I have never been, nor will I ever be a mechanical savant. I know my limitations, and while my brothers could build a working car out of some sawdust and two screws, I can barely follow the directions found in an IKEA box.
It’s not that I don’t try. I really like to build stuff, but unfortunately, my inability to follow directions seems to affect all aspects of my life.
I guess I should have recognized this early on. I really did have problems following the simplest directions in first grade. The teacher would say, “Class, don’t eat the clay” and sure enough, moments later, the teacher would add, “Robert, I told you not to eat clay.”
I really thought she meant just the class, not me. If she had meant me, why didn’t she just call me out by name before I glommed onto the clay or sampled the paste.
As I continued to get older, I fought my desire to follow directions. I really wanted to figure out how that whole thing worked in life. I thought it would be important, after all, that somewhere along the line, going from Step 1 to Step 2 and so on would come in handy.
That day came when my family purchased the complete series of Popular Mechanics books. It was overflowing with amazing “how-to” projects, from building your own radio station to fixing a leaky pipe.
I was never drawn to such pedestrian things as pipeage. I just didn’t have the butt to be a plumber, I guess.
I remember turning the pages of these books for hours on end. Every time I used the bathroom, I would find a new project, so that meant at least one a day. By the time a year had past, I had almost 400 projects in mind. No sh**!
That would never do. None of the projects in Popular Mechanics took a day. At least not for me. If they only didn’t have all these directions to follow, I could have been done by lunch time. But, Popular Mechanics loved Step 1s and Step 2s. I guess that’s why they were so popular in the first place.
I finally settled on building a hovercraft. That sounded like a lot of fun, and it required balsa, a toilet tube and a gas powered model airplane engine, things I just happened to have lying around.
In the interest of trying to describe said hovercraft, I did some searching on Google. Obviously, no one else did well on this project either. I couldn’t find a single photo.
So I will describe it as best I can. It was about 18″ long, 8″ high and a foot wide. In the center was a vertical tunnel where you mounted the gas engine. This tunnel vented the air from the prop to the bottom of the craft to create the cushion of air. The toilet tube extended out the back from this tunnel to provide propulsion to move the thing forward.
Simple enough. Unfortunately, it had directions. Lots of them. I slogged my way laboriously through each step, wanting this first project to be perfect. I worked on that hovercraft for weeks, cutting all the balsa framing, gluing it together, then pinning it until it dried. Then adding another piece. Eventually the entire framework was done. All that was left was to put on the super thin skin on the body to make it look more like a hovercraft.
That would have to wait. I desperately wanted to see the hovercraft hover so I skipped the last 20 or so steps and took it outside. Yes, it looked a bit sad sitting there on the driveway. Compared to the one in the book, it was very pathetic, but only because it didn’t have the futuristic rounded shape the thin balsa would provide.
But, I thought, why waste time doing all the finish work if the thing didn’t work as advertised. I got out the gas and the battery to start the engine. I fueled her all up, hooked the battery to the spark plug and started cranking the prop.
Spin, sputter, stop. Spin, sputter, stop. Spin, sputter, stop. This goes on for a very long time as the engine refused to kick over. Spin, sputter, stop. I tried again. And again.
Then I would convince myself that the engine was flooded. It may have been, in fact. I would leave it until the next day, then the next. Then the next. This goes on for a while, too.
I even reread the directions. Yes, I read the directions. I wanted to see if I had missed anything at all. I hadn’t. At least nothing that the Popular Mechanics had bothered to write down.
The engine was pulled off my trainer. Whenever the PT-19 would do a loop, the engine would sputter, but never quite stop. What I didn’t realize until years later was that there were two kinds of .049 engines, ones that were gravity fed and ones that weren’t.
With the engine lying on its back in the hovercraft, it was in perennial, sputtering climb. The gas could never possibly make its way to the engine as I had a gravity fed model. I was cursed from the very start.
It wasn’t my fault for once. It wasn’t in the directions. They never said to get the non-gravity fed engine. It just said an .049 engine.
Eventually, the hovercraft hovered – right into the trash can. I just couldn’t bear to look at it any longer. All those hours spent building it and all that time spent trying to actually follow directions.
I never built another Popular Mechanics project again. And to this day I am very suspect of all directions.
In the Emerald City, still staring at the dresser from IKEA in the bedroom and wondering if all the directions are really included,
– Robb