Anyone have any interesting hobbies??

[Teeeman]

The trick to the Dude is packing tape and a clamp on the fill valve… patch the holes, blower her up tight just before lighting the fire… roll the valve up and clamp it like a half-eaten bag of chips… and launch quickly.

It may stay inflated until the end of the flight, if it doesn’t, it lazily folds over about mid-length… pretty sad when that happens…

and despite the D power, it is not much for altitude… 50 feet maybe?

-Terry

[tmbnorm]

I actually saw a "Dude" get up over 100'. It was an impressive launch.
It even recovered with a chute. The boy scouts went wild!

[Teeeman]

We managed a chute recovery from about 20 feet to ground...

we've launched it 2 times...

it is cool though to see this big silver Mylar 7 foot rocket on the pad though

-Terry

[Mr C]

My main hobby is stunt kite flying, before the kids were born I competed individually and on a two and four man team nation wide.
I dedicated almost 20 hours a week in practice.
Now I see if the flags waving, I'll slip away for an hour or two of two line fun.
I also enjoy:
Camping
Diving (I'm a retired Navy Diver)
Softball (Playing and coaching my daughters team)
4wheeling
Mountain biking
fishing
fishing
fishing
Hanging out with my scouter families
playing cornhole

[Pinewood Daddy]

playing cornhole

???? ???

[Darin McGrew]

Yeah, I had to look it up too...

[Teeeman]

there has got to be a better name for that sport…


We just watched Wild Hogs and I would not call it very family friendly due to situational and scripted innuendo (lots of it and all of it not kid friendly).


But if you have seen it, you won’t have any problem understanding the above comments…



Kites:
… pass this knowledge on to your boys in a few years as they get ready to hit the dating scene…


when I was 20, my folks bought me a 2 string stunt kite. Bright red. I was in college and broke… my folks took me along with them to the beach and I was very surprised my mom insisted on getting the kite at a surf shop… simply because I showed interest in it for 10 seconds… they felt sorry for me I guess, they were helping pay for school but I didn’t have a dime to my name and my minor depression must have shown through (sadly, you can’t date much when you are both broke and you have to study 24/7 to keep your grades up).

The kite though… much to my surprise… was a blessing and half…

It was an absolute girl magnet at the beach! (course I had hair and a wasteline then, hahahahah!... easy to stay thin when you can’t afford anything more than one trip a day to the cafeteria on cheap meal tickets you pounced from the other Freshmen who bought too large a meal plan for cheap, hahahahah!)


(While learning to fly the kite, I almost hit some guy brave/stupid enough to walk directly under it in the head with the tail… it popped like a whip 3’ above him… I was not trying to do this… the pop was the result of my having just BARELY figured out in time not to bean him in the head with the kite how to get it to pull up… it went from a nose dive to a vertical in a very fast 180… I was already preparing to run for my life if it hit him… the tail followed through and “pop!”… right above his head… he looked up and shot me a really dirty glance… I just gave my best sheepish grin…)

Some friends I had met at the church I attended the next year (I was a co-op student and worked in VA for a year) are still friends to this day. They had then a 5 and 7 year old pair of daughters… who now at 25 and 27 still refer to me as “the man with the kite”… I ate lunch with them one Sunday after church and brought along the kite since it was very windy (early spring).

That day I had an even greater incentive to keep the kite in the air… we flew it in a populated cow field full of fresh, soft springtime grass (read that Ex-Lax for cows)…

I did not want to have to put the kite back in my car’s trunk if she went down in a less than opportune spot and that field was more riddled with bad spots than a WWII mine field!


-T

[Mr C]

Sorry Gang,
Cornhole (Yes, thats what its called) is a backyard/camping/tailgating game.
http://www.playcornhole.org/

It's a great game for everyone, cheap/easy to make and if you mention it to anyone thats never heard of it... expect guarded looks.
Check it out, make a set of boards, sew the bags and then tell the rest of us how fun it is! (You can even play it online!)
As for the kites, I have to admit: I have so many we had to get a two bedroom apartment when we got married just to store them! And I have more now!

[Randy and Son]

Talking about kites sure brings back some memories. I remember learning to build them with my friends when we were 10, 11, 12 years old. And then after some early success we would round up all of the monofilament fishing line we could scavenge from our houses to see how far up we could fly one. Well, our kites had a limited ability to lift and at first it kept getting higher up but eventually with all the string it was towing it was just going farther out, not up. Then we eventually realized that we had string suspended over about three city blocks worth of houses. We were flying from a football practice field but that's not where the kite was now. One little dip and that kite was never going to be seen by us again. None of us were real excited about winding the string to get it down either. I think we would have preferred to lose the kite, but we eventually did pull it back in.

