…to human ingenuity. A web site devoted to kludges.
[Afternoon update]
Heh. From comments: “Submit Ares I.”
4 thoughts on “A Tribute”
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…to human ingenuity. A web site devoted to kludges.
[Afternoon update]
Heh. From comments: “Submit Ares I.”
Comments are closed.
Too bad I didn’t get a picture of the “ghetto” pen chain that a boss made for the office I worked at over the summer (worked in Old Faithful area in Yellowstone) out of clear packing tape and chained rubber bands. This was tried after other attempts to fight the wandering pen problem failed (bending the pocket clip to a right angle with the pen and removing the pen cap altogether). As a bonus it reduced our pen theft problem (that is, the pens we personally stole from other departments to replace our losses). It may have lacked something on the “professional” and “classy” levels though.
There were some great kludges at the place I volunteered for the past years, JP Aerospace in Sacramento, California. The best kludges I can remember were when we were testing some inflatable devices and jury rigging seals, valves, and other things out of whatever we had in the office at the time. There’s also the “balloon fill bag”, a tent we sowed together to hold down large latex balloons in windy conditions. It has a long velcro patch on the top, running the length of the tent, that you can unzip, releasing the balloon. A brilliant piece of engineering.
Finally, from the late 70’s, there’s perhaps the most masterful kludge I’ve ever heard of. Just google for “magic/more magic”. All I’ll say about it is that it is a switch that should do nothing.
Submit Ares I.
Most of these kludges still make more sense than the Ares I.
“I would have never noticed that it’s made out of cardboard if they would have drawn a door handle on that otherwise vividly realistic conversion kit.”