Did you ever, as a child, send toy cars down a slope, competing with friends over whose would roll faster? Now this pastime is taken seriously by perfectly grown-up people. The event is called “Valve Cover Racing.” A valve cover is a part of an internal combustion engine that closes the valvetrain to protect its Read more…
When building country cottages or garages on a homestead, you often need to screen bulk construction materials, soil, or garden earth. For this, a special fixture is used — a so-called vibrating screen (grizzly). Its classic version — a frame with a mesh set on trestles — is very bulky and low-productivity. I tried to Read more…
We have already described the construction of a sailboat and a vessel powered by a rubber motor, using PET soda bottles (see “M-K” No. 5 and 8 for 2024). We suggest adding to the “bottle fleet” a catamaran model with a rotor wind drive. It has long been observed that if a rotating cylinder is Read more…
Soil cultivation with electric tillers is nothing new. Especially for owners of summer cottages, gardens and vegetable plots (see, for example, “M-K” 3’83, 11’90). And when prices keep rising, when using walk-behind tractors (not to mention scarce mini-tractors) sometimes becomes economically impractical, electric helpers on small land plots are, so to speak, beyond competition. Convenient Read more…
A small plot of land, where “serious” machinery has no room to work, can really only be cultivated properly with a walk-behind tractor. That is why a thrifty rural owner, having decided to get such a machine, will first choose its make and weigh its capabilities. And only then will he think about a cart, Read more…
No one in the small gardening cooperative near Bryansk suspected anything miraculous. The gardeners had only one thing on their minds: extracting water from wells. In hot weather, every able-bodied resident was tied to the heavy handles of cast-iron pumps. They had to pump bucket after bucket to water the thirsty seedlings. One of the Read more…
Small cozy Latvian villages, half-hidden by the curly greenery of trees, are densely scattered across fields that are as flat as a table. They are sometimes only a few kilometers apart, like the villages of Rude and Nica in the Liepaja district, and their life is closely linked by such close neighborhood. Many schoolchildren from Read more…
You can’t carry much cargo on an ordinary two-wheeled bicycle, even if it has a luggage rack. Meanwhile, bicycle owners often need to do just that. So it is a good idea to make a trailer for the bicycle. The design of such a two-wheeled trailer was described by Zbigniew Hennel and Andrzej Fedoruk in Read more…
I invite the magazine’s readers to get acquainted with an original design of a universal self-propelled vehicle built by my brother Alexander. As he claims (jokingly, of course), the idea of making such a machine came to him out of laziness. He really did not want to spend his whole life doing hard, low-productivity work, Read more…
When people want to emphasize that someone has done a great deal of work, searching for a fitting comparison, they involuntarily turn to the hard labor of digging the earth and say: “They’ve shoveled so much!” Then everything becomes clear at once, and memories of stubborn soil, an aching back, and blisters on the hands Read more…
