How did you become a do-it-yourselfer?  Were you taught by a parent, did you
take courses in home repair, or did you just get interested in it?  What were
some of your early projects?  What sorts of things do you particularly like
building or repairing?  Do you consider yourself an expert in any?

35 responses total.

        I think most people become DYI's from need. Either thooy can't afford
to have it done or there is immediate or desparate need.

I did DIY because I liked to "fiddle" with things - really starting when I
was 8 and was given a microscope. You have to do a lot of DIY with a
microscope. I probably started even earlier with other toys. 

What sort of DIY do you have to do with a microscope?  I thought the kids'
models can with a collection of prepared slides all ready to go.  And what
sorts of things did you inflict on your other toys?

The simple answer is, I don't really consider myself a DIYer.  I have an
interest in it, but nothing more really.  I just lurk here...

  When I was a kid, I took everything apart. I was fascinated in the way
things worked, and especially was interested in seeing how many machines
operated. By this study, I learned to fix what was broken. At first I wasn't
so good, but now, I can fix most anything.

It doesn't take long to get bored with prepared slides, so I made my
own, even thin-sectioning, staining, and fitting a camera for photos, etc.
The extended story is that my brother got a chemistry set, and we were
both jealous of each other..with the result that my brother had a professional
microscope by the time he was in high school, and by that time I had a
nearly professional home chemical laboratory. We collaborated a lot when
we grew out of being fighting siblings. 

2 reasons:
1.  Dad grew up on a farm (nuff said?)
2.  Engineeritis.  I fiddle with things too much.

I took the neighbors kids toys apart.  Their parents got mad at me.  I was
sorry buts unable to stop.  It's just part of who I am, I like it and
it helps me be independent.

So, you *still* t ake the neighbors' kids' toys apart?

  I have a bad case of fiddlewithittillitbraeks. Every computer I have, I
have fiddled with the configuration. I'm just recovering from a self induced
crash that wouldn't have happened if I would have not optimized the hard
drive. But, as I was taught, you must optimize to make it more efficient.

 Well the bright side is that I didn't format the hard drive.

Jim says 'I told you so, I told you you'd be sorry if you played with
Spinrite'.  (For Jim's childhood, see Agora 108).
        I am sure it was not my parents that I learned manual skills from. 
My father never learned from his father, who died when he was 12.  (He did
learn to cook from his mother).  The three projects I remember him doing were
replacing the glass in a storm through which I hit a whiffle ball, putting
up wooden shelves on the wrong size brackets (I took them down), and making
an utter mess replacing bathroom mosaic floor tiles out of order (I took them
out and did it over).  My mother was somewhat better.  I taught her how to
rewire a lamp and she did all the neighbors'.  I leared a bit of plumbing and
wiring on rental housing, but nothing major.  PUt in a wall lamp once.  At
ages 11 and 12 I took woodworking at the local community center.  (At the end
of the first year, when my hair had gotten a bit long, someone asked 'are you
a boy or a girl?'.  In public school girls only got to take sewing.  I learned
to true the wheel on my very old bike.  I learned to fix the toilet in my
Macedonian dorm by buying a book onhow things worked, after the repairman
never came.  Macedonian toilets work differently.  We got the sink unclogged
by someone who came to fix the plaster down the hall.  And then Jim suggested
we build a house.....

