All our problems are solved: post your dodgy solutions

[James H]

7 hours ago, Jack12477 said:

Except the "hooves" are too close together to fool anyone !

And cows only have two feet.

[bruce d]

13 minutes ago, James H said:

And cows only have two feet.

Huh?

[Jim Lad]

 

Quote

And cows only have two feet.

Interesting cows your have there in Lancashire, James!

 

John

 

[Jack12477]

1 hour ago, James H said:

And cows only have two feet.

 

12 minutes ago, Jim Lad said:

 

Interesting cows your have there in Lancashire, James!

 

John

 

 

Are those the ones that produce English Leather 🤔?  You know " all her men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all ! "  👹

[Cathead]

They must be Gary Larson cows; in the Far Side they're always standing around and walking upright.

[Ian_Grant]

3 hours ago, Cathead said:

They must be Gary Larson cows; in the Far Side they're always standing around and walking upright.

....and holding glasses of wine, if memory serves.

[bruce d]

Looks like fun but ... wouldn't brakes be a selling point?

 

[wefalck]

They existed still in the late 1950s and I don't remember any brakes. When you hold the rocker arm tight the rear driving wheels are blocked. Of course, it would be so clever to use this downhill ...

[bruce d]

On 6/13/2023 at 9:59 PM, wefalck said:

Of course, it would be so clever to use this downhill ...

If I had been given one of these as a kid, I would have headed straight for a twisty downhill road. One way or another, first thing to do would be to test it's performance.

Edited June 14, 2023 by bruce d

[Mark P]

Good Evening All;

 

Re the cow hooves on the shoes to disguise shoe-prints, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote on of his Sherlock Holmes stories based on a murder which was carried out by men wearing the same sort of thing, to leave cow-prints in the ground.

 

All the best,

 

Mark P

[Cathead]

I had the 1980s version of that, something like this. Who needed brakes when you could put your feet down or just bail out? Scabs are a sign of childhood done right.

 

[gak1965]

On 6/14/2023 at 6:45 PM, Cathead said:

Who needed brakes when you could put your feet down or just bail out? Scabs are a sign of childhood done right.

Gosh, a Big Wheel, although ours were from the '70s and the one in the photo has the "safer" hand break designed to intentionally create a spin. Between the three of us, we wore a long hole in the contact patch of the front wheel (like maybe 3 inches long) and still rode it.

 

My guess is we'd be arrested if we had let our kids play with them. Lord knows my collection of scars implies I did childhood right by your impeccable definition 😀

 

George

Edited June 19, 2023 by gak1965

[wefalck]

The problem is that, if kids don't learn risk awareness at an early age, it will hit the adult even harder and potentially fatally ... you should learn respect of moving things at an early age.

[Keith Black]

 My parents home was on a hill and the driveway had a pretty good slope to it. Back in the early fifties I'd take my skates apart and nail the wheels to both ends of one of dad's 2x4 cut offs. Myself and kids up and down the block would sit on the 2x4 and roll down the driveway or if dared, you'd ride down the driveway standing on the 2x4, kinda like a skateboard but long before skateboards that we know today. 

 

 Knees and elbows constantly had the skin scraped off and occasionally there were broken bones. We were young and immortal, we didn't need no stinkin' risk awareness. 

Edited June 19, 2023 by Keith Black

[mtaylor]

Risk Awareness?   Back then there wasn't such a thing.  You were either "normal" or a "wimp".    The saying "There will be blood" was more of a challenge than anything else.   Today's kids have no idea.....

[VitusBering]

I swear on my Dad's memory every word of this is true.

 

The Great Gold Mine Adventure.txt

 

[Keith Black]

 What a great story, VB, especially coming on the heals of Father's Day. Thank you for that. 

[Cathead]

Agreed, thanks for that. There's a lot of wisdom in knowing how to balance anger, fear, relief, pride, and curiosity in a moment like that. 

[gak1965]

8 hours ago, Keith Black said:

I'd take my skates apart and nail the wheels to both ends of one of dad's 2x4 cut offs. Myself and kids up and down the block would sit on the 2x4 and roll down the driveway or if dared, you'd ride down the driveway standing on the 2x4, kinda like a skateboard but long before skateboards that we know today. 

Neighbor had the steep driveway. A couple of 2 by 4s, some lag bolts, a piece of rope, a bit of scrap plywood, and the wheels from a broken wagon were turned into a "go cart". Fortunately we lived in a cul de sac, so as we flew out of the driveway there weren't a lot of '70s cars with their crap brakes to run us over.

