It started waaaaaaaay back in the spring of '77 with a twinkle in my dad's eye. That twinkle, my friend, was soon to become a legend.
Around the age of four, I started taking things apart. Anything I could find in my room- tape players, radios, phones, toys, lamps, TVs, Pong consoles... just unscrewing them, looking at the innards, and putting them back together. The tape players were my favorite because they had gears. Surprisingly, most everything that was taken apart worked when put back together. I had also started my boating passion around this time, when my dad started letting me drive the boat- a 14' Orlando Clipper.
When I was ten, I started working on my bicycle and helped my dad with the lawn mower. About this time, I went to a local lawn mower place and asked for a blown up engine so that I could take it apart and play with it. They gave me a 3.5 HP Tecumseh. I took that thing apart and put it back together more than I can remember.
For my 14th birthday, my parents got me an introductory flight lesson, and was instantly hooked on all things with wings. This also subsequently drew my attention from girls and kept me pure 'till much later in life than my peers.
All through highschool I flew airplanes- soloed on my 16th birthday and got my license a month later. I still worked on things mechanical, but they were model airplanes, and my technical path was slowly being diverted away from wrench turning and guided towards aircraft design and fluid dynamics.
When I graduated, my parents forced me to go right into college rather than take a year off that I wanted. So I kinda just picked something- Aviation Technology. Hey, I figured that if I liked flying them, I'd like working on them. WRONG. I did graduate with an Associates and an A&P License (same thing that Airh0ckey has), but I've done nothing with it since and forget most everything they taught me. There was too much stress involved with working on aircraft, I deduced, and realized I missed my chance to become a commercial pilot or aerospace engineer.
However, it did reawaken the wrench turner in me, and started working on my own car. My very first project was to replace the rear brake shoes and drums on my '85 Accord. I started at 6 PM, and at 8:30 AM the next morning, the car was being loaded onto a flat bed to have a garage work on it. That was total humiliation. I vowed never to let that happen again, and enrolled in an Automotive Technology program at a college here in Vermont. Two years later, I graduated with an Associates and an ASE Master Technician certification. The only thing I'm not certified in, other than all things body work, are diesels.
Since then, I've split my personal studies about 60/40 between high performance cars and aircraft design. You all have seen about 10% of what I know about cars, so I won't really bore you with that side of what I've done. But I've designed and built quite a few RC aircraft, most successful, some not. But even the unsuccessful designs have taught me the importance of how drastic small changes are, as well as teaching me what won't work. Somewhere in there, I managed to learn a thing or two about boat design and construction and have designed and built a few full scale boats. In doing this, I experimented with different construction materials, specifically foam and fiberglass.
I guess I got a little off track there, but I can't really say how or why I got into working on things and designing stuff. It's just a passion. It's me. I wasn't born into it; neither of my parents work on anything mechanical or in the design realm. I do it because I enjoy it and am pretty good at it.
My advice is, get through high school and take a year off. Fiddle around on stuff, but keep it low budget. PAY ATTENTION to your failures because you can still learn from them. Don't follow the herd. Don't do just one thing. Work different jobs. Drive a tow truck. Work on heavy equipment. be the "shop bitch" at some place because if you're smart, you'll learn things. Don't sell yourself short once you do know a thing or two. Take a welding class. And above all, DO NOT STOP LEARNING! If there was
one sentence in this whole post that was more important than the rest, it was the previous sentence. Once you stop learning, you're doomed.
Read my goddamn post. It's basically an outline of my life story.
i wanted a camero.. well, the gey and the curious made me want an import <_< . i always wanted an accord after that, dom't ask why, because i couldnt tell you, lol.
) and a few other random things. i've always loved to take things apart, and play with them...
Celerity
