Asignificant part of my childhood was spent dreaming up crazy ideas for things to make, something that I suspect is shared with most of you reading this. As I was brought up in an engineering household (both parents were involved in industry throughout their working lives) these flights of fancy tended to be based around stuff powered by internal combustion engines. Into my teens and pocket money subsidised by delivering newspapers meant I could move on to projects a little more complex than launching Lego "aircraft" via a wheeled cart fired down the coal shed roof, the aerodynamic properties of these designs being inversely proportional to their satisfyingly spectacular disintegration on contact with terra firma. As previously related, to the horror of the assembled readership, my practical abilities were never great and this has been a constant frustration throughout my life. I can spanner away with the best of them but whittling a gear linkage from a couple of blocks of steel? Unfortunately not and because of this the more ambitious dreams inevitably remained just that.
展开▼
