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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BillM" data-source="post: 4150501" data-attributes="member: 45785">Not necessarily true. Got a set of Lincoln logs when I was about 6. Didn't get my first erector set until after I got here to Oklahoma. Been here nearly 28 years. However, since my family was poor, and split when I was 4, I had to learn from taking stuff apart and trying to put it back together. Though if you want to, you could say the world was my erector set. When I was 10, my brother and I got GI Joe Action Figures. Mine (GI Jerry) was equipped with working bows and arrows, spears, and swords. Blades and points were hand-forged (cold forging) from coat hanger wire, and sharpened on a piece of concrete. Grandpa gave me his '61 Falcon after he wore it out, when I was 15. Had to scavenge my own tools, mostly, but when grandma bent the rear bumper into an L-shape on her matching Falcon, Grandpa "borrowed" mine. I used a ball peen hammer, a plumbers propane torch, and a wet rag to straighten hers, and put it back on mine. Only way you could tell it had been bent was the crack in the chrome where the bend used to be. Fit perfectly! At 18, Uncle Sam trained me to work on high performance fighter jets. between then and age 30, I worked on my own stuff, spent ten years photographing broken and blown up stuff, and other things, during that time. Computers, firearms, armour, the usual car and home stuff.At 30, Uncle Sam sent me to school to work on satellite communications systems. Among other things I worked on was a  a circuit board in a IBM System 360/70, got it back running again. Replacement board was going to cost $5000, and a six-month lead time. Some of the traces were blown right off the board. Superglued copper tape in place, soldered the joints, and replaced the fried components. Put it in the test jig, and it worked just fine. Was still running on that card when I left.  Also fixed a Vietnam Veteran AN/MSC-46 satellite communications van that should have gotten a Purple Heart. Was shot up be the Viet Cong, still had patches on the skin of the van. Had a 40' dish, 10-ton counter weight, and had been built to track non-synchronous satellites. Modified for geo-synchronous satellites by the time I got to it, in 1986. Retired from the USAF in 1997, back to working on my own stuff. Wasted 10 years going to school to be a teacher, and another few as a teacher, spent the last 8 years of my working life in an industrial laundry. Started working there to load the machines by hand, told people I was getting paid to exercise, instead of paying to go to the gym. 2-1/2 years later, moved into the maintenance shop. Spent nearly 5-1/2 years there. Rewired a Braun 450lb load washing machine, among other interesting things. Got qualified to work on boilers. And a water treatment system that was obsolete 20 year before I started working there. Also finished wrecking my back working that water treatment system, so that I was a couple of days from giving my notice when they fired my entire shift, about half of 2nd shift, and a third of 1st shift. Covid-19 dropped most of our business in the toilet. All the restaurants, machine shops, mechanics, and other we rented assorted kinds of towels to closed down. And all the oil companies we did uniforms for. We average 30-50 thousand pounds of laundry a week. My last Friday there, we were washed out before 5am. Usually had 20-30K pounds ready to start on Monday. Been working on my own stuff since then.</blockquote>

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