As part of "Craft/Design/Technology"..
..we had 6 months to design something, and create it in our school workshop from whatever materials were available.

I decided to create an adjustable tripod for a camera.

I of course instead spent 5 months and 3 weeks fucking about in the workshop, welding things together, making throwing stars, melting aluminium and trying to make Warhammer figurines, trying to colour steel*, putting people's pencil cases into the furnace, that sort of thing.

After 6 weeks I realised I had fuck all, so I handed in 3 sawn-off chair legs as a "Work in Progress".

The teacher wasn't fooled, but was amused.

*Our metalworks teacher was a lovely man, but totally scatter-brained. He was missing 2 fingers on his left hand and 3 on the other. He lost the right fingers to a bandsaw and legend had it that he lost the left fingers when demonstrating to a class how he lost his right fingers. Anyway, I wanted to colour a piece of steel and he had a tip - if I heated it up in the furnace until it glowed and dipped it into whale oil, it would turn blue. I asked where I could get whale oil and he said he didn't know, but had a canister of Duckhams that I could use as an alternative.

I will never forget the 6 foot flame that shot out of that canister and over my shoulder as I gently lowered a white-hot steel pole into it. Neither will my mate who was standing behind me in his new Nike Kagoul.
( Dixipoos Bye Bye Blackbird, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 12:16, Reply)