We made our own rifles and zip guns, you just take a piec eof tubing and size
it to a cartridge and then fasten some sort of hammer mechanism that will
strike the end, it was crazy, and the thing exploded and hopefully the bullet
went one way, its amazing we're alive.  (Uncensored).  We also had a three
foot metal lathe in the basement so we could make more sophisticated things.
Whenever a part broke we made the part.  We used to go to the army surplus
stores in Detroit (this is Jim and 3 brothers) and pick up stuff and modify
it.  My brother built a couple houses summers during college.  I helped one
brother build a catamaran.  We used to make all our own swords for playing
gladiators, crate boards were the best, they were thin and you could cut them
with a jigsaw or coping saw.  Rifles were made out of wood, bow and arrows.
I went waterskiing, we had an aluminum rowboat and a Mercury mark 10 outboard
motor, and since I was the youngest, they nailed my brother's loafers to two
1x6's about 4' long, and then I got into his loafers and we got a clothesline
and tied it to the boat.  It worked!  Everything worked!  It was amazing. 
As soon as somebody was doing something, we'd make our own version of it.
We made our own backboard and basketball hoop built into the garage.
(I will spare you the details).  Our house became so popular for basketball
that we had to install floodlights, the games ended around midnight.  SO we
ran floodlights by climbing to the top of the house.  If any adults had known
what we were doing, I'm not sure they would have let us do them.  When our
parents went to Florida, we surprised them be remodeling the kitchen to look
modern, new cabinet doors that we made, and did our own woodwork, stained and
sealed.  (They were suprised, not exactly what they wanted.  It's funny how
they got used to not having to open up doors to get at things).  We didn't
buy anything finished except the hardware and plywood boards.  I was still
in grade school then.  So I just assumed everybody did these things, without
going and asking adults' permission for this, they just do it.
(JIm, why not continue your turn later, okay?  Okay.  We were using expanded
foam and fiberglass for the catamaran, back the fifties.  The Corvette was
the first fiberglass car, was that in the fifties?......)  More later.

I remember visiting my sister, a nun, who was in a teaching order, and she
had fixed up the classroom the best she could, but the desks were in poor
shape, all carved up, marked up.  SO the next time we visited we brought
sanders and varnish and refinished all the desks in the classroom.  I was 6
or 8 ta the time, I remember it vividly.  TO this day I can't visit anybody
without fixing something, it's like leaving your mark peeing on a tree, I go
somewhere I visit something, its like leaving a part of myself.  Its what I
enjoy doing.  ANd I used to make little wooden boxes and I would put alarm
clocks in them and wind it up and lock the box and the only way the box would
open is when the alarm went off and wound up the string and pulled the
nail out.
        I made my own tanning booth with some fluorescent bulbs, and did
one in a friend's closet, he had psoriasis, and he used to go tot he
doctor, since only doctor's had them at that time.  I had a nother friend,
we collected pigeons from under the bridges, so we started buying fancy
breeds and built a coop, carrier pigeons, a walk-in coop, wiht doors so
that, these are homing pigeons, we could relsease them and they'd come
back, this is high school, and nobody asked, we just decided to do this.
        When I was into photograph I would buy bulk film, roll my own,
push process and color adjust, I would shoot with filters and color
adjust.  It seemed like no matter what I got into I always wanted to take
one step backwards, and to this day we're interested in processing our own
food, making our own shoes.  We do it mainly to know how, you do it once
then you can keep most anything in repair.
        We used to dig at our play site, there was some sandy soil, we
used to dig holes until they were over our heads, and then connect them
about six feet underground, we had tunnels going from hole to hole, the
adults put a stop to that.  (That reminds the editor a whole lot of when
we dug a foundation in sand, six feet deep, which almost fell on my head).
Every winter we'd build igloos (so did the editor) that you could almost
stand up in, by piling up snow until we got something way above our heads
and then we could hollow it out, and one time some kid walking over all
the snow piles came through the roof, and then he was standing right in
the middle between the two of us.
[line expurgated on sledding]
We redid the canvas canoe, it was all rotted away so we put a new canvas
on it and coated it with paint, oil paint.  We'd usse fiberglass patch.
        We used to make our own little rockets, take all the sulfur off
the match heads and put them into thirty-thirty- cartridges as the body of
the rocket and then set em up and light them and they worked great!  It
was amazing.  (How bout you take another turn later?  Sure.  I guess the
point I'm getting at is we didn't have anything ready made.  It was more
of a challege.  What captured our interest is could we do it.....
.

