Motor cultivators, mini-tractors, potato harvesters… For economically strong farms and homesteads, such equipment has long ceased to be a novelty. The lot of the less fortunate, it seems, remains only hope in oneself, in one’s ability to create solid mechanical helpers almost from “scrap,” and on extremely simple, yet reliable agricultural tools—a “gift from deep Read more…
Every time the season for preserving vegetables and making juices approaches, I catch myself thinking that I’ll have to go to my neighbor again to borrow his juicer. It looks unassuming and simple in design, but once I’ve worked with it, I can no longer bring myself to use my industrial electric-powered juicer with numerous Read more…
A story about all the machines and mechanisms created by amateur constructor Vasily Alekseevich SVERBIL from the village of Zelenchukskaya in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic cannot fit into one publication. It’s better to tell about them one by one. And we’ll start, perhaps, with the simplest thing the craftsman built—the “Elektronik” walk-behind tractor. They say that Read more…
From the depths of centuries, the shovel has reached us, to which V. Dal, the creator of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, gave an amazingly apt definition: “a blade tool for digging and scooping loose materials.” This hand tool is well-known to owners of dachas and garden plots, not to mention Read more…
In small families, the kitchen is most often used for meals: it’s quick and convenient—everything is at hand. But most kitchens are cramped—you can’t fit a normal “family” table, say 900×900 mm, there. It would seem that the solution is to use a folding (for mealtime) design. However, transforming such a table from small to Read more…
In my time, I had the opportunity to build and test many motorboats. The first to hit the water was the motorboat “Zvezdochka”, whose drawings were published in the October 1966 issue of the “Modelist-Konstruktor” magazine. It is known that in rural areas, DIY enthusiasts are not spoiled by the wide range of construction materials Read more…
I’m sure many amateur car builders face the problem of glazing the body when building their vehicle. Most of them solve this by “tying” themselves to the sizes and shapes of automotive glass used on production models. I, however, took the risk of equipping my “jeep” with triplex-type glass, cut to the required dimensions myself. Read more…
Regular subscribers know that our publication pays considerable attention to individual construction. By regularly publishing various house projects and thus communicating with reader-builders, we have found that many novice builder-cottagers have a poor understanding of the house construction process itself. Finnish builder and teacher Renti Jormalainen tells about the initial stage of building a home. Read more…
The author of this material is a schoolboy from a distant Siberian city. When the editorial office received his letter describing the ski-track snowmobile he had built, he was 15 years old and studying in the tenth grade of secondary school. Now Yevgeny has grown older, more experienced, and would probably design some components of Read more…
Owners of houses with stove heating know how difficult it is to light a cold stove (fireplace or sauna stove), especially in bad windy weather. You’ll literally cry, because the smoke initially often goes not into the chimney, but, on the contrary, into the room. This problem is especially acute for those owners of garden Read more…
