Attic Fan Thermostat?

[Mike Lamb]

This device was rigged to the cord of an old attic fan. Is it some kind of thermostat?

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[hausdok]

It's a sensor probe that probably is supposed to be immersed in water. When that attic gets hot enough, some contacts will close inside of that thing and the fan will come on.

[John Kogel]

Hey, I used to attach baby buggy axles to 2 X 4's with bent nails just like that. []

[Erby]

Used to make 2x4 go carts with baby buggy axles!

Lot's of fun until you crashed.

[David Meiland]

You guys should have been hitting the commercial job sites, stealing bigger nails. My dad never had any really big ones.

[kurt]

Used to make 2x4 go carts with baby buggy axles!

Lot's of fun until you crashed.

I thought crashing was part of the fun.

[Erby]

It was the 60's. Couldn't afford to buy nails. We used to straighten a lot of 16D nails.

Used them for just about anything we built as kids. Tree houses, go carts, horses, ramps, whatever.

Depends on the crash and how much it hurt, Kurt.

[kurt]

True. Crashes were an expected part of the process, though.

[Marc]

I crashed once. Wasn't the high point, wasn't fun, wasn't expected, actually quite painful but I remember it like yesterday, 44 years ago.

Marc

[gtblum]

We used to straighten a lot of 16D nails.

I still do! Every time I do, I raise it to the sky for my Grandfather to see.[:-angel]

With lots of hills and an a Supermodified track in town, we built and crashed many of our versions of those jets on wheels.

The kid's whose dads worked building the nuke plants always had the best stuff. Plenty of all thread for axels and some really nice wheels that I think were appropriated from the plants, as well.

[Erby]

It's more fun when the other guy crashes his and YOU get to watch, Marc.

[Mike Lamb]

It's a sensor probe that probably is supposed to be immersed in water. When that attic gets hot enough, some contacts will close inside of that thing and the fan will come on.

Thanks, Mike.

And thanks, John, for mentioning baby buggy axles.

[John Dirks Jr]

Speaking of 2x4 go carts, I made one. I didn't have all the right parts to make a functional clutch but I had the string connected to the wooden gas pedal for the the throttle and rope steering.

An over anxious older kid in the neighborhood wanted badly to see it all in action. So we found a belt that went between the little B&S engine pulley to the wheel pulley. It was tight with no ability to clutch it. He push started me from the top of a hill and off I went. With no way to stop I got speed wobbles after about 50 yards, took a sharp right over the curb and did an end over flip into a ditch.

Amazingly I was unharmed but the cart did not fair as well. Busted front axle and cracked cooling fins on the cylinder head.

I remember him saying, "Sorry I didn't know you wouldn't be able to stop Johnny"

Some things you never forget.

[Marc]

Speaking of 2x4 go carts, I made one. I didn't have all the right parts to make a functional clutch but I had the string connected to the wooden gas pedal for the the throttle and rope steering.

An over anxious older kid in the neighborhood wanted badly to see it all in action. So we found a belt that went between the little B&S engine pulley to the wheel pulley. It was tight with no ability to clutch it. He push started me from the top of a hill and off I went. With no way to stop I got speed wobbles after about 50 yards, took a sharp right over the curb and did an end over flip into a ditch.

Amazingly I was unharmed but the cart did not fair as well. Busted front axle and cracked cooling fins on the cylinder head.

I remember him saying, "Sorry I didn't know you wouldn't be able to stop Johnny"

Some things you never forget.

My father made one similar to that for me. Used a railroad cross-tie for a frame. Put a plywood seat in the middle with horizontal shaft engine behind it. In front was a 2X4 with a single large bolt in the middle and thru the cross-tie so I could rest my feet on it and steer the cart. The V-belt was deliberately chosen to be several sizes too large. The slack was taken up by an empty wooden thread-spool fitted on one end of a steel rod. The rest of the rod was bent in such as to give me a lever to push down as I sat in my seat to tighten the belt. A string attach to the other side of my seat was connected to the throttle and gave me control of that. It actually worked very well for two years. Father was a mechanic and basically did anything and everything 'round the house. Welder, radio/tv tech, everything.

Lookin' like I just created the mother of all drifts. []

Marc

[Erby]

Nah, Marc. John did it with his baby buggy axle post.

Ah the memories!

[John Dirks Jr]

Marc's description is exactly the way mine was intended to be. However, for lack of all the correct parts, we rigged it direct drive with no ability to disengage.

[hausdok]

Didn't have a motor. Use a piece of cut-off plywood sub-flooring. Nailed a couple of 2 by 4's to the underside. One to bear the rear axle and the other for the front. drilled a hole down through the front one a the center and then shoved long bolt through there and used some washers and a nut to separate the two and then nailed axles taken from an old baby buggy found at the dump onto the underside of those 2 bys. attached a rope to each ene of the one up front for steering. Then I took a bunch of chicken wire (How was a 7 year old supposed to know it was stucco lath) formed up a body and took a can of contact cement and then laboriously cut out little squares of underlayment and glued them over the whole body and painted it.

Few momonts of tension when I proudly displayed it to my parents. My father was, "How many times have I told you not to take building materials from the shed without asking me first," and my mother was, "Leave him alone. Look how much work he put into that and how cleverly he built that body." The old man grumbled, "Do you know how expensive that contact cement is?" She won; I was out of trouble.

Hauled it over a mile up to the hill on Lango Road and a bunch of the Lango Hill guys busted my chops about it but all wanted to ride it. I was going to be first. My brake was a piece of 2 by 4 spiked into the side of the floor. Started rolling down the hill and got up to good speed. It was a blast until I came to the 90 degree curve at the bottom. Tried to turn at that speed and she went up on two wheels. Straightened her out and she shot off the road onto the dirt path at the corner right into an electrified fence where she got hung up. Tried to stop but my lever-type brake popped off like it hadn't even been nailed on. I got shocked about twenty times climbing out of that mess and the body - all my hard work - was wrecked.

That ended my quest to be the soap box king of Lango Hill. I traded it to one of the Lango boys for a B-B gun.

A the stories I could tell about that B-B gun....and the myriad of ass whuppings it cost me. Sigh.

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike

[John Kogel]

Funny one, Mike. A wooden prototype might have been a wiser choice for your first run, at least until you got the brakes working. We had a perfect hill running past the house, two lane country road with a corner at the bottom and a long straight to the finishing line. We had two younger sisters to act as traffic control people, which was to yell 'car' at the top of their lungs, at which point we would steer for the ditch and hope the bent nails held er together. For brakes, we found the foot most reliable, the original brake shoe.

We would race 2-man bobsled style, one kid pushing and jumping on the back, if he could. My brother tried the engine thing but it was a dud. As pit boss, my job was to push the cart off the block when he got the wheel spinning. I think the exhaust fumes stunted my growth and the engine stalled as soon as the wheel hit the ground. I'm sure we had to try it 10 times tho, just to be sure it wasn't just me not pushing hard enough. []

Later, my brother showed up with a gocart minus an engine. That was the "Steely", with bearings in the wheels and a steering wheel. Racing then became a cat and mouse chase down the hill with me and a buddy getting a no more than 5 second head start. I learned defensive driving on that old road. []

Later still, I built the supreme soapbox car. A buddy found a trailer axle with 16" wheels on it. I bolted angle iron bed rails to that and put a pair of small wheels on the front with good old rope steering. That thing was deadly when it got rolling.

[hausdok]

Yeah,

But that was kids playin'. Today, the only way they'd do that if it was on a screen and they had a controller in their hands.

OT - OF!!!

M.