What Was Your Source of Inspiration?

Yes true for me, Meccano, model trains, and growing up as an army kid surrounded by advanced equipment.

Maybe the 50s was just the right time...there was plenty of stuff happening and science and engineering was seen as exciting.
We had meccano and lived in Rugby a big rail junction, thos steam engines still stir the emotions.
But if I had to choose one 'toy' it would be Plasticine.
I made everything from knights in armour with dragons to fight of course... to submarines... I sent some intrepid woodlice to the bottom of our garden pond, they returned safely too.
I think plasticine is wonderful for manual dexterity and free expression of both artistic and engineering ideas...Ok for some engineering you needed to put it in the fridge to get the required rigidity!
Del

Watching Neil Armstrong take that giant leap for mankind when I was three was a big part of it. That and the fact that my dad was a mechanic and I grew up under the hood of a car. Some of my first toys were real wrenches and tools. I took everything apart as a kid, rarely got it back together again because most stuff was riveted and not intended to come apart.....

My father was a non-mechanical who tried to fix my favorite toy airplane and couldn't put it back together, (when I was 6 yrs old). It inspired me to try and figure out how to fix things on my own.

When I was 11, I asked my Dad how a carburetor worked. He said, "It's black magic, Son." I still have the drawings I made back then as I taught myself about jets and needle valves.

Natural inquisitiveness, the lack of someone to do things for me, and steady background radiation from Dr Who and Star Trek I think may have put me on the path.

-A-

My father was also not very technical but would try to fix almost anything. My grandpa on the other hand was very technical and taught my mom how a jeep worked by having her help take the entire thing apart and put it back together. The first thing that sparked my technical curiosity is magnets. I was fascinated by the invisible force and thought up all kinds of crazy ideas that looked very cool but being in 3rd grade I lacked the knowledge of physics. I even formed an invention club that was based on ideas of the hover board from back to the future. I was told by an older kid that hover boards were real so I just assumed that I needed to find out how they worked and I could build a hover car. I literally have a few hundred inventions in a folder from the last 22 years or so of ideas. Some of the early ones are of course not feasible but some were. Now I get to invent for a living. I couldn't have hoped for a better job. Engineering is the best field of work for anyone with a creative technical mind.

My Dad was an electrical engineer who could design, build and repair anything. There is a wall on a main road in Dover where he lived in the late 60's, early 70's, he made a mold, made the stones out of cement in the mold, then he built the wall, just for fun.....I still look at it every time I drive off the ferry and drive towards Folkstone.....the wall has developed a crack due to the heavy transport moving along there, but otherwise its in a good state.

He brought me a big cardboard box home for Christmas 1950 or '51, in it was colored wire, switches, lamps and a battery........that started me off!! I was 4 or 5 at the time.....

In 1955 I built a single channel Radio Control system, transmitter & receiver from two kits I bought with money saved.........valves and HT batteries.....but it worked great!

I built a proper analog RC system, still using the same transmitter, fully proportional in the early '60s, when the MAT100 and 101 transistors you had to test each one to see that it worked at 27Mhz, not all did.....there was only one Analog proportional system as far as I am aware, published by RCM&E magazine, 1963? or thereabouts. It had features that only recently digital RC has got!!!

In the RN, amongst many other things, I also built a single channel Oscilloscope, mostly with valves, only the calibrator was transistors!!! A multi band Superhet radio.....

I have also built dozens of different metal detectors, battery chargers, radar detectors, radar guns,and and and and.....today I build my own stepper motor drivers for a CNC router.....PC interfaces and the like......thze list is very long.....

But all because of that cardboard box from Dad.........my Mother was apalled that it was my Christmas present!!!! I wasn't!!

Mwaaahhhh!!!

I was about 9 or 10 when I asked for one of those for my birthday and a similar chemistry set for Christmas...was told no. Asked to buy them from my birthday money (we didn't get pocket money) and was told no.

Still makes me to think about it....

I did have sticklebricks and a clockwork trian set. I designed (age 13) a cage to hold my caterpillars as they were growing (I always released the butterflies) and it's just occurred to me that I never considered that I might build it - that was Dad's job and I wouldn't have been allowed. It worked wonderfuly...

I scared my Dad when I was about 25 when we were changing the back brakes on my Astra. He'd walked to the shop to get new brake shoes and when he came back was greeted by the sight of his daughter (with eye protection!) grinding the lip off the drums. He admitted he was terrified when he spotted me - but did say I done a good job. I'd worked in a shipyard and been to uni by this time...

Where's that gender attitude thread...

A GA from me for many reasons, here are a few:-

1) Many men don't know about that and do a bad job on the brakes.....

2) Women should "get stuck in more" on such jobs, there are no reasons not to

3) I was always for women's rights, its your right as a woman to do such things if you wish to.

4) I have two daughters, although they don't get as "stuck in" as you do apparently, the elder leaves her Bank colleagues breathless quite often....and when her family gets born, she will be the one that goes back to work, not her husband....as she earns twice his salary!!!

More power to your elbow lady!!!! and how about some other tales from the book "Scaring Dad by loving Daughter!"? From other Ladies here as well!!! Or their proud men folk?

The absence of a telly was one thing. I'm not that old, but the folks simply didn't like the 'one-eyed monster' (shaddup - my grandpa said that, and he didn't mean it that way). Going out, playing games, discovering stuff was all part of it. No playstation type games was also part. Found a fossil one day and a neighbour (who happened to be a very highly qualified guy) explained to me what it was. The time scale left me jaw-dropped, and an avid reader of stuff like National Geographic.

Was also a time when if something broke, you had to fix it because you couldn't aford to buy new.

Devising ways for Action Man to get bad with sisters Cindy was no samll part _(shaddu...).

One last tuppence; turn on the telly today and compare with what you might have found 50 years ago. Endles dross, where once it was all news and educational stuff (though Z-Cars doe still water the eyes )

Meccano (red & green, starting with #6 and going to #9)for mechanical gadgets and steam locomotives as a self-taught introduction to thermodynamics

Growing up on a farm in the Willamette Swamp kinda forced me to become engineering minded.