Having just received a box of stuff from my Mum, I found my old primary school flask made by my Dad. It’s a beautiful thing, but at the time I longed for a Star Wars thermos. This is probably circa ’79 where having a bearded hippy craftsman Dad, even in Cambridge, was deeply uncool. I’m glad to say he still is a hippy who makes Pots!
[/url] My school flask by tangwyn, on Flickr[/img]

Very nice

My dad is just finishing off a scratch built model of a Royal Scot (o – gauge) which I’m mighty proud of him for.

Wow, that’s nice. If only he’d put a little Darth Vader behind one of the trees it would have been a win-win for you both. 😉

My Dad made (in the 60s and 70s until he got all management, cut his hippy locks and bought loads of blue ties):

Bookcases
Balsa wood powered planes
Rowboats

By the 80s, this had down-graded to:

Carved propellors for my broken Airfix hurricanes

Now, as far as I know, he just makes emails and pizza dough once a week.

There’s a message there for us all.

The fastest sledge in the history of man in the right conditions. Made out of steel tube and timber. If it ever escaped from your grasp it usually ended in tears/maiming for the poor **** further down slope that got in its way.

My dad made himself a deep freezer. Wooden framed, lots of loft insulation and the cooling gubbins from I’m not sure where. It sort of worked for six months or so after which he bought a proper one and converted it into a work bench. By his own admission he’s probably responsible for rather more CFC emissions than most.

My dad made, repaired or built everything around the house. Electrics, plumbing, joinery etc. Absolutely everything. I even remember him fitting our entire house with double glazing. His garage has every tool known to mankind. Fully qualified mechanic too and spent many a happy weekend helping him spanner cars when I was a kid. Thankfully I learned a lot from him, though I still won’t touch electrics. Seems to be a lost art nowadays. Most of the guys I work with couldn’t even wire a plug and one guy gets tradesmen in to hang shelves and the like 😕

His last handiwork was helping my build a bike stand.

he had some mates to help him

My dad was an electronics engineer

He made us:
A metal detector
A guitar fuzzbox
A home CB Radio set-up (old-school illegal one before that were ‘cool’), complete with a bin lid for the base for our (W40?) aerial

He also made for the family
Step on security mats (for an alarm system)
x2 porches
A really crap treehouse

And probably lots of other stuff I can’t now remember.

Me, and a catapult.

Right, I’m going to fill my flask and raise it to Dads with tools, past and present. Cheers!

My Dad made/designed and developed Nuclear Warheads for a mahooosive American Arms company.
He also made sheds, kitchens, fitted wardrobs, bathrooms and restored amongst other vehicles a TR6, TR4, BSA motorbikes and a Norton Commandos.

He also made me cry once or twice the git. 😆

When I was a lad I got to play in these all the time, sitting on my dads knee working the controls

my mum cross, mainly.

My Dad was (now retired) a welder/fabricator by trade and made all sorts of stuff for the around the house, shelving units, wrought iron scroll stair spindles (well it was the 70’s), outside coach lamps, etc. The thing I have, that I rescused when he was going to take it to the tip, is the set of car ramps he made when he was an apprentice. Nice solid ramps that are wider and higher than the tin pot ones you can buy in Halfords. I remember then being around from when I was little and used to ‘help’ dad working on the cars (Escorts and Capris, before it went down hill with Allegro and Ital).

A motorhome, out of a Bedford Luton van.

Like this but longer, blue-and-white and with better detailing…

My Dad built our family home from scratch, on his own, while working a full time day job!
He’s pretty handy at construction and has done pretty much everything there is to build!

BoardinBob – Member

When I was a lad I got to play in these all the time, sitting on my dads knee working the controls

You are Nizlopi and I claim my £5.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3WhQB7Hq0Q[/video]

As he gets nearer to retirement my dad’s getting more and more into his serious woodwork, he’s always been quite handy but the stuff he’s making now just brilliant.

1st thing he made for me: a solid oak workbench, complete with 2 record vices, to go in my own workshop when we finally move house, it’s a straight copy of the one he uses, which my grand dad made just before WWII.

Can’t buy that on Screwfix.

Nice hatter, you know that a bench and vice needs pics here.

My father spent a lot of time working away from home, so I don’t recall much stuff.

But he did once find the time to make a cardboard aeroplane with me. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it meant a great deal to me. (We also made Airfix models).

He made me who I am today.
I am happy with that

Thanks Dad 🙂

My dad did all the wood work in our house fitted kitchen three fitted bedrooms and freestanding furniture . Some of the nicest bits of mahogany still have brands and marks from the ships they were intended for (granddad was a ship’s fitter) My dad also made and restored furniture for me that we have in daily use 15 years after his death.

It fills me with melancholy to recall what an ungrateful sod I was when about 5 or 6 he gave me my own carpenters bench tools and tool box that he had secretly made for me.

I was more grateful for the fold down table and storage draws he designed and built for my train set .a freestanding chest of draws that expanded to a room filling 7 foot By 4 . I only wish there was enough space in my modern home for my son to use it.

