What's the most Kerbal thing you've done in real life?

[Mister Dilsby]

Just what it says on the tin: what is your most Kerbal feat of engineering, piloting or design, in a professional capacity or otherwise?

Here's mine: one time, I made a lawnmower run on hydrogen. And I blew it up.

I was working in a research facility back when everyone thought H2 powered cars were the future, before Li-ion batteries got really good and really cheap. One of the projects was a new way to store the H2 in a solid state medium. The head boffins wanted a cheap and easy way to test it out. So I said, "How about a lawnmower?"

My partner and I acquired a kit meant for adapting a gasoline-driven generator to run on propane. Then we went to a local dealer for the lawnmower. The owner overheard us talking about where we were going to drill the hole in the carburetor and how much we'd need to delay the spark timing; also, how long to make the extension cord for the electric starter so we could start it from behind cover. "Should I even bother filling out the warranty card for you boys?" he asked us. "Nope."

We did the modifications in a few days, then wheeled it out behind the building and hooked up the hydrogen system. Naturally it didn't start. And then it didn't start again. And then it kicked over a couple of reps--and then it failed. Encouraged by evidence of some kind of combustion I held the starter down for a few more seconds--then the hydrogen that had accumulated in the engine ignited, blasting off the oil fill cap like a mortar rocket. We approached cautiously, knowing that a hydrogen flame is both (1) really hot and (2) invisible. The engine was trashed.

Next day we got a second mower from the same place ("I knew you'd be back!") and did it all over again. This time with a bit of an adjustment to the spark timing the mower started right up. Of course the project went nowhere, but hey hydrogen lawnmower lolz.

[Corw]

I've killed guy named Jeb. Police doesn't have a clue.

[AbacusWizard]

Not something I did, but something I saw: a mini-bicycle that had been modified to be powered by an electric drill bolted to the back. VWRRRRRRRRRR

[luizopiloto]

I modified an old airplane headset to work with a PC... I had to change the wiring and the mic electret for a higher impedance one... it works... but the speakers are 600 Ohms... so it needs an amp to work properly...

[Enkiel]

once drove for 150 km with a crooked rim because i tilted the car on the side....

[T.A.P.O.R.]

Hmm...

Lots of cobbled together stuff, but not much explodey, except this one time in the olden days when I had a job fixing record players.

One machine I was working on needed new power supply capacitors.

It was very old.

I was young and did not know that way back when, not everything that looked like a green cap, wasn't actually a green cap.

It turns out it was an electrolytic in a non standard casing and was polarised.

Oh boy was it polarised!

I obtained a replacement and when I turned the power on, it was unfortunately necessary for my face to be brought rather close to the power supply due to the location of the wall socket.

The capacitor exploded immediately.

Very loudly too and it tripped the building's power supply when the shop was full of customers.

The workshop was windowless and as the power went out, I thought that I'd blinded myself.

I don't think the power was out very long, but when it did come back there were thousands of silvery bits of electrolyte gradually making their way toward the ground.

Thankfully I wasn't blind, but my ears were ringing and I'd learned a lesson.

I went back to the supply shop, got another cap and fixed it properly.

P.S. in that same job (first day), I melted a pair of speakers with a tone generator on low power and low frequency.

[NecroBones]

I crashed my truck and rolled it on its side, and walked away mostly unscathed.

Edited June 19, 2015 by NecroBones

[luizopiloto]

Oh.. on another day I fixed a radiator hose with duct tape...

[TheSaint]

Hang on a bit... <looks up statutes of limitations> Nothing. Nothing at all.

Seriously, when I was a kid my brother and I would go down to a place called Student Science Service and buy copious amounts of chemicals with little or no adult supervision. We'd wind up in Gitmo today for the stuff we did then. We bought sulfur and zinc dust and made our own rocket motors and smoke bombs. We bought sulfur and saltpeter, crushed up some charcoal briquets and (unsuccessfully) attempted to corn our own gunpowder. (Which, in hindsight, is beyond insane. We're lucky to be alive.) We did lots of other more run-of-the-mill chemistry and physics stuff. My parents were a confusing mix of proud and terrified. They actually bought one of those tin garden sheds and set it up in the back yard so that we could continue our scientific experiments with a reduced threat of burning the house down.

[SemiaCloud]

I strapped a model rocket engine to my bike, put training wheels on it, and the ducked and ignited the engine while behind a wall

[Wjolcz]

My cat decided once to munch laptop power cable. He bit it in half, so I decided to use the old trusty silver duct tape to fix it. It's still taped and works perfectly. Not a big thing. The cat is fine btw.

