I've come to the end of my guest week. I'll be handing the keyboard to Mary Beth Trautwein starting tomorrow, as the Seniors start at Tinkering School.

I've had fun doing this, and I hope you have enjoyed reading it.

Today here in Houston it was somewhere in the upper 90s with humidity to match, and my garage (where all the tools are) was well over 100 degrees, which makes any tinkering sessions necessarily brief for the health and well-being of both tinkerer and project.

Which got me thinking about some alternatives for those of us not blessed with viable indoor tinkering spaces or projects that won't fit indoors (like my cars and truck) when the weather won't cooperate.

While I'm not suggesting one should veg in front of the TV endlessly, there are a lot of shows out there now embracing the tinkering and doing-dangerous-things mindset. Besides "Mythbusters" on Discovery Channel, which is easily the most famous, and which I've already mentioned, there are others on various cable channels.

The Science Channel (part of the Discovery network) has regular showings of "How It's Made", "Factory Made", and "How Do They Do That?" which explore how everyday objects come into being. "Deconstructed" takes stuff apart and explores how it works (which could lead to your own deconstruction sessions).

National Geographic Channel has "Cut It In Half" which is pretty much what it sounds like, and History Channel has "Sliced" which is pretty much the same premise.

Of course, there are a bewildering variety of do-it-yourself shows -- my favorites, maybe for sentimental reasons, are the ones that come out of the "This Old House" family: the original show, "Ask This Old House", and Norm Abram's "New Yankee Workshop". There are others on PBS and a lot of other channels including the aptly-named "DIY" channel.

I watch these kind of shows a lot more than I watch scripted TV or so-called "reality"... I figure I should at least learn something in the process.

But then remember to translate that into doing something.

And have fun doing it!

It's Friday! And it was payday at Nameless Employer, which means a small group of us go for Thai food at lunch.

Which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I did when I got home after work.

Despite the heat (upper 90s here in Houston today), I was determined to get to confirm the cause of a rattle in the right front door speaker of my truck. Which meant I needed to pull the door panel.

Sounds intimidating, doesn't it? I was actually taking apart (some of) my truck right there in the fading light of Friday night, out in my driveway (Leviathan the truck won't fit in the garage: he's too big).

Well, it so happens this isn't the first time I've had the door apart, so I knew all I needed to do was pull off the cover over the mirror mount (spring clips), the switch panel for the window/power lock (spring clip, two wiring connectors), the lens over the courtesy light (small tab), the courtesy light bulb (ouch, hot), then the door panel itself (two screws with an 8mm hex head and a number of drop-in clips, undo the socket for the courtesy light with a 1/4 turn), and the panel is off.

Not so bad, see? Took less than 5 minutes.

Yep, the speaker is blown. After 11+ years and 260,000 miles, the foam between the cone and the frame is separated.

I've picked out a speaker I want to put in there, but A Long-Established And Trusted Source For Stereo Bits says it won't fit in the door, but will fit in the same size opening in the C-pillars behind the back seat. The speaker said Trusted Source says will fit in the front is somewhat less deep than the one I want. The difference in depth? All of 1/16 of an inch. 0.0625 inches. Kinda silly to cut it that finely, I thought. So I measured. It's 2-1/2 inches (2.5")to the window guide rail (the nearest obstruction). The chosen speaker is 2-3/8 inches (2.375") deep. The recommended speaker is 2-5/16 inches (2.3125") deep. Which means either one will fit.

Gonna have to call those guys tomorrow, I guess.

But... while I was inside the door...

I have a piece of door glass from a later model year of my truck, given to me by a friend and fellow engineer who also is one heck of a tinkerer -- but more to the point, he was also the engineer on the window and door mechanisms on the truck. The later model year glass is slightly thicker than the glass that came in my truck. Which means it's slightly quieter inside the truck. I'd done the driver's side a while back when I had a reason to get into it, but hadn't done this door yet.

This was considerably more fiddly, mostly because I couldn't remember what I'd done on the other door more than 2 years ago -- and I didn't want to remove the window regulator (the bit that raises and lowers the glass), unlike the other door, where replacing the dead window regulator was why I'd gotten in to the door in the first place!