My current hobby is to restore old vacuum tube radios from the 1920's to the 1940's. I like to work on both the electronics and the wood cabinets. Tubes really aren't hard to find and usually the problems are in other components anyway. Its fun to make something sing again and look like new that may not have worked for the past 60 years while just sitting in someone's attic or barn or worse.

Randy

[GravityRacer]

Hmmm...well. PWD is kind of new, in the sense that I haven't really spent that much time on it. I used to build cars and sell them (NOT custom). I surf all over the internet. There are some really interesting (and strange) places. 0.o Rockets, now. Well...I had my own section (read club) in the National Association of Rocketry, and am L1 certified, which means I can fly H and I motors. Let's see if I can post a pic of my first High Power rocket. It's a 1/4-scale model of an AIM-120D "Slammer", in pretty realistic detail.

http://s57.photobucket.com/albums/g208/ ... light3.jpg

Let's see if that works....[/img]

[digger]

I drywash for gold in the mojove desert and I am in a rock & gem club.I allso collect gemstons & garden & skateboard & try to bild pwd cars

[Pinewood Daddy]

I'm not sure if you would call it a hobby, but we started collecting various reptiles last summer (after PWD season).

We started with a Bearded Dragon, then a Veiled Chameleon, followed by another Bearded Dragon, a Kenyan Sand Boa, Ball Python, Brazilian Rainbow Boa, Trinket snake, and a few small lizards.

Reptiles are great pets. Other than some specific environmental requirements, most required little effort to maintain, most make no noise, most don't make any odor, and most are interesting to look at. Some of the food requirements, like crickets, can be noisy and stinky though.

Most lizards eat some kind of live insects, most snakes eat mice or rats (live or frozen/thawed). Make sure you don't have a problem handling any of these.

Be sure to thoroughly research the requirements, adult size and temperaments before purchasing any reptile. Some cute little lizards grow to be big mean monsters. Green iguanas are one example. The local PETCO sells alot. Don't people realize they grow to 4-5 feet long and can be very mean!! Their claws can tear you apart. A baby Burmese Python may be less than 2 feet long when born, but can grow to over 20 feet long requiring an enclosure the size of a small bedroom and eat rabbits or small pigs!! Any snake over 8 feet should be handled by two people for safety.

Bearded Dragons make a great pet. They have a great temperament, easy to handle, but can eat 50 to 100 cricket per day when young.

My Ball Python seems to be curious of us and his surroundings. He's 9 months old, about 38" long, weighs 850 grams and likes to slither around my head and neck.

We handle most of our reptiles every day or two, except the Bearded Dragons are handled a few times per day. There no sense in having a pet you can't handle.

A little update on our reptile "hobby". We now have (4) Tegu's, large intelligent lizards with good temperaments, similar to monitors, except monitors are know to have attitudes. Our smallest is about 3 feet long & 2 lbs, the largest is 3 feet long (but missing 1 ft of tail) and about 9 lbs. We have a male & female Blue Tegu's who copulated yesterday, we'll try to get them together a couple more times soon and hopefully we'll have eggs in a week. Our largest snake is a Dumeril Boa, she's about 5.5 feet long. We were recently given a Cuban Rock Iguana. She's only 2 feet long but she'll probably reach over 4 feet long and over 15 lbs! Males can get over 5 feet and 25 lbs!!! There are even more that I don't have time to mention.

[mbb]

When I was in college in a dorm (with a no pets policy), a friend two rooms down from us had a monitor lizard Smedley. It started out as a little guy in a cage that he could keep hidden easily. After a while it was about 2.5-3ft long, and had a large caged area about 2.5x6 under a built in desk that he kept a blanket covering when they were out of the room at class, just in case anyone came into the room.

One day a custodial worker went into their room to do room inspection and Smedley had escaped from his cage. The 300 lb woman almost killed herself trying to get out of that room. Needless to say Smedley had to go off-campus after that.

He was pretty cool to have around though.

[Pinewood Daddy]

I just found that one of our kids didn't secure the top on one of the Ball Python's tanks. We now have one AWOL snake. I guess I'll go get the flashlight.

[GravityRacer]

You gonna have J-Lo go with you?