Advice for the determined experimenter

IDTIIWY

I know your out there.
Your in the garage with a bunch of PVC pipe.
Or in the back yard with diet coke and mentos.
Or putting together that Tesla coil from the instructions you got on the web.
They didn’t mention much about safety on the website did they?

Well I am here to save the day.
I am officially forming the IDTIIWY* safety consulting company.

I know you won’t take my advice so I am appealing to the better half of the back yard inventors.
The spouse.
The spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, or significant other is the one who provides adult supervision and we all know it.

So if your significant other starts bookmarking sites like the following:

Back yard ballistics, Dangerous Hobbies, Trebuchet web, Power labs or has a sudden interest in recording every episode of Mythbusters you just may need my services.

I can instruct you on precautions to make sure that you or your significant other can live his desires to build machines that he couldn’t afford when he was a teenager.
And do it safely.

I have years of experience with building devices that are intended to shock and awe and have lived to tell the tale. Not due to any magical or mystical understanding of the dangers within, simply through dumb luck and an instinctive understanding of physics, chemistry, and electricity.

So learn from my mistakes, send me your questions and I will help you keep your loved one in one piece, with hair, and not on fire.

Examples of such sage wisdom:

“Never stand behind a trebuchet.”
“Never light a oxy/acetylene balloon by flicking matches at it.”
“Don’t stand in front of a trebuchet.”
“Try not to do anything with high voltage while wet.”
“If your going to launch an anvil at night paint it a bright color.”
“Cats don’t want a ride, use a dog instead.”

Just remember to submit your questions well in advance, I don’t just sit in front of my PC waiting for you to contact me.

Got to go… I have experiments to preform.
For your benefit

And
Mythbusters is on.

Update:  Mythbusters is done.  Look up Adam Savage on You Tube.  Great stuff.

*IDTIIWY I’d Do That If I Were You

Sometimes said to encourage the builder of dangerous devices to go ahead and proceed with the experiment. Especially if you personally wouln’t do it. But your curious to see what happens.