. Building my own grapple that worked on the existing hydraulics. While it did work, it had allot of issues that were causing other problems that were cracking parts of the bucket and cylinders. Attaching a skid steer quick attack to my loader. I'm still working on this one as I have thousands into it and really want it to work out. Somewhere there's an answer to this, but I'm too lazy and distracted with other things to figure it out.

Eddie

PS. FarmerFord, Great story. I love it that your parents found your submarine at the bottom of the pond. We dug tunnels as a kid like we saw on our favorite TV show, Hogans Heroes. When my parents found them, they freaked out like I never saw before.

 

[mopacman]

Eddie I like your phone story. Years ago when working on the railroad the vice president of the railroad came to town in his private rail car. I was sent to hook up the power and phone. When I got their the carmen told me that every thing had already been hooked up. The next day I was called to the office and the chewing began. I told them what happened. They said it worked ok till the vice president pick up the phone to make a call then the phone whent up in smoke. Back then the phone and 110 used the same type of plug which were used only on the RR..............Larry

 

[amashinga]

I made a pop bottle rocket pistol out of wood when I was a kid to shoot at birds with. It was used once and that was enough to convince me that I had a stupid idea and was even dumber to build it, and even more idiotic to try it.

I see we are digging back into our youth. I am gonna dig out a few stories that make peoples toes curl. The thing is I grew up in a very different world to the one I now live in. Farms and villages in the heart of the Zulu tribal areas in Southern Africa. It was always hot, and kids were expected to only speak to adults when spoken to, and make themselves scarce after breakfast,
take lunch in the kitchen, and only re-appear for dinner. Every kid had a .22 or a 12 guage, and we were expected to be roaming vermin control. I would grab my shotgun, a beat up old westley richards and take one of the farm motor bikes. This was before I even hit junior high. Dont ask me how I did not kill myself

Anyway, on to the projects.

A timed napalm bomb using a mixture of gasoline and liquid soap. The detonator was a .22 with the bullet removed and the powder plugged in with wax. It was aimed downwards, and the "timing" was provided by means of a kerosene soaked plug that took a while to melt the wax and ignite the powder, which then flared downwards into the mixture.

Hand grenades made with shotgun shells turned backwards, and inserted into a pipe. A stick with fins was attached to the pipe to provide drag, like a bottle rocket. This was then thrown and usually had satisfactory results.

A friend of mine built a black powder "handgun" out of galvanised pipe that fired a "C" battery. The result was a visibly stressed pipe, a battery that now orbits the space station, and a hairline fracture in his wrist. He used black powder that was used to reload shotgun shells for guns with damascus barrels thankfully. I hate to think what would happen if he had used a nitro based powder.

A crossbow made from surgical rubber that fired thin steel shafts.

And just so you dont think we were all a bunch of psychotic pyromaniacs

numerous go carts, a "choppper" bycicle, many many wire cars which were the bread and butter toy for kids of all ages wire car, tree houses, forts and the list goes on.

For all the completely stupid things we did, I never came as close to killing myself as I did when a supposedly safe pontoon raft built by an adult sank with me fully clothed. I did learn a lesson. Pontoons made from old drums might be safe today, but they rust, and dont stay safe forever.

Anyway, my trip to a fond childhood, MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL

Bruce

 

[Renze]

Hmm... When Fendt started advertising their Vario transmissions in 1996, i spent lots of hours designing a worm gear type CVT with a conical worm gear. Project was abandoned because i couldnt figure out a way to get a universal gear shape which would contact the worm gear at any position/ratio.

I did build a 3pt lift and a dirt scoop for my pedal go kart when i was 13.. i also built a canopy for it when i was 9...

During technical school, i studied a way of using waste heat from the sewers to defrost roads in the winter: It would save a lot of salt and night labour to keep those roads frozen, and pouring sewers into the base of the road would be cheaper than laying pipes and making the road as well..
Project abandoned because there was not enough heat in poo to keep stuff defrost in severe frost, if the sewer would get frozen, we'd have an even bigger problem...

When i was 18 i have also investigated the idea of laminating old silage plastic cover over chicken coop wire mesh, to make a skin for aluminium framed airplane wings, which should have been powered by a 200hp Volvo 2.3 turbo 4 cylinder car engine. Lack of resources, foreseeeable problems with local air control, and a lack of landing ground in the bush around here, made me abandon that idea.

My latest crazy idea was building a medium sized, PTO driven rock crusher, preliminary sketches are found in another thread in this forum, project abandoned because of lack of time, and because the necessary materials are too expensive to buy new, and i havent bumped into a batch of used I beams with 1" flanges.

