I did most of my bodgering during my high school years, when I intended to be an engineer. After that I've only done computer programming, no hardware stuff, with the exception of some dabbling with flying model planes. So this isn't going to be impressive at all, but here's what I made:

1. a couple of bird cages, including a slide out floor and nesting box for laying eggs and holding babie parakeets. I bred parakeets a little. 2. A solenoid. I wrapped wire around a tube and plugged it directly into a wall socket with no resistor, which is a bad idea. 3. Some rubber powered model planes, some control-line planes, and a radio control airplane. 4. a radio receiver 5. a radio transmitter 6. a solar cooker: I made a parabolic dish with cardboard and lined it with aluminum foil. It didn't make enough heat to cook food, but enough so you could feel some heat at the focal point. 7. model rockets 8. My first bodgering job was a rubber band gun I made when I was around 5 years old. It shot rubber bands. 9. a skateboard using rollerskate wheels.

That's all I can think of right now. I think maybe JW and Battlebots will inspire me to mess with hardware again. I might build a robot and/or a scaled down catapult and ballista.

-- Richard Manahan (rjcyclesk8@hotmail.com), December 28, 2000

Answers

i "bodged up" a mighty nifty CD-ROM Launcher using silicone gel, a 12000 RPM 12volt DC moter and some tape. it made CD's spin very fast, maybe about 168 miles per hour, thats about right. i made some other stuff too, like a couple rockets, a glider(polystyrate) with landing gear and some other things.

-- Sean Durkin (seandurkin@msn.com), December 28, 2000.

A great question! In highschool, I made a radio controlled hovercraft as a project. It was quite nice, made out of lightweight styrofoam with hand-carved propellors (because I couln't find any).

Most recently, I'm 90% done a cool little gizmo. I rigged up a little radio controlled car to the parallel port on my computer! I then wrote some programs and stuff, so it can actually be controlled over the internet! It should be done before 2001!

That CD launcher sounds really neat, I always wanted to make a giant catapult!

Mike http://mikebeauchamp.com

-- mikebeauchampDOTcom (mikebeauchamp@home.com), December 29, 2000.

Is your radio control car wireless? Cuz i got an idea, you can have the RC car relay video and send a GPS location and you can navigate the car around the town just by staying at home. lol Your Idea sounds relly really cool.

-- Sean Durkin (seandurkin@msn.com), December 31, 2000.

I've made several catapults (trebuchets, actually) recently.

The biggest I've built so far is designed for launching squashes. :) it can throw one nearly 11 meters up into the air- the results are messy.

Other stuff I've bodgered includes:

A (VERY ugly looking) model amphi-car, which is sort of a cross between the Navy Blue's fanboat and the Bodger's floating Land Rover. It uses old plastic bottles as the pontoons, and a 5V (running on 12V) motor with a homemade aluminum propeller powered by an old screwdriver battery. It's heavy for its size, but is can get up to quite a speed on its own.

Homemade mini-hydraulics using drinking straw-pistons and a water-pik as the pump.

A homemade pantelegraph. It's an early ancentor of the fax machine. If you've seen the program "The Secret Life of Machines", you'll know what I'm talking about.

Pics of all this stuff can be found at: http://www.angelfire.com/bc2/sewdorfland/build.html

I like that CD launcher idea, I only use my old CDs as coasters.

-- Robert Maitland (rcm_ca@yahoo.com), December 31, 2000.