Tag: mechanics

Plug In Your Car for the Book of the Day

Long ago, I lived next to a high school shop teacher.  The only cool thing about that was that he loved to tinker, and did so with electric vehicles.  His first was an uncomfortable folding chair welded to a flat platform on 4 wheels.  Under the chair sat a car battery, and buttons rested under the natural spot to rest your feet, one button on each side.  When you pressed both buttons, you went straight.  Just the right, you’d turn right, and left turned you left.  It was a pretty neat toy for his son, and he didn’t have to buy a Power Wheels.

Build Your Own Electric Vehicle by Seth Leitman is a big more complicated than welding a chair down.  This book goes through the steps of creating your own electric engine, converting a gas-powered vehicle to support an electric engine, and also weighs pros and cons (such as safety vs. vehicle weight and speed) in trying to get your vehicle greener.  Of course, I don’t know if my shop-teacher neighbor was really concerned about going green (the guy had two trucks and an SUV), but were I into mechanics, it would probably be fun to convert a vehicle just to say I did.

Start Your Engines, It’s the Book of the Day

Here’s a weird one:  Today’s BotD is Small Gas Engine Repair by Paul Dempsey  That’s not really the weird part.  What struck me is that one could argue, “Interesting, Barry, but with all this hybridization/alternative fuel sourcing/farm-animal-utilization going on now-a-days, how long will this book be relevant?”  That got me thinking.  First, have people talked about alternative energy sources for anything other than home and car?  Is there a hybrid riding mower out there?  The answer got a lot weirder when I found sites like Evatech, who apparently make remote control hybrid mowers.  Freaky! But think of the fuel economy when it doesn’t have to carry you around, and the energy economy on yourself when you don’t have to push it.  It’s like a Roomba for your backyard!

Well, all of that aside, what struck me beyond that point was a consideration of obsolete technology.  Who could still make a record player? Who, in 50 years, will be able to make a record player?  Who in 50 years will know how to make a small gas powered engine?  What about in 100?  After all of that, now I’m interested in how these things work.  The biggest problem with doing the Book of the Day is never having enough time to complete them all myself.