 

That's the thing that was really different for my kids; vs me; even in the suburbs there is just so much more traffic and the drivers are always in such a hurry. That and there just wasn't the same number of kids their age to help provide safety in numbers. I think it was because I grew up in a new neighborhood, where everyone was a family with young kids, whereas we've always bought older homes, and the neighborhood was a mix of empty nesters to people  without children and everything in between. There were 18 kids on my block growing up in the mid 60s through the early '80s, all but one in a 6 year birth year range; there were 10 on the block with my kids covering a 17 year range. Not the same.

 

The heck of it is that we always misunderstand the risks, don't we? When the DC sniper hit in 2002, our kids were 2 and 4. After a day or two they were crawling up the walls and we figured we had to do something, so we took them to this playground in our neighborhood behind the Silver Spring YMCA on the logic that this was not well known, required you to take an obscure route on a bunch of residential streets, and we couldn't be afraid of everything. The chance of the snipers being in there was astronomically small. Well, it worked for the kids for the two weeks or so it took to catch them. I almost had a heart attack afterwards though, because they had been using the YMCAs in Silver Spring and Bethesda as bases, those guys had been within 100 meters of the playground multiple times. At the end of the day it was fine, it was the correct decision on statistics, but you really never know do you.

 

George 

 

 

[Dr PR]

I lived on the top of a hill, and we (the other 14 kids in the neighborhood and I) rolled or slid everything we could come up with down that hill.

 

We made our own "go carts" out of scrap wood and whatever wheels we could find.

 

One just used the wheels and axles from a wagon. The wheel base was very narrow and it had a tenancy to flip and roll, so it had a seat belt, high seat back and crash bar. The front axle was on a board that pivoted on a bolt for steering. We rigged a steering wheel that worked like the steering drum on a ship's wheel. However we initially rigged it backwards so when we turned the wheel to the right the cart turned to the left. Most of us got used to it, but there were a couple of kids that never learned to steer. So I re-rigged it to work right. It had "brake" that was a board that hinged on a large nail. The top end was the handle and the bottom dragged on the pavement. Pull up on the handle to jam the other end into the road surface. It worked to hold the cart in place on the hill, but there was no way it would stop or slow down much if the cart was rolling.

 

A later version used four foot long 2x6s for the axles, with the wheels at the end. The front axle hinged on a bolt for steering, and we just pulled on a rope that connected to the ends of the steering axle. This was much stabler and would not flip or roll, no matter how hard we tried - and we did. However, one time when I tried to do a 180 spin at speed the front axle swung all the way until a wheel jammed into the long 2x8 that was the cart frame. That put the two front wheels more or less in line with the cart body, giving only a triangular footprint on the road, and really putting on the brakes! The cart stopped suddenly and tried to flip, launching me over the front. Fortunately I was wearing a high school football helmet that belonged to one of the kid's older brother. Unfortunately, the helmet broke when I hit the pavement, but I came out of it without a scratch on my head. Then we had to explain how I managed to break the helmet!

 

****

 

When we got a good snow we raced our sleds down the hill in the street. We also sledded down the hill in the lawns, slaloming between tree trunks. The driveways to the houses made natural "ski jumps" and we built up snow ramps to make them even higher. Half the time we parted company with the sleds in the air.

Edited June 20, 2023 by Dr PR

[Cathead]

7 hours ago, gak1965 said:

At the end of the day it was fine, it was the correct decision on statistics, but you really never know do you.

Living in constant fear is corrosive.

 

Since we're all telling dodgy hill stories, here's my variant. I grew up in one of the Great Lakes snow belt zones, where 2-3 feet of snow was a pretty normal ground cover. We lived in a farmhouse atop a large hill, with a steep wooded dropoff behind the house. So one winter some friends and I built an Olympic-inspired luge run down that hill by packing down the snow into a tight, smooth chute that wound its way in sharp curves between the trees all the way to the bottom. Then we hooked up a hose and iced down that sucker. We must have engineered it well because it's a wonder no one flew out of the chute and cracked themselves open on a tree; that thing was fast!

[mtaylor]

Well, I'll put in my 2 cents.   

 

As kid we didn't have any hills in the subdivision which basically was filled with housing bought by folks on the GI Bill of WWII.   However, there was a large hill probably 1/4 mile away or so that was undeveloped and had tall grass.  Our summer time had many trips down that hill on either a big sheet of cardboard or an old car hood (several were stashed there by us kids).   Great memories of fun times. BTW, the hill was known in the neighborhood as "Cardboard Hill".   

 

Back then, we'd leave home in the morning and not come home till dark and no one worried about us. We'd wander (usually on bikes) to the hill in on direction, the grade school in another, and then there was creek on a large state owned farm that was a great place on hot day to sit in the water and talk.  

