Stuff I did when I was a kid

[squirrel]

Here's a neat picture, my older brother found the box of negatives from when I was young. This is a photo enlarger I built when I was about 13 or 14 (mid 1970s). It's made from an old Kodak camera my grandfather gave me, and a slide projector. I put the lenses from the projector in the sheet metal housing on top, with a light bulb. The negative fits in a plate I made to hold it in the camera where the film would go. The photographic paper goes in an easel on the base. I also modified an old timer that my dad had made as a patent sample long before then, and used it to time the exposure.

I made black and white prints at night in our kitchen. Fun stuff.

[squirrel]

and this is the kind of stuff I took pictures of....a 56 Chevy Revell model I built, then rebuilt with my own chassis, made of brass square tubing, sheet tin, etc. I think I have it somewhere around here still. Notice the nicely trimmed prints, cutting straight lines in paper was something I hadn't figured out yet.

[HEMI]

[studemax]

Never mind Hemi, I think you did a good job Squirrel!

[Stich496]

Never mind Hemi, I think you did a good job Squirrel!

x2
I wish I had photos of the stuff I build way back when..
we ( the ne'hood kids and I built a jr dragster way before there ever was a class..
'82 it was mad from fence tube and my moped engine.

[Bamfster]

I remember back in jr high photography class doing stuff similar to that. We built "cameras" out of cardboard boxes. The "lense" was nothing more than different size holes punched in the cardboard. We would load them with b/w photo paper, aim it at an object and open the "lense".

We then would develop the paper in a darkroom, and if you timed the exposure right, you'd actually get an image of the object on the paper .....cool stuff.

[DanStokes]

Geeze, Hemi - jealousy is a terrible thing!

Jim - it's super that you have these old pics. I wish I had pics of some of the stuff where I was a co-conspirator. Like the English bike with a Reo lawn mower engine. We did some wild stuff because we didn't know any better - but no photographic evidence.

Dan

[TheSilverBuick]

That's pretty neat. When I was 14 or 15 I used photoshop to re-size photos =D Actually I'm way impressed, though from a technical stand point, there isn't much you do that surprises me, but I am truely impressed. I was still building things with legos, and they came with directions =D

[studemax]

I remember back in jr high photography class doing stuff similar to that. We built "cameras" out of cardboard boxes. The "lense" was nothing more than different size holes punched in the cardboard. We would load them with b/w photo paper, aim it at an object and open the "lense".

We then would develop the paper in a darkroom, and if you timed the exposure right, you'd actually get an image of the object on the paper .....cool stuff.

Ah.... better known as pinhole cameras. I always wanted to build one, maybe I should get busy!

[LORENSWIFE]

torched a bathroom once

[Stich496]

torched a bathroom once

haha my bro did that in mid school

cig in the hole in the wall and , up it went

[Gary 351C]

I wish I had a picture of it. When I was 10 I built what I called a Go Cart even though it had no engine, it was basically a soapbox derby car. The street we lived on was like a 4% grade and about half a block long. The frame was made from 2x4's and had spoked hand truck wheels front and rear. I used a 30 gallon trash can for the front end and the best part was the transistor radio I mounted under the seat.

[squirrel]

My brother (two years older than me) bought a mini bike when he was 12, using his paper route money. He built a kind of go kart thing a bit later, using plywood and 2x4s. He got me to ride in it, him towing me with the mini bike and a rope. It was fun till I flipped over. The steering wasn't so good, and I went off the side of the driveway (1/4 mile long dirt drive), and over I went.

I wonder if he has a picture of that still?

[Monk]

I remember getting creative after a little league
baseball game one night.

My buddies and I took several straws and a bottle
opener.......stopped at Pete & Leo's laundromat, on the way home, where
we commenced to empty many bottles of Pepsi out of the console
soda machine.

I think I stayed up all night pissing.

I always did think 'outside the box'

[pdub]

Lemme see, it depends on which 10 years we're talking about. An erector set with real tiny wrenches, Mom wouldn't let me have a chemistry set (too dangerous), Mom wouldn't let me have the Operation game (too macarbe) , or Rock em Sock em Robots (too violent).

So in the next 10 years I drove drunk and bricked and beer bottled quite a few mailboxes and signs, and was at least an accomplice to busting a window out of a local privately-owned business just to hear the newly-installed burglar alarm go off. Remember the ones with the half-inch wide foil tape that ran all the way around the window? I didn't throw the brick, but I drove the getaway car, and it was originally my idea..

So much for the theory of a fine raising.

Never got caught but once, when I had built a hand-held pistol for bottle rockets, a foot long pipe with a wooden handle hand-carved from the crooked jont from a dogwood tree. Stopped in front of the school superintendent's house, I wasn't driving, I was the shooter. Launched a most excellent perfect shot over the crest of the roof and we took off.

Well, they superintendent had a bunch of other local dignitaries on the back deck of the house and the bottle rocket fell directly into the middle of them. POW! If it had been a hand grenade, it would have vaporized everybody of importance in the Rock Hill school district right then and there.

That resulted in a chase scene. The dude I was with, driving the car, was a no-driving wimp and got scared at what was happening, the with siperintendent tailing us and blowing the horn. He pulled right over, the Eagle Scout, caught in mischief. We got in big trouble. Good thing my parents (Ward and June Cleaver) didn't like the school superintendent for some reason already. They actually laughed it off, and since it didn't happen at school, well, we got off. Gosh, I did so many more much worse things that I DIDN't get caught for.

Yeah, a homemade camera probably would have been a better way to pass the time, for sure. But I wasn't quite that smart.