I did eventually get the old glass loose from the regulator with the aid of a 10mm socket on an extension and a small hammer. No, not to break the glass, but to knock the brackets loose from the regulator, where 11 years and 260K miles of togetherness had made them loathe to part.

Putting it all back together was simply the reverse of taking it apart.

You'll note that nowhere in this process did I consult a shop manual. This is partly because I don't actually own a shop manual, or even the electronic version of same, for this truck, but mostly because I really didn't need it. There are a limited number of ways one of these things can be put together, and the first time, I just used a bit of logic and a bit more trial and error to figure it out. Hint: both of the little screws that hold the door panel on are hidden when the assembly is complete. One's visible when after you pull the window/lock switch panel, the other is hiding way down low behind the courtesy light lens. Took me a while to find that one the first time.

And all this ties into one of my favorite of the 50 Dangerous Things: disassembling appliances. Okay, a truck's door isn't exactly an appliance, but it is a piece of machinery. And it can be taken apart, without damaging it, to examine its innards and explore, for example, how the window lift works, or how the door handles connect to the latch.

For the adventuresome who want to try this, but don't want to work on their own car's door, pick up a door from a similar model car at a salvage yard. You can sometimes find them for under $100 if they have outer sheetmetal damage. Bring it home, take it apart -- without destroying it. And there you go: you learned something, and now have some spare parts for your car (if you got a door from the same make/model as your own car) if there's a problem down the road. Haul the remains to your friendly neighborhood scrap metal dealer (we have one here in Houston that pays out in $2 bills), where it goes into the recycling stream, and Bob's your uncle.

It's only a mystery if you keep it that way yourself.

My predecessor as guest blogger, Deb Nies, has published Part IX of her and her tween's exploration of Fifty Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) on Examiner.com.

Go, read about using a knife and then throwing a pointed stick ("You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"). There's even video of said tween *not* shooting her eye out.

We're going to start off this one with a great piece of video: Adam Savage's TED talk about making his own dodo bird skeleton out of Sculpey and his obsession with making a dead-nuts-accurate copy of The Maltese Falcon. Seriously, take the 15 minutes or so to watch this. If you've ever seen Adam on one of his stream-of-consciousness explanations of something on "Mythbusters" (a show that demonstrates the wonders of tinkering-as-learning on a weekly basis. Talk about "Dream Jobs For Geeks"!), this is that, turned up to 11.

Did you go watch it? Don't worry, I'll wait.

Okay, you've watched it.

The money quote is right at the end: "But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it?"

BING! The journey is the point of the exercise, not the destination. That, right there, sums up the open sense of wonder, the "tinkering instinct" as it were.

Adam's about a year older than I am. And every new episode of "Mythbusters", you see him tackle that week's myth with the same sense of exploration and wonder that we all had when we were kids and the world was new. Now, I have to admit that I had wondered if he was that manic about it In Real Life as he was on TV, and this TED talk pretty much confirmed it: he didn't create the persona for the TV role, he got the TV role because of his personality. If you look at all of the "Mythbusters" team, in fact, they're all like that. Adam's just the most outwardly manic about it.

I would kill for a shot at being involved with "Mythbusters". Getting paid for Mad Science is my ultimate career goal. I've gotten close a couple times, and to be honest, what I do for a living now is mighty close. It's certainly Applied Mad Science: client comes to us with a problem. Sometimes something we have on the shelf or in the catalog can solve it. Sometimes it's a derivative of something we've done previously. But sometimes it's a "hey, nobody's ever attempted this before" problem. Which is how I end up designing a tool to apply a total of about 1,000,000 pounds of force, distributed between 4 hydraulic actuators, to unstick the latching mechanism on a piece of subsea equipment in about 3600 feet of seawater. Or a tool to reach inside a 13 in x 20 in opening -- the only access to the inside of the device -- to remove and replace a gasket -- all without direct human involvement.

Getting back to my point, with many adults, the sense of wonder has been suppressed, if not outright beaten down. And this is a total shame. It kills the creative urge. It leads to cynical, jaded, unhappy people who don't see the extraordinary things that surround them in their daily life, or if they do, don't give a flying care about how extraordinary they are. I'm a mechanical guy, and I don't pretend to understand how digital data transfer really works (I have a broad clue, just not the details), yet I'm sitting here in Texas typing this on a computer connected to a server in a completely different state, if not country, and once I publish it, it will be readable to anyone with any type of network connection anywhere in the world. Including the folks on the International Space Station in orbit.

Wow.

Just, wow.

I still don't understand exactly how it all works, something about packets of data being routed from one node to another and somehow getting reassembled at the desired destination even though they may not arrive in the same sequence they left and indeed may not have taken the same path from origin to destination. It's all Mysterious Spark Chaser Stuff to me.

Which is fine. We have our specialities. I spent the first part of my career in a speciality that even other automotive engineers thought was bordering on witchcraft. There *is* math that governs multi-phase fluid flow and heat transfer, but it's really unspeakably hairy math with partial differential equations and a whole lot of handwaving, and as a result, most folks who do cooling systems end up learning the ropes and the rules of thumb from one of the Old Guys... and when they achieve Old Guy status themselves, pass it on to the next generation.

I was 35 when I found myself regarded as The Old Guy for the first time. This was bothersome in some respects, because I didn't, and still don't, consider myself old (granted, my body sometimes reminds me that I'm not in my 20s anymore, but "old" and "young" is an attitude, not a physical state).

My point is designing a centrifugal pump or a cooling system is every bit as mysterious to the Sparkies as their stuff is to my fellow Gearheads and me. All I know is I do machines. Mechanical stuff. With electronics sometimes, too, but lots of nuts and bolts and gears and pumps and hoses and valves and...

Sorry, getting excited there.

I don't understand the minute details of the Sparky stuff, but I still have a healthy appreciation for it, and I learn what I can about it when I can. Why? Well, I'm curious.

The person who's lost that sense of wonder, when presented with a situation they have no experience with, retreats. They shut down. They ask "why?" Why do they have to deal with this?

The tinkerer -- someone whose sense of wonder is intact and active -- grabs hold of the situation with both hands and says "Why not?!?" And sometimes the end result is amazingly wonderful, and sometimes it's an amazing train wreck -- on the first attempt ("Oops. Guess we're gonna have to do that a bit differently next time. Anyone have a mop? And a shop vac?" And the phone number for the window company? And have you seen where my lab coat went?").

Reading through some of the reviews and blogs from folks who have bought Fifty Dangerous Things, one of the more interesting common threads is the awakening of the dormant sense of wonder in the parents... it's as if they've had a chance to throw open the door to a long-shut closet and let all that curiosity about the world and its endless amazements back out into the open.

I'm not sure if Gever had that intention when he put the book together, but it's certainly a pleasant side effect.

And my message to those folks who have re-found their sense of wonder is: Don't put it away again, ever! The sense of wonder leads to exploration which leads to learning which leads to appreciation which leads to knowledge which leads to competence which leads to confidence which leads to self-sufficiency which leads to sharing and teaching by example and that spreads it around to more and more people and this is an insane run-on sentence worthy of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest.

Whew. Needed to breathe there.

Here's an open question for the folks who have done this (public answers not required, but a little feedback would be appreciated): With the reawakening of your sense of wonder, are you happier than you were when it was dormant? I'm willing to wager on the answer being yes.

That's because shutting down the sense of wonder, locking it up in a dark closet at the back of our mind, runs counter to our genetic programming. We are creatures of exploration and learning. It's our natural state. Parts of society have gone to a lot of effort to suppress it for their own reasons (control/subjugation being the most prominent) on both a micro and a macro level, and in big business, particularly, "toeing the line" is rewarded far more often than being the loose cannon.

Which is ironic... no, sorry, it's tragic, because pretty much every single big company that makes a saleable product was founded by a loose cannon ("Hey, I wonder what happens if I do this?") and built upon the innovations of other loose cannons ("That was cool! But if we now do this, it'll be even better!") -- that's how they got big in the first place! Those of us in the United States live in a country founded by loose cannons. Toeing the line is a static, stagnant way to go.

As to why keeping the sense of wonder active is good? Well, if our goal in this life is to make the world a little better place than it was when we found it, how better to do that than to encourage and grow self-sufficient competence amongst our fellow humans?

Those of us who have children in our sphere of influence owe it to them to show them, by example, that retaining that sense of wonder, actively, into adulthood is, in fact, a Good Thing Indeed.

Our kind host, Gever Tulley, is off at Tinkering School doing just that right now.

What's more, willing to bet there's a smile on his face. People with the sense of wonder active and "on" also seem to be happier people. Coincidence? I think not.

Will it become universal in our lifetimes? Unlikely. There are a lot of extraordinarily incurious people out there. "But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it?"

Everyone wants to get a little attaboy/attagirl for their efforts every now and then. Some little acknowledgement from the boss/parent/spouse/kid that "hey, what you did there was pretty cool".

But what if what you do, while certainly important, isn't something that generates positive feedback as a matter of course?

I spent the bulk of my career in the automotive business designing parts that, if I did my job right, would pass completely unnoticed by 99.999% (the elusive "five nines") of the end user customers. What did I do? I designed parts of the engine cooling system. "Oh, but Jim, that's a very important part of the vehicle!" you say. Yes. Yes, it is (to quote Phineas of Phineas & Ferb). But it's not something a customer writes the CEO of the car company to sing the praises of. I never once saw a letter breathlessly gushing about how great the water pump on the CEO's old college fraternity brother's new Bourgemobile was as he drove the wife up from Palm Springs to Las Vegas for the weekend.

That's because nobody thinks about the water pump, or other bits of the cooling system, until everything goes horribly wrong, and they're on the side of the I-15 about halfway up the hill from Baker, California, hood up, steam pouring out, and they're hot, sweaty, stranded on the side of the road 12 miles away from a town whose biggest attraction is the World's Tallest Thermometer and a restaurant and motel called the Bun Boy. And they know that the World's Tallest Thermometer was displaying 119 degrees F when they went by. And they are most assuredly Not Happy At All.

Then they write the letter to the CEO. And eventually, the engineer sees it. Negative feedback all the way.

And that was something I sort of got used to: lack of feedback = good. Feedback = bad.

Flash forward a few years and I'm working for a supplier company (which has sadly mostly gone away due to all the bankruptcies -- sadly because it was a fantastic place to work if you were an engineer and liked Applied Mad Science). And I'd brought in a prototype design in what had to be world-record time, going from CAD data to finished, machined, assembled, and tested pieces including multiple complex castings, in 19 days (for reference, the standard time to do such a thing was 45-60 days). Didn't sleep much during that time, and neither did any of the rest of my team.

The parts were shipped to our customer on time. And they worked as promised. Better, even.

And the day after, I'm at my desk and the boss comes in and says "You did an outstanding job, Jim." And he hands me a print of an e-mail from the customer who was amazed that we had pulled it off -- the first part had gone on the first prototype engine and it fit exactly as it was supposed to. And the customer was very happy and wasn't shy about telling us so.

And that was the first time in my engineering career that the end user - the customer, in this case the engineer at the customer company - had given me positive feedback.

Felt good. No, felt GREAT! And all I could think of was "I'm tired, I'm sore, but it was totally worth every bit of extra energy spent."

How does this relate to the mission of 50 Dangerous Things and Tinkering School?

Feedback is a vital part of the process of learning. There's the immediate and self-dispatching feedback we get for ourselves when something we've done worked, or didn't work. But that external feedback from others - observers, people in positions of authority such as parents and instructors -- is also important. I've seen it done right, and I've seen it done wrong. I've seen kids give their all -- and maybe they came up a bit short of the ultimate, but they gave their everything all the same -- and feeling that little rush we all get from knowing we put it all on the table, there wasn't more to give -- only to have a coach, parent, some other authority in their lives tear them apart. And all that was accomplished was undone by a word or two, and just that fast.

Okay, so the goal wasn't met. The team got beat -- they didn't lose, they got beat. The deadline was missed. The rocket didn't launch. But the effort was put out there. How can you give feedback that is building, not destroying? It's really not that hard:

• Acknowledge the effort.
• Also acknowledge that the goal wasn't met, but don't be mean about it.
• Ask questions: what went right? what went wrong? How can we fix those things that went wrong?
• If the kid(s) are down on themselves, seed the conversation: "Well, this went well, right? Okay, that other bit fell off, but you know how to keep that from happening again, right?" ENGAGE them. Don't dictate the outcome, just get them pointed the right way when they're turned around and give them a little prod. Once the path is visible, boom! they're off down the path.

