I have long been a fan of the magazine “Modelist-Konstruktor”. Back in my school years I was into aircraft and rocket modeling and made kites. Small-scale mechanization also attracted me. I dreamed of some kind of tractor, especially when I had to dig the garden by the house by hand. After graduating from the institute, Read more…
The prototype of this slot-car model (for how to build a simple home or school track for model-car racing, see “M-K” No. 3, 2025.) was the Cummins Diesel Special racing car, a participant in the 500-mile race of 1952 on the track in Indianapolis (Indiana, USA). In the early days of the automobile industry, racing Read more…
According to the “table of ranks,” the Gran Turismo class covers comfortable, high-speed cars in a sporting style, intended for long-distance travel on motorways. Soviet industry never produced anything of the kind, and there were almost no high-speed roads at the time. Even so, such cars were built by amateur designers to individual projects (and Read more…
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…