[Canute]

We got into the Space Race in the late 50s. We designed our version of a Mercury capsule and I "volunteered" my sister's doll. Had it fitted with a pressure suit (electrician's tape). Planned to launch with an M-80 someone "acquired". Unfortunately, my sister threw a hissy fit and I had to return the astronaut. We launched the "capsule" but it didn't get very high. The 2x4s may have something to do with the poor thrust.

[gak1965]

1 hour ago, Canute said:

Planned to launch with an M-80 someone "acquired". Unfortunately, my sister threw a hissy fit and I had to return the astronaut. We launched the "capsule" but it didn't get very high. The 2x4

Unless a I've forgotten my physics (possible) plenty of specific impulse, not enough thrust....

[VitusBering]

1 hour ago, gak1965 said:

Unless a I've forgotten my physics (possible) plenty of specific impulse, not enough thrust....

 

 

 

[mtaylor]

I recall having a few of those rapid disassembly launches around '71 when the Estes were the rockets of choice.   Seems if you dropped those "motors" on concrete accidentally, they would explode either at "launch" or just as it left the launcher.  If I'm remembering right, those Saturn V's had 4 motors and were only a single stage.  Some smaller ones were two stage with one motor per stage.  

 

We started off launching at Wright State University which was mostly field back then as they only had a few buildings up.  The AF sent out a truck with MP's on Sunday and asked us to go somewhere else as one of the jets landing saw one of our rockets (the smoke trail) in front of him.  

[Canute]

A large problem with solid fuel rockets is any bumps could create voids in the solid fuel. When the burn gets to that space - boom

[gak1965]

2 hours ago, mtaylor said:

recall having a few of those rapid disassembly launches around '71 when the Estes were the rockets of choice.   Seems if you dropped those "motors" on concrete accidentally, they would explode either at "launch" or just as it left the launcher.  If I'm remembering right, those Saturn V's had 4 motors and were only a single stage.  Some smaller ones were two stage with one motor per stage.  

Ah yes. The Saturn V from Estes was (at least back in the 70's) a single stage cluster design using 3 C engines that I think was also set up for a single D engine later. 

 

As a boy I made some of the multistage variants. They flew so high I lost a couple of them when they flew out of the range of realistic recovery. Never did the clusters as it felt like the odds of actually igniting all 3 engines at the same time seemed low, since I'd think that the first thing that would happen is that once the first engine lit off it would promptly pull the ignitors out of the other engines (they were all wired together).

[Dr PR]

We used to make multi-stage rockets with ordinary fireworks rockets (before Estes and hobby model rockets were a business). Two stage rockets were easy. The largest we made was a four stage monster.

 

The first stage was four of the largest rockets wee could buy. They were wrapped with masking tape and the fuses twisted together.

 

The second stage was three slightly smaller rockets taped together. Again the fuses were twisted and then inserted into a hole we drilled in the clay plug at the end of one of the first stage rockets.

 

The third stage was one of the smaller rockets with the fuse in a hole in the top of one of the second stage rockets.

 

The fourth stage was a tiny bottle rocket sized thing with a plastic nose cone and metal fins. It whistled loudly when it burned.

 

The whole thing was about 1 1/2 feet (0.5 meter) tall. We used a spark gap in the leads from a neon sign transformer to light the fuses. The transformer was plugged into a long extension cord that was plugged into a switchable wall outlet. Just flip the switch - ZAP - and away they went. We launched a bunch of two stage rockets this way.

 

That is how it was supposed to work. But gak1965 named the problem with the four stage monster. One of the four first stage rockets ignited before the other three. Unlike all the other rockets we fired that left the launch pad in a hurry, the four stage rocket rose slowly - just like the Saturn 5. As it rose it tipped over and was about horizontal when the other three rockets fired. Whoosh! Crash! It hit the side of a neighbor's house and fell into a rose bush where it thrashed around until the motors burned out. The neighbor kid was watching at the fence between the yards and the rocket just missed him. The rose bush was toast!

 

****

 

We did recover the second, third and fourth stages. After some reassembly we launched them successfully as a three stage rocket.

[Bob Cleek]

Regarding downhill adventures, growing up in the 1950's in San Francisco was an adventure. The wheels were old "ball bearings" we'd get from the local auto repair garage or the wrecking yard, the axle was a whittled end of a two by four with nails driven into the end to spread it to a tight fit on the inside of the bearing. Brakes were the heels of your shoes. The teenagers in the photo had fancier brakes... hinged blocks of wood.