 

[tatra805]

Ok, although new to the forum i cant resist to join in on this one

As a kid i got some genial ideas where i know wonder how i never broke a bone and only ended up with small scars.

One day i made an elevator to lift myself 3 meters in the air. Simple construction of a rope and a lightweight metal basket. Rope went over a metal beam 3 meters up and i pulled myself up.... at 2,5 meter i must have been too tired and decided it was time to find out the basics about friction and heat generation. The fold of my fingers and my palm (so opposite side of the knuckles) cut till the tendons but no bleeding as everything was nicely burned close...

About the same time i decided to built my own pole-house. The poles were railway beams which we had laying around. After digging the first 1 meter deep hole i was already attacked multiple times by our ram and then found out i could not lift the beam high enough to drop into the hole. Abandoned project, again.

Some time later i decided to cut my pedal-go cart to make it a bit longer and to put an engine on. Besides cutting the frame the project halted because i did not have an engine (and a million other things i realized much later). The success story resulting from this was the conversion of my bicycle trailer to 4 wheel but not tandem axle but the pivoting axle type as nowadays found on agricultural trailers. This was after breaking the original axle when helping the village workers with cleaning the, that time, open canalization in our neighbourhood by hauling loads of dirt. Heavy work for me and my bicycle but big fun for the workers (which were there with tractor and 3 axle dumptrailer)

Years later i became more "electrical" orientated. Looking back at the diverse projects i am sure my parents had long sleepless nights wondering if they smelled something burning. In any case a good project was a solar station for our scouting group which involved solar cells, converter, chargers etc all build from separate electronic kits. The thing worked great and was although not the most efficient system a multi-source UPS. (Users alsways on inverter power and 220 from mains or generator or the solar panels were charging the batteries/ feeding the inverter).

In that time i also made complete domotica concept for my room, searching through catalogs of components and kits for each and every detail in the system working it out to parts lists, schematics etc . This was nevertheless not approved by my parents to become reality. Crazy for a 16 year old but realistic.

The last crazy plan looks as a husky 12v winch powered by 2 optima yellow top batteries which are charged by a car alternator which is driven by the PTO of the Iseki.
All the above mounted on a 3pt carrier. The components i have laying, and as i know zero about hydraulics it looks way easier / cheaper to do than to find a hydraulic engine and valve block to convert the winch to hydraulics. Help me please as i will in the end or come to a perpetuum mobile or create a new thread to global warming with all these energy losses.



Btw, did you know that with the right amount of WD40 sprayed on your bicycle brakepads and the tension of the brake lever set at the right position you get a grip-loose-grip effect of the brakepads which basically is working as ABS. It works for short time (so attach the WD40 can to your frame and spray as you drive) and results are much more dramatic in a turn with the ABS system applied to the front wheel. ... I was around 14 then and the man with his moped coming from the other direction might argue the fact that ABS shortens brake distances. (20$ to take the dent out of his fueltank)

 

[Travelover]

When I was a kid we used to make hydrogen by mixing lye and aluminum foil in a pop bottle. Slip a balloon over the top of the bottle and you could fill the balloon with hydrogen gas. We'd tie a couple of these balloons together with a piece of cotton string, which was lit on one end. The balloons would rise into the sky until that string burned down to the balloon, then they'd flash off with a nice report.

The bottle gets really hot from the chemical reaction and we were lucky it never broke and burned us with the lye or that the hydrogen never ignited in the bottle. I'm lucky to be a healthy, 10 fingered adult.

 

[foggy1111]

As I remember it......When I was a young lad....my Dad had a group of about 3 welders working for him....and I would help out doing some grunt work on Saturdays and such. One of these welders was not only a fantastic welder....but a genuine practical joker. One day he put a "little" car washing soap in an old hub cab and made a small pile of bubbles with the oxygen and acetylene from a torch.....and when I walked by....he tossed a match in the bubbles and the resulting explosion scared the XXXX outta me.

So....not to be outdone (remember I was about 14) I waited for break time....and when those guys came back in the door I had this "huge" pile of explosive bubbles awaiting my match....and tossed a match in the bubbles. As I remember.....I rattled the overhead doors and blew out a couple windows and I think I blew out those guys ear drums (and my own) with the resulting explosion (don't try this at home). Them 'ole boys were pretty careful after that with the practical jokes on "the kid".

 

[mjncad]

This thread is a hoot!

My mother told me of the time she pee'd into a can of lye as a kid. She didn't try again and she was fortunate no permanent damage occurred.

When I was a kid, there were real service stations and I remember a couple of us were rooting around the trash bins when we came across a jug with some green antifreeze in it. Well we pee'd into it, and although there was no spectacular explosive chemical reaction; the pee-antifreeze concoction turned red.