Edited June 16, 2015 by Veeltch

[Justicier]

Hmmm... probably when I was younger (and certainly less wise) when I had fireworks battles with friends. No joke... we were shooting bottle rockets and throwing firecrackers at each other. Pretty Kerbal I would say. I generally did a lot of Kerbalese things with fireworks... at one point I poured gunpowder down a cardboard tube and since I did not cap the one of the ends off and put pressure on the gunpowder, it did not explode. Instead it acted not dissimilar from a flamethrower for a few seconds as the gunpowder burned. Now that I think about it... had I a nozzle on one end and the other end of the tube capped off, I would have created a very inefficient chemical rocket

[KerikBalm]

My entire PhD thesis has secretely been my impression of what a Kerbal would do if he decided to be a biologist instead of an engineer.

[Scotius]

I once extinguished burning kitchen table with my bare hands. No, i wasn't the one who set it on fire. No, i did not need medical attention afterwards. Or even bandages. To this day i have no idea how i managed such feat with only minor 1'st-degree burns

[match]

Sparklers... packing tape... more sparklers... compression... more sparklers... modified 2 liter plastic bottle... SRB test ended with catastrophic loss.

Jeb would've been proud.

[mikegarrison]

I built a wing for my track car out of plywood and aluminum, from airfoil templates that I designed myself using xfoil. But I never installed it. I also built a bracket for my datalogger display that I fabbed up out of a cardboard box that some brake pads had come in and held in place with tape. (Later I replaced that with a metal bracket that holds the datalogger display and also a bullet cam.) I cut holes in my bumper and ran air ducts from them to my brakes.

If you head out to the race track, you will find all sorts of Kerbal stuff out there in the pits.

[luizopiloto]

why not use fiberglass for the airfoil?

[Superfluous J]

Everything that happened in my life between the ages of 15 and 18.

Seriously. I'm an odd mix of embarrassed and proud at the stuff I both survived and got away with during those years.

[FancyMouse]

I was driving at a roundabout, needed a left turn (meaning I need to "orbit" 270 degrees) and when I just passed 90 degree, I was trying to accelerate.

[regex]

A friend and I built this out of an old Elite 150, spare Vespa parts, extra fiberglass, and a few old Harbor Freight tools. Custom wiring harness with the digital MPH display in the project box up top. I also made a custom pipe for it out of an aftermarket glass pack, thing was loud as hell, you could hear it from a mile away "BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR". Got a lot of good miles out of it before something in the engine blew, probably a valve (still haven't cracked the case to see) and likely because the pipe was too big for the carb, which couldn't provide enough fuel to cool the engine, which taxed the radiator, etc... It's sitting in my garage right now with two flats waiting. Always waiting...

[Plume & Akakak]

I went to art school.

[Thomas988]

I'd have to say the most "Kerbal" thing I've ever done is go crazy with happiness while sitting in a Mercury capsule recreation. No joke, the first thing I did in there was shake the interior vigorously as to simulate re-entry. I then proceeded to press every button over and over and over and over and over...

[TheSaint]

Hmmm... probably when I was younger (and certainly less wise) when I had fireworks battles with friends. No joke... we were shooting bottle rockets and throwing firecrackers at each other. Pretty Kerbal I would say. I generally did a lot of Kerbalese things with fireworks... at one point I poured gunpowder down a cardboard tube and since I did not cap the one of the ends off and put pressure on the gunpowder, it did not explode. Instead it acted not dissimilar from a flamethrower for a few seconds as the gunpowder burned. Now that I think about it... had I a nozzle on one end and the other end of the tube capped off, I would have created a very inefficient chemical rocket

ROMAN CANDLE WARS!!!

We used to drive down to Ensenada and buy a trunk-load of fireworks and then go out to some deserted beach and do all sorts of unwise stuff with them. Including lighting the roman candles and pointing them at each other like guns. Lighting the bottle rockets in our hands and firing them into the surf. (Looks really cool when they go <POP> underwater.) Good times.

