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…
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…
