Hobbies, Past and Present.

• Making and repairing things
• [-] Reading
• People
• [-] Photography
• Social, political and general commentary on life (same page available with "As I See It" Icon link.)
• [-] Coin collecting
• Cars and other vehicles (same page available with "Vehicles" Icon link.)
• [-] Travel
• [-] Amateur radio
• [-] Home renovations and maintenance
• [-] Teaching
• [-] Computers
• [-] Videography

Making and Repairing things

I suppose that some might refer to this as "playing with toys" rather than a hobby, and that is the way it started.

When I was about three years old one of my Christmas gifts was a Mecanno set. This was a collection of small flat bars, angles, plates, wheels, axles, and a box of bolts and nuts to fasten them together.

A few months later Dad was late for work one day. The old Big Ben alarm clock still told the time but would not ring - or to be more precise, it would only stop ringing when the alarm spring was completely unwound.

I asked Dad if I could try to fix it and he agreed. I soon found that the screws that held the works in the case were too tight for me to remove so, when he came home from work, I asked him to loosen them for me - not remove them, just loosen them a little bit.

The next day I removed the case and spent hours looking at the gears, springs, levers and all the other wonderful things inside. In fact, several days were spent studying the way that large gears moved smaller ones and the action of the gear train that allowed the spring to turn the hands and the escape movement which regulated its speed

Finally my attention turned to the alarm mechanism. A separate spring drove a second gear train to another escape movement, but instead of a balance wheel and balance spring at the end of the train there was a bell clapper arm which was rapidly moved back and forth between two externally mounted bells on the top of the clock.

This was all in good order. The problem was in the stop lever. A cam, on the shaft that carried the hour hand, moved a blocking lever down to stop the movement of the bell clapper arm until the preset time. Another lever arm, connected to the blocking lever, extended out through the case so that the alarm could be shut off by hand. Over the years the tab on the end of the blocking lever arm had been worn away by being struck by the moving bell clapper arm as it was shut off.

After a few days of studying of the situation, I bent the blocking lever arm a bit so that it once more would reach to block the movement of the clapper arm. A day or so of reassembly followed and then I tested it to make sure that it worked.

That evening I asked Dad if he wanted the clock back, as it was now in working order again. He checked it out and didn't seem very surprised that it was working as good as new again, but told me that he didn't need it as he had already bought another one.

I don't know what happened to the old clock after that, but I do know that the clock and the Mecanno set were significant items in my life
- and my father's acceptance and encouragement were major factors in what I have become.

It was probably with beginning of primary school that I first began to recognize the great diversity of both physical types and personality types that I would co-exist with for the rest of my life - although I was certainly not thinking ahead more than a few days at the most when I first had my range of aquaintences expanded so suddenly.

Over those early years I learned that there were people who saw physical pressures as the means to obtain what they wanted, and also that there were others, like myself, who would make the other choice. I was never in the upper levels of physical strength in my peer group and had parents who looked on violence as the methods of those lacking adequate mental abilities. Probably for both of those reasons, I began learning the skills of negotiating for what I wanted rather than demanding it. (In those days it was almost unknown that any of our community would just take that which they wanted.)
For my chosen "problem solving" approach to have any chance of success it was necessary to at least try to understand how several (and later, many) different kinds of people operated - on both physical and mental planes.
Many years later, probably while in my late twenties, I came to understand that this had developed to the stage of a hobby - that is to say, an activity that I enjoyed even when there was no necessity for doing it.

Over the years it has proven to be a very usefull hobby, except when I encounter those whose approach to their total environment is so far remote from my own that their thought processes completely baffle me. One example would be the badly disturbed individuals who could, as reported in the news of the recent past, skin a live animal and refer to the act as an artistic endeavour! That level of mental depravity makes me shudder to even type the words.

On the brighter side, people in general are interesting, sometimes funny without meaning to be, usually sympathetic to the problems of their friends and neighbors, always have a "dream" that they are trying to attain, don't like things that are unfair to themselves or any person who is not well equipped to handle the problem, capable of surprising things if pressured, but always fascinating to observe and learn from!