If you recall that cross-country racing skis are designed mainly for travel on a prepared track, while wide hunting skis handle any snow, it becomes clear how the proposed homemade sled design differs substantially from store-bought ones: above all, it does not require packed snow slopes. Even the fairly popular three-ski snow scooters “Chuck and Read more…
Improving drive efficiency is a problem that concerns not only bicycle designers, but also the owners of these machines. Since the invention of the bicycle, the pedal drive has been brought, one might say, to perfection. Increasing its efficiency without complicating the mechanism is hardly possible. On sports and touring bicycles, for example, multi-speed transmissions Read more…
A universal trailer for a passenger car. My wife and I often go on short trips in our car — sometimes fishing at a lake, sometimes into the woods for mushrooms. And on these trips we always lacked a trailer, a kind of compact camper where we could sleep peacefully and have a snack regardless Read more…
Having become a pensioner, I took up breeding nutria (swamp beavers, or coypu) and became convinced how profitable this business is. With low costs for keeping these herbivorous and, moreover, very unpretentious animals, I get not only tasty meat (on average 2—3 kg from each animal), which is in no way inferior to rabbit meat Read more…
First, a few words about myself and the situation fate put me in. It all started when, during a motorcycle accident, I suffered a severe spinal injury with damage to the spinal cord. Unfortunately, I was not operated on immediately, but two months after the injury. The result was complete paralysis of the body, from Read more…
Starting a car’s internal combustion engine in winter — especially after a long period of inactivity — is often a serious problem. The issue is even more pressing for powerful trucks and agricultural machinery, much of which is now privately owned and is typically stored outdoors without a garage. And the cause of a difficult Read more…
The compact moped I designed, unlike production models, fits freely in a passenger elevator. That is perhaps one of its main advantages, since the two-wheeled little machine (which, incidentally, reaches the same speed as the “Riga-7”) can also be “parked” on the balcony of a city apartment. The moped frame is taken from a children’s Read more…
Owners of a motorcycle with a sidecar often wonder how to increase its payload. An original solution was proposed by our magazine’s reader A. Tatarnikov in his article “The Obedient Trailer,” published in Modelist-Konstruktor No. 12, 1992. The design of his motorcycle trailer with an offset hitch and a track matching that of the towing Read more…
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…
