To those unfamiliar, the title is a twist on the title of one of my favorite books: “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!”. The book is a collection of excerpts from the famous physicist Richard Feynman’s life and mostly talks about experiments and things Feynman did by simply being curious and doing the things he found fun and interesting.
The start of the book about his youth resonates a lot with me, and by just being curious, I’ve done everything from building bombs to making my own snow machine. This page is just to manifest some of the things I had fun building while growing up.
The Snowmachine That Gave Me Snow Before Anyone Else
I always loved the snow, and hated the part of the winter before the snow fell. We usually have around a month of this in Norway, and I desperately wanted to get snow in my garden before everyone else. Snowmachines obviously existed but were way out of my price range, so I had to build my own.
The principles were simple: blow air out at high speed, then add water to it, creating tiny water drops that would freeze before hitting the ground.
I tried many different designs until I found something that would work. The end design was simple, blow high-pressure air out of a small nozzle, and add some water to it through another tube.
This worked amazingly, and every year since I was 12, I had snow in my garden before everyone else. With this snow we would set up a PVC tube as a rail, and get a months practice in with our skis before the rest.
The Smoke-bomb That Activated Every Single Fire Alarm At Home
I had always been a bit of a pyromaniac. Every New Year’s Eve, I would take apart fireworks and build more exciting things that would make louder and better bangs. The problem was that I was limited to the small quantities I could get from fireworks.
I did some research online and found that you could buy some of the ingredients for these fireworks off eBay. One of the main ingredients is Potassium Nitrate, a chemical that releases oxygen when it burns, causing a much stronger burn in whatever it burns with.
I bought a kilo of Potassium Nitrate from a Polish reseller off Ebay and prayed it would get through customs. When it arrived, I was ecstatic. I could make anything out of this!
I found out that if you melt the potassium nitrate together with sugar you could make crazy smoke bombs, releasing so much smoke that a batch the size of a ping-pong-ball would be seen by the whole neighborhood. One day I wanted to make the biggest smoke-bomb, I could possibly build, and used up most of my remaining potassium nitrate and started the melting process. Note all this was made in my small “lab” in the basement. When stirring, suddenly some of the batch landed on the very hot stove plate, it ignited immediately, and my entire batch, the size of probably 20 ping-pong balls, started burning. Within about 10 seconds, the entire house was filled with so much smoke that even in the room the furthest away from my lab you couldn’t see your own hands.
This was when my mom told me the bombmaking had to stop.
The Pocketbikes From The Landfill
One thing I was always passionate about was mechanics. I could take anything with a motor and fix it. One of the most fun refurbishments I did was some Pocketbikes we found on a landfill.
The motors were basically rusty all the way through, and we had to take apart everything all the way down to the cylinder and polish it up. After a few days of cleanup and pulling the motor starting string for the 500th time, we finally made it work, and it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had.
The RC Plane
I always loved radio-controlled stuff because you could basically build anything with it.
Back then, you could order parts from China for ridiculously low prices, and I used to buy servomotors for everything I wanted to build.
One of the cooler projects I did with this was building an RC plane out of construction foam. Most planes just didn’t have the properties I wanted, they were either too big or small and then too fast. I wanted one that was small but could sail as well as the big ones. So I had to make my own one.
I carefully cut the construction foam, filing the edges with sand-paper to make the same curvatures you get on more professional RC planes. Once I had built the aircraft out of 3-4 different types of foam, I mounted all the servo motors in the right places, calibrated the plane, and went to test it. It flew perfectly! I’ll admit this was beginner’s luck, but I had a lot of fun with it.
More coming
Adding more stories as I go.