extreme of consciousness style.  You know, I don't reminisce very often.
I remember shooting carp in the river with bow and arrow.  Almost every year
the river would flood the golf course and leave these puddles, the carp were
going to die anyway.  We got real good with a bow and arrow.Wewould also ride
our bicycles several miles into the city storm seweres, with flashlights. 
Very similar to caving, except on bicycles.  City spelunking.  SOmebody said
they saw a rat one time, but I don't think I ever did.  But the neat thing
about it is, once you get a couple of miles in there, it gets kinda narrow,
but you can come up any curb you can crawl up the street, but you couldn't
get the bicycles up.  God, if our parents ever knew what we were doing.
(rane, is there a spelunking conference somewhere?)  They have bars now.
Low adventure.That same boat that we used for waterski, we made our own
sportabout, runabout?, with a plexiglass windshield, old car steering wheel,
adapted it to a shaft and pulley so we could steer it from th front.  (Is
there a boating conference?).....
        None of us four boys who shared the unheated bedroom wanted to be the
one to get out of bed and turn off the light, so we rigged up a string that
went from the bed across the floor up the wall to the light switch.
One of the very earliest things that we did, remote control.
(Okay, that's it for today.  Good, I am sure that this is not half the list,
I have not thought about this for a long time........)

(On compulsive DIYing, as in "TO this day I can't visit anybody without fixing
something, it's like leaving your mark peeing on a tree": there's a *great*
story (article/column/whatever-they-are) by Patrick F. McManus.  If memory
serves, it's called "I'd Rather Do It Myself".  (Memory says it's in
_They_Shoot_Canoes,_Don't_They?_, but I wouldn't put much weight on that.))

   No, I wasn't using Spinrite. Spinwrite will not run on a cached drive and
most of them are cached. This crash was from Norton. I have recovered. 
I don't want to do that again, and I won't.

Partly it's that I've always enjoyed fiddling with things, taking them apart,
and figuring out how they work.  Part of it is it's usually easier to fix
something myself than to deal with getting somebody else to fix it.

I got into big-time trouble any time I did anything to the house!  I had to
get creative any time I wanted to run wires for my shortwave or hang stuff,
etc.
 
Speaking of breaking other peoples toys, Rane, we still need to get together
so I can have a look at your SE.  Perhaps this week some time.  I will e-mail
you.

How about if we start a conference on microcomputers?

Try     

j micro

to check out the (already existing) microcomputers conference.

        There is a micro conf already. Doesn't seem real active but there is
some life.

And, there is a lot of "good stuff" there. 

#19 was intended as a joke.  SHould I have typed :=)  ?

  Yes, that might have helped. I was beginning to feel hurt.

  The only reason the micros conference is so dead is that everyone's
computer seems to be running well.

Or could it be that all the micros people are busy with the DIY conf?
I got the impression that micros was possibly the most active conference,
there are always new computers to have problems with.  Hmm, maybe you are
teasing me, you obviously knew that I knew....
My grandfather was a do-it-yourselfer, maybe it skipped generations, but his
projects had to be apartment sized.  He made suitcases and blueberry vodka,
and carved up a whole lot of straight branches by removing the brown and
sometimes the green bark, and reupholstered his kitchen chairs, and knitted
his own sweaters, and made leather belts.

Hi! This is Jim's sister. I never needed to know how to DIY cuz I always have
Jim to call!  Actually I rerally just want to know what time it is. 

        Hi Dorothy, welcome to Grex.

I will pass on your welcome, Dorothy is still afraid of computers and may not
be back for a while, especially until we find her some local dialin number.
So I am e-mailing her pieces of conferences for amusement.  Jim does her DIY
stuff when we visit in Warren twice a year, and this time we decided she
needed a comptuer and grex account.

Computers are nothing to be afraid of.  They are just tools.  Tools that
are altered by software to become different tools.

        And tools altered (unintentionally) by users at which time they become
reeeealy different!

As is the case with most complex tools.

        Like screwdrivers?

Dorothy is afraid of answering machines, I have little hope for this.

A screwdriver is a complex tool for some people just as C+ is for others.
 
I'm afraid of answering machines too, as well as VCRs, camcorders, HT's
and other modern devices that contain computers.  They have so many
buttons that is often difficult to touch them without accidentally pressing
a button and, hence, altering something.  I am afraid of them only because
most of them are not easy to use and I don't want have to locate the 
manual and spend a lot of time figuring it out AGAIN.

I am having trouble learning how to operate the variety of clock radios at
Kiwanis.  Each one is different.  In order to set the time on one, you had
to rotate a (missing) knob to a certain position, then push set, then hours
and minutes.  Took us ten minutes to set the time, not counting finding a
replacement knob.  

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss