SixSibs

I finished making a Rube Goldberg machine yesterday, and filmed it from start to finish. I thought that you might enjoy watching it. It never worked as an entire, functioning machine, but that was only because  I didn’t have enough stuff to do it all in one big, continuous machine. (And patience to retake the entire thing over and over and over again!) “Theoretically” it would have worked! (Although it took 5 hours to build a machine that could do what  I could do myself in 15 seconds!)

As we were running some errands on Saturday we saw a sale at a Catholic church, we stopped and my dad and I got out to scope the place out and see if there was anything worth getting. They were working on tearing the tables down and boxing up all of the items that hadn’t been purchased, so they gave us some paper bags and told us that we could have whatever fit in a bag for 50 cents! I got a typewriter, a scanner, a cordless phone, a car stereo and a bunch of wallwarts, cables and connectors all for $1! When we got home Luke and I started tearing apart the typewriter which resulted in these pictures being taken:

I’m planning on using some of the parts I scrounged to help build a security system for our room.
(Special thanks to our dad for taking the pictures)

Yesterday morning as I was running my daily 5k I saw a bunch of “treasures” piled up besides several people’s trash cans; several people had just had a yard sale and the things that they didn’t sell they just threw away- which meant a bunch of free goodies for an enterprising young man such as myself! When I got back home from my run I immediately grabbed a wagon and headed back up the street to do a little bit of “dumpster diving”. By the time I got back I had collected a wagon load of treasures that included a suitcase, an old carpet steamer, a nice piece of telescoping rod and a half dozen or more containers of varying sizes and shapes (John really enjoys doing experiments so he uses a lot of jugs, bins and bottles). I stowed all of my collection in our storage shed until 9:15 when it started to look stormy and we all had to come inside, seeing that everyone had nothing to do I offered to let them take apart the carpet steamer I got and they all enthusiastically agreed to help. It took us about 50 minutes to go from a fully assembled carpet steamer to a heap of parts and trash.
We had everyone from Isaac on up photographing the process so we got a lot of good (and some not so good) pictures, here are some of the highlights:

First Isaac and John took the bottom off.

Then John and I took out the actual steamer hardware

Then Luke took apart the “guts” of the steamer and we all split up the remaining parts.

My share of the “haul”: A high voltage power switch, 4 casters and a 5 foot section of double-strand wire.

After it stopped raining I put together an 18 clue treasure hunt to tell my younger sibs where the rest of the loot I had collected was hidden. They found it and John has already done an experiment with some of the jugs: see how long you can bang them before everyone else goes crazy!

This morning our John Deere Gator (which made a brief appearance as Rachel’s Jeep in Spy Movie 2) wasn’t responding. Around here when something isn’t working people call in the six sibs repair team to fix it. We have fixed mowers, stuck doors, locks, and all sorts of other things with help from our dad (and sometimes by ourselves). It took John, Isaac and I about 10 minutes to take off the Gator seat, the speed control lever and the “gas pedal”  and to figure out what was wrong.  The trouble spot was a little switch that was attached to a little plastic “gas pedal” and was used to make the gator go.

After we got the switch fixed we snapped all of the floor board parts back together and  flipped it over and re-screwed the seat that we had taken off to get to the floor board.

We then tested it out and it worked perfectly!

So our Gator is now back in active duty, ready to haul little boys wherever they might want to go!