Shop Time w/T.W. Friends

4 forms of ID to get in to this place.

 

I got in through the back door. Thanks for leaving it unlocked

 

Was going to pull this trailer in and weld on it, fenders hit the shop. Oh well, it’ll quit raining one day

 

Sawsall??

 

Card access got added to one of our buildings to secure it. They prop the door open with a 2x4.

 

Now I just gotta hit it with the flapper and paint

 

Lol

"The war of currents"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents

And that barely touches on how he literally pushed Tesla to go crazy... Tesla was a great inventor, Edison was a great politician. And politicians don't deserve to be celebrated.

 

I don't celebrate, just report.

 

Honestly, that's really mild.

Things always started getting more serious when we brought out the 5 gallon buckets.

Trick was to hit the ramp to get air, sort of an assisted bunny hop, but not use the ramp, because the gallon bucket would shoot out and make a scene for everyone watching. Which was half the fun.

 

At around age 10 we would take a rusty metal Radio Flyer wagon and pull it up a giant paved hill to ride down.
The street had a stop sign at the bottom, cross traffic didn't have to stop.

We rigged up a caliper brake on one wheel - pulling the lever would make it either fall off or occasionally lock up the wheel, neither of which provided any measurable stopping power.

We managed to rip off both wheel sets and have the bolt come out of the handle, we just kept putting it back together and riding down again.

As an adult I have driven on said hill and though what the were we thinking...

 

Growing up in Minnesota my dad had a 4x10 1” thick sheet of plywood and 5gal buckets full of joint compound and paint in the garage. We made some awesome ramps in the alleyway.
By junior high my brothers and I were all skaters. We lived at the end of a culdesac in Houston. My dad helped us build some sweet ramps. Had a launch ramp, a quarter pipe and sweet grind rail.

It’s amazing we all made it out alive.

 

We didn't have hills, so we tied a rope to each others bikes and then pulled each other through the neighborhood. That wagon coming around the corner sounded like an avalanche of pots and pans...

It worked really well until one day when one of the rubber tires came off and the metal wheel sliced my brothers leg open 8". Lots of stitches, and never did that one again after that.

After that, we built a dirt double jump behind the garage, off the paved alley. And that worked well, especially after I figured out I could jump it going backwards. Until the one day where my body cleared the jump, but the bike got hung up. The landing was eventful. And so were the 7 stitches to my chin as well.

 

I had forgotten about the rubber tire coming off the steel wheel or just losing a chunk of the tire - bang, bang, bang...

One of my friends was the athletic type, we rigged up a water ski style pull rope and I routinely pulled him all over town with my 10 speed, he was on a skateboard.

 

So tonight I was at a class, like an intro to ground school type thing where they were teaching us about different classes of airspace, and how to identify them on a map. The instructor zoomed to a portion of Alaska where there was a little picture of a seal and an explanation as to why it was there, basically scroll over on the map and it says stay above a certain altitude so you don’t bother them for migration or whatever. Of course me, being me said, “just another failure of the American educational system. All these years I thought seals were flightless”. I got an eye roll from my brother, I told my wife when I got home and she didn’t even give me a chuckle. Oh well at least I thought it was funny!

 

So what you’re saying is that no one has given you their seal of approval…

 

Ours was the big yellow Tonka trucks. We got really good at steering them…stopping was a different story altogether. Wore plenty of holes in my tennis shoes riding down the hills in our neighborhood

 

We built a non-powered go-cart and dragged it behind the bikes. Turns out using a bolt to connect the front "axle" (aka a 2x4) to the body hurts when you get thrown off of it and land on said bolt with your knee.

 

I did no such thing!
But, they may not have heard….

 

In our era 10 year olds weren’t expected to think.

Proof: I can’t count the number of time my father started a lecture after we did some stupid thing with “what were you thinking?” And “I dunno” was a perfectly acceptable answer.