One time we go down and are being our usual unwise selves on a deserted beach. We turn around and there is a Mexican soldier standing next to his Jeep parked next to our van. With his rifle. And his rifle is not on his shoulder. And I'm all, "Okay, everyone stop what you are doing, keep your hands where he can see them, and, TERRI, WHERE ARE YOU!" (Terri being the one person in our group who spoke Spanish.) Just as I finish saying this, Eric comes running around the corner of the van with his roman candle firing everywhere, screaming like a banshee. Mr. Mexican Soldier now shoulders his rifle and aims it at Eric. Eric sees the rifle, drops his roman candle, puts his hands up, and starts screaming like a completely different type of creature, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" Now Terri finally arrives on the scene and starts talking the soldier down off of the ledge in very soothing tones of Spanish. Turns out the beach we were on had been secured for Mexican military exercises, and we had somehow managed to find an unsecured entrance to it. After some quick apologies and a rapid cleanup we got the heck out of there. And once the adrenaline wore off we all started laughing hysterically.

-----

Another time we're down there shopping for fireworks and we saw: The Boom. It was in the back of one of he shops. You could call it a firecracker, in the same way that you could call Godzilla a lizard. It was about a foot tall and about five inches in diameter. The vendor claimed it was four sticks of dynamite bundled together. We had our doubts about that. It was definitely four somethings wrapped together, with their fuses wrapped together at the top, and it had a label on the side that said, "Fuse is guaranteed to last for 15 seconds". (This becomes important later.) But there was no doubt about two things: It was huge, and we wanted it. He wanted $60 for it, we could only haggle him down to $45, and that was a lot for us, so we moved on. But I kept looking over at my buddy Robert and saying, "You know we're going to go back and get The Boom, right?" "Yeah, I know," was his response. At lunchtime we went back to the shop and pulled the, "All we have left is $30!" card, and it worked, we owned The Boom. We went out to the beach and had our usual hijinks, saving The Boom for the finale.

So it's getting late, all of the other fireworks have been expended, so it is time to light off The Boom and go home. But as stupid as we all are, none of us are stupid enough to light this thing. So we draw straws. And Manny draws the short straw. So we pick a rocky point on the beach and set out The Boom. Manny sits out with a lighter, the rest of us retire to a respectable distance. It's windy, so he has to huddle up against the fuse to get it lit. Finally after several tries he gets it lit. And from our perspective, it looks like we've been ripped off! A giant shower of sparks lights up the twilight sky! What is this, some kind of roman candle or something? Manny has a shower of sparks go off almost in his face. He falls over on his butt and looks at the thing for just a second. The bundled fuses are what is sending this terrific shower of sparks upwards. (What had happened was that the vendor wrapped the fuses of four large firecrackers together when he concocted this monstrosity. And, as any pyrotechnics technicians in the audience already know, when you wrap a fuse it burns faster. So lets all say it together with Manny as he comes to the dread realization in his mind: ) "This fuse is not going to last fifteen seconds." He rolled over, got onto his feet, he made it one step, and then

<BOOM>

Suddenly our disappointment was replaced with a mix of exhilaration and terror. All we saw was a four-foot fireball with Manny's figure silhouetted against it. He went sprawling on the ground and we went running up to him. We flipped him over and he was just staring at us wild-eyed. We're asking him all these questions, "Are you okay?" "Are you hurt?" "Can you move?" Totally not realizing that his ears are ringing so bad he is stone deaf, all he remembers is us huddled around him flapping our jaws. He was fine, his hearing came back after a couple of minutes, his ears were ringing for a day or so, he skinned his palms on the rocks. And, once again, when the adrenaline wore off, we all started laughing hysterically.

OMG we were idiots. Glorious idiots.

Edited June 17, 2015 by TheSaint

[mikegarrison]

why not use fiberglass for the airfoil?

Because I suck at composite layup.

[magnemoe]

made an bomb, who behaved like an rocket, and went after us

As teens we found we could make an bomb out of confectioner's sugar and some weedkiller who my father had an big sack of.

First we made some small bomb with coke cans, it worked well so we wanted to scale it up to an pipe bomb.

Fond a short pipe we could add caps to both sides, drill hole for fuse, we gotten some real fuse for this not home made.

As this was dangerous we went to an field where it was diged two 3 meter deep holes 7 meter from each other for an drainage project.

Put bomb in one hole, light fuse and jump into the other hole, this should keep us safe from explosion and fragments.

Waited and suddenly an load noise but no explosion, however the bomb jumped out of its hole and down into our where it was spinning around. We jump out of the hole and felt pretty stupid.

Later we tried making rocket out of this, metal cap in bottom as engine and a plastic tube as body. It did not work well because of low twr. mostly the went up 3-10 meter before tipping over and going sideways usually in our direction

Two fun features was that it burned real hot, far hotter than gunpowder and it made lots of smoke.