About
About me, I guess I have held a screw driver for as long as I can remember sometime around 5 or 6 about the time my parents took me to a steam train museum and I got to see the awesome power of the massive steam engines. Something about the cyclic action and valves opening and closing blowing steam captivated me. Ever since then I wanted to design things. My friends designed new cars by drawing a new body, I was the kid drawing the carburetor and deciding it would outdo anything any other company had ever designed. I took everything apart I could get my hands on. I would find things on the road (computers, TVs, printers) and bring them home, take them apart and save the components. I started to fool around with circuits when I turned 12. There was just something about electricity that excited me. Maybe it was the analytical nature of things or how an ability in electronics could take my projects to the next level.
The 60 in 1 RadioShack kits bored me to death. There was an article in an old magazine I found describing how to build an electric fence from an ignition coil. I never did get the circuit to work but I was fascinated by high voltage. I found other ways to drive the coil with relays and transistors and timer chips. I did use a protection diode but I still blew my transistors out all the time, I did not know of snubbers and hard switching at the time. I built drivers for flyback transformers and tried to make a few Tesla coils, succeeded in building a spark gap coil. I also built electromagnetic launchers, I used to charge a 3.2kJ capacitor bank to 400 volts and dump it all through an SCR into a coil of wire. I even managed to make a double stage coil launcher using an optical sensor to trigger the SCR connected to the second bank.
I built many projects, even programmed a few chips, but through my college years I went back to working on cars, trucks, engines and everything. If only there was more time for more projects!
I've had other hobbies as well. I played sports all my life and continue to do so. Played piano, swam for a team, soccer, basketball, paintball, martial arts. Probably my favorite thing to do though is go to lift weights or go run. I like to listen to music quite a bit and no matter who you are we can find common ground!