😀

Well, he was on the team from ICI and Rank Hovis McDougall that developed it. Our freezer was always full of the bloody stuff, and that was before they had refined the texture, so it was unbearable rather than just disgusting to eat!

Loads of things – he made some gorgeous fitted bookshelves in their house, a folding high chair for me when I was a baby, and I still feel guilty we didn’t reuse the beautiful wooden cot he made.

Now he makes oboe reeds.

As with others, my Dad made stuff, but he had help on some of the stuff.

The Marina on the right.

The concrete chimney.

In addition to that, he made our house (again, with some help) but being an engineer of the hands on variety, he did a lot of the work – much of it whilst the labour was laid off working full time on the Marina project above.

He also made a pretty cool tree house, and worked a lot on boats and old cars whilst we were growing up.

My Dad Passed away in October from Liver Cancer, we didn’t have much growing up so he made pretty much everything.
That include houses, A restaurant from scratch to provide a living, all the storage, beds etc that we ever needed.
He made all of us kids realise that anything could be made if we needed it.
I was lucky enough to renovate 2 houses in France with him, one of which my mother still lives in.

Just sad that I didn’t get to enjoy more of his retirement with him and I was looking forward to seeing what he could make without the time constraints he normally had through his working life.
RIP Dad 🙁

djglover – Member

Quorn

Well, he was on the team from ICI and Rank Hovis McDougall that developed it. Our freezer was always full of the bloody stuff, and that was before they had refined the texture, so it was unbearable rather than just disgusting to eat!

FTFY

My dad made a unit of shelves in my bedroom when I was a kid. His considerable skills as a financial adviser proved not that useful, I later discovered he’d started at the top and worked down, all the screws were put into the shelves from above, 2 to each shelf in opposite corners so if you put anything heavy on them they turned upside down then fell on your feet. And once that had happened a couple of times the unit lost all its strength and collapsed on my head. Ironically while it spent its entire time while upright falling apart, it proved very solid once crushing me.

I love me dad but I wouldn’t trust him to make a sandwich never mind a harrier jump jet. And his dad was a bloomin ships’ engineer.

Beautiful flask, though a hidden Darth Vader (or Daft Invader as my Mum mishears it) would have been added a little something.

My Dad, an electrical engineer, made pretty much everything: a garage, then a 1-bed, 1-bath extension, doing the plumbing and electrics, the roofing, the works. He’d rebuild and restore classic cars, make bicycles for birthdays and a sledge with steel runners that went like runaway train and was just as solid. I can barely wire a plug but I’m a far better cook.

My dad tried to make many things but unfortunately they fell apart.
He makes a mean cup of coffee mind.

…me laugh
…me proud
…me thankful

My dad could make himself a pint of beer by pouring it from bottle to glass with a great deal of expertise. That’s about all though.

Mum, on the other hand was a bit of an electronics whizz and would build and repair all sorts of stuff. My first stereo was a strange amalgam of parts that dated from 1930s to 1970s, but sounded blooming marvellous (and loud).

My old man was a Techie Teacher and made the following ranked in order of awezumness:

Allsorts of stuff from plastic like huge storage boxes and salad tongs!
Chess sets from wood
Ladders from teak to get into the attic bedroom
Fibre glass sailing dinghys x 3
Twin keel sailing yachts 4 berth x 3 (sold one to pay for the kits, him and his mate kept the other ones)
A 2 man Hovercraft
Crow Pie – I didn’t get to eat this it was from his days in the RAF.

I forgot the most amazing wonderful thing he made

My dad some research work for the European Space Agency back in the 60s making satellites in Holland. He then did some work with Scania Vabis in Sweden, it was a short term job as they employed him to do some sort of time and motion / productivity survey. He told them they could produce twice as much stuff in half the time. They sacked him.

His was pretty good at making go carts, the type with pram wheels, and like Wrightyson, killer sledges.

He once tried to pull some grass that had choked a cylinder mower with the engine running and almost lost a hand when he freed it. He also thought that tying a rope around his waist would be sensible when tensioning a falling tree limb. Thankfully he had a change of plan as the falling tree would have whipped the rope like a cheese wire.

He made a lot of jam, rhubarb and ginger, strawberry and raspberry, and sometimes marmalade

Boffins are shite at DIY.

My dad makes nothing, but when I was about 7 he made me a cavalry fort with the Alamo burned into the wood above the entrance, it was a belter , way better than any thing you could buy and bullet proof!!! It’s only as I have got older I realise the hours he must have put in once we were in bed making it and it was all hand tools and an old electric drill!!! God wish I still had it to pass too my lad!!

Me dad knocked up a couple of these when we were young that we used to sail mostly at Anglesey.
What I learnt to sail in, and what I’ve mostly forgotten now.
Always remember the delightful sensation of getting smacked in the head with the boom!
😀

Mirror Dinghys

Good times.

… me miserable and confused.

Things my dad made: boats, canoes, furniture… good on ya, dad.

things my dad made:

me, the man I am today
me proud
the best grandpa ever

miss you dad 🙁