I know some of this sounds like the rah-rah, no-kid-is-a-failure, self-esteem-is-everything stuff that I, for one, absolutely hate. Real self-worth comes from self-accomplishment. We as notional adults owe it to the following generations to set them up for accomplishment. If you do that, the other falls into place automagically. And even better, the kids grow up to be thinking, capable, skilled-at-self-directed-learning adults.

Which is, when you get right down to it, the point of the exercise.

I look back on my childhood, and the lessons that have stuck with me throughout the rest of my life involved me doing something. Building an engine. Fixing broken stuff. Figuring out the parts of algebra that had me stumped in Algebra 1 (I'd never gotten below an A in math before those Algebra 1 Bs) before Algebra 2 started the next year taught me more than just factoring polynomials -- it taught me a methodology for problem-solving and learning I've used to this day. Yes, there were teachers who absolutely made a difference -- but again, looking at it through the filter of hindsight, that difference was not at the lectern, but in setting a framework in place and then letting us, the students, figure it out ourselves. And yes, some of us were better at it than others. The very best teachers encouraged teamwork amongst the students to help pull the ones not-so-good at figuring it out ourselves up to a functional level.

And it again comes back to feedback. Using that tool to build instead of destroy: "C'mon, Pete, you can do it!" will get a much better result for everyone involved than "Pete, you idiot, you've ruined our chance to win!". Maybe Pete will get all the way there this time. Maybe he won't... but it won't be because he gave up or quit trying, and the next time, Pete will try something just that little bit different that might just push him over the top.

I'm trying to tie this in to the 50 Dangerous Things, and to be honest, I don't have a direct tie-in to anything specific, but only to the whole concept. Because what is more dangerous than encouraging independent thought and self-directed accomplishment these days?

Okay, I just went back and read through this post, and something else struck me: This kind of build-upon-it feedback is important to adults, in a business environment, too. When we're working as a team here at Nameless Employer (there's a clue in my first post here, but humor me a bit, would you?), what comes out of the team environment is greater than the sum of its parts. It's a really heady feeling, and it's something that I still get that little charge out of.

Which gives me an idea for the next post: Why adults should keep that childlike sense of wonder.

Mellow greetings, fellow travelers.

Okay, so I'm not really a terribly mellow person. I'm Jim Crider, mechanical engineer, car guy, and genetically-engineered tinkerer. Some may know my nom de net AutoJim from various and sundry places, but I'm not a net.celebrity by any means. As for how I got here, if I trace the lineage, there are a few blacksmiths and a couple of master mechanic/master machinists in my bloodline. We understand what the machines are telling us in my family (specifically my mom's side). My dad learned early on that any birthday or Christmas presents that were "some assembly required" were best left in that state after I had completely disassembled the Pit Change Charger he spent half of Christmas Eve assembling in about 15 minutes. Most of the fun of that particular toy was in the taking it apart and putting it back together aspect, which was actually designed in -- and there's no way whatsoever anyone could sell such a thing in a toy store today, what with the small screws and *gasp* actual working wrench and screwdriver that came with it. Mid 1970s? Sure. Today? The lawyers would have a stroke.

I'm originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and currently in Houston (about a year and a half so far) after 18+ years in the greater Detroit area where I designed car parts that, if I did my job right, you'd never really notice. I'll write about the nature of feedback a bit later in the week. Or in this post. Not entirely sure which yet -- I got a late start to my guest week.

What I do these days is design tools for fixing broken stuff subsea.

For fun, I play with cars. I participate with the Sports Car Club of America as a driver in Solo (autocross) competition, and as a racing turn marshal (if you ever watched a road race like the IndyCars at Long Beach in person or on TV, and you see the people on each turn with flags, that's us).

How I met Gever (virtually - I have yet to have the privilege of a face-to-face) is a racing pal of mine, who happens to a) be a computer programming genius and b) has a completely adorable ~4 year old daughter, posted a link to Gever's first TED talk on Facebook. At the time, I'd just written a rather angry open letter to US public school administrators (be forewarned, if you venture around my LiveJournal beyond that post, you may find Adult Words. I try to friend-lock the more opinionated posts and the ones with Adult Words, but sometimes one slips out) and Gever's message at that TED talk really hit home. Struck up a conversation on Twitter in which I linked him to that LJ post, and it's just kinda gone from there.

About my day job: if you watched any of the ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) video feeds from the BP Macondo-252 well blowout response (or, as the press calls it "The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill"... don't get me started on that), beyond the one feed most often shown in the press of the ROV spraying dispersant into the stream of oil and natural gas coming out of the well, you saw some of the stuff my colleagues and I designed and built. I can't at this time get into a lot of detail about specific tools and techniques we used (the lawyers say so), but the general idea is that this is a harsh environment -- at 5000 feet of seawater, the ambient pressure is about 2600 psi, it's pitch black, and about 40 degrees F.

Which leads me to danger as a topic. Gever suggested I talk about how some situations are simply too dangerous for humans to be involved. This is one of them. Just consider that pressure. We humans are intended to be in what we call 1 atmosphere of pressure, about 14.696 psi absolute at sea level. Pounds per square inch. We have a lot of square inches on our bodies (some, like me, more than others). We don't really react well to pressure. Commercial divers use funky gas blends (such as replacing the nitrogen in air with helium) and can go 500-600 feet with LONG preconditioning and decompression sessions, but beyond that you need a hard suit. Even manned military subs rarely go much deeper than 800 feet -- the amount of metal in the hull needed to resist the crushing pressure becomes a diminishing return as the sub gets heavier for its size and harder to keep neutrally buoyant -- and smaller on the inside so you can't put as much stuff in it.

Since we're talking about 5000 feet of seawater, or about 2600 psi, let's do a quick visual. You all know what a Honda Civic looks like, right? It's a smallish car, weighs about 2600 lbs. And everyone knows what a 12 x 12 floor tile looks like. That floor tile has 144 square inches of area (12^2). Lay down on the floor, put the tile on your chest, and park 144 Honda Civics on the tile.

Doesn't feel so good, does it?

Humans are squishy. We will compress. A lot. The Mythbusters did a bit earlier this year about venting the air supply in a commercial dive suit while at about 300 feet of depth. It wasn't pretty (I don't have any desire to navigate the rather Byzantine Discovery Channel website to find a link to the video right now).

Which goes back to danger: there are simply some environments that we humans can't easily go. Yeah, there are specialized deep-submersible vehicles that can take 2 or 3 humans down to even the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but they can't really do much crammed into a 6' titanium sphere with a half-dozen 6" diameter viewports. And the support equipment for maintaining habitability is big and bulky and makes the sub too big to fit into many interesting spaces.

Solution? ROVs! Remove the life support requirements and you have something smaller and, conversely, more capable at depth, while the operator sits in a control booth on the surface in a comfortable chair (ROV dives can go over 10 hours in duration), air conditioning, access to a head ("toilet" for landlubbers), blast music, etc.

There's still danger, but it's danger that is within the realm of reason: we know how to account for the danger, we see that the risk/reward ratio is tipped toward reward.

And it all comes down to learning - through experience - how to make those risk/reward decisions. That comes from doing dangerous things. As kids, we found ways to take those risks whether or not our parents really overtly allowed it. As adults, we need to set boundaries -- and if you think Gever doesn't set boundaries at Tinkering School, you'd be wrong. It's just that they're well out of the direct view of the casual observer (and most of the kids themselves, I'd expect). And when we adults set boundaries for the kids in our charge, we need to say why. Truthfully. Kids have finely-tuned BS detectors. "Because you'll be eaten by a grue" is a challenge, not a reason. "You haven't checked to see if that lashing can hold up the platform and 10 of you yet" (see what I did there, tying into this year's Tinkering School?) is a reason.

Because the objective is a thinking, capable kid that grows into a thinking, capable adult. The neat thing is that starting a kid on the path to thinking and capability isn't hard to do, because, well, we humans are programmed to learn best that way already anyway. The even neater part is that once that path is started, the artificial boundaries we adults set can open way up and retreat into the shadows.

And that's the value of the 50 Dangerous Things: they provide a kicking-off point, a way to start down that path. Going off on tangents is not only allowed, but encouraged.

Kind of like this post.

Life is like that, too.