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A Belarus artist still driving his home-made Soviet car
- caloni 12y agoA good advice for programmers, too.
- seyfulislam 12y agoAfraid not. A programmer re-invents the wheel to fully understand the inner workings. I've never heard of anybody (non-programmer) who spent months/years to program a software from scratch just because he can't afford buying it. This guy wasn't a mechanical engineer or something, too.
- gambiting 12y agoHe worked in a weapons factory, so I imagine he wasn't there filling spreadsheets. He was probably operating heavy machinery,so even if he wasn't an engineer by education, he had the knowledge needed to do it.
- Pxtl 12y agoIf you weren't a programmer when you started, you are when you finished. Wasn't Torvalds pretty much a hobbyist when he began?
- rada 12y agoTorvalds graduated from college with a Master's in Comp Sci.
- astrodust 12y agoAlthough I'm sure Torvalds was an exception, I've met several people that that level that still can't code to save their life. Being a Comp Sci. major and being a programmer are often orthogonal.
- Pxtl 12y agoYeah, but I think he was still an undergrad student when he started working on Linux, wasn't he?
- hobs 12y agoThere was recently the case of a kid in the australian outback who wrote his own OS from scratch as he was too remote to get anything, it happens more than you think. Pretty much the same thing as far as I am concerned.
- swah 12y agoMaybe the poster is talking about the last phrase?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- 72deluxe 12y agoNot entirely - that's what libraries are for!
- b6 12y ago> Though some foreign collectors are ready to pay up to €10,000 for the unusual car, Karavkin says he is not ready to sell “a part of his life”. Unfortunate. Seems like it'd be a smart play to sell it to a hipster and buy two modern cars. Hopefully he'll get some better offers after this article.
- jacquesm 12y agoWhy is that unfortunate? He's made this creation so that he could drive it, not so that someone with more money but less creativity could drive it so he can drive a run of the mill car. It's fairly obvious he's put a chunk of his soul into this machine.
- pm90 12y agoWhy? He may not need the money; but he may have very fond memories attached to that old car.
- VBprogrammer 12y agoNot only that, but anything which goes wrong with it he can fix. The service schedule is defined by what he thinks is reasonable and whether it is running well.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mhurron 12y agoI too bemoan that not everyone on the planet can be bought. What is capitalism coming to when greed is not the over arching purpose in life.
- icebraining 12y agoWhy would it be greedy of him to sell the car?
- mhurron 12y ago
- laacz 12y agoI merely must add, that such DIY vehicle can't be safe. You should have extensive knowledge not only to build a vehicle, but to make it road legal in most parts of this planet. Actually, if you're thinking that assembling your car from scratch would be nice idea, and logic fails you, there are so-called "kit cars". Car constructing kits, if you wish. On street I've seen only Fraser[1], though. [1]: http://www.fraser.co.nz/the-car/buying-a-kit-car/ http://www.fraser.co.nz/the-car/buying-a-kit-car/
- izacus 12y agoWhy would you have to make a vehicle road safe on most parts of this planet if you're driving it just within a single country? I would figure that car only has to pass Belarus technical and safety standards. As for safety: it's obviously vintage tech car and as such it probably can't really compare to modern Toyota safety standards.
- laacz 12y agoI meant that safety and engeneering requirements for cars are more or less strict around the world. As for being vintage - car is vintage now, it's not vintage when you've built it and are trying to register.
- 4ad 12y agoYes, it just can't be safe. It doesn't matter how much the creator tries to make them safe, they just can't be man. It must be a law of nature. It doesn't even matter that the vehicle is actually vetted by organisations actually responsible with road safety.
- IgorPartola 12y agoDifferent kinds of safety. I doubt the Belarus equivalent of the DMV performed crash testing of this vehicle. Pretty sure their inspection boils down to "does it make funny noises?", "does it smell bad?", and "do all the lights work?". That's certainly the case here in the US. I am sure that in this particular instance, since it's been driving for so long chances are it's not going to randomly catch fire (though it certainly could), but yeah, if you are building your own vehicle, I doubt you'd be able to do better than a team of engineers who dedicated their careers to it. Remember, they still mess up routinely, and it causes many deaths.
- userbinator 12y agoIt's funny that what gets called "maker culture" these days in the West is nothing like what goes on in the Eastern Bloc countries, which would fit the term far more closely.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoMy personal feeling is that "maker culture" evolved from being a brand for tinkering to being a fashion over the course of few years. Heck, two years ago the hackerspace I help run was the forefront of the "maker culture" in my area, now we're just forgotten - not fashionable enough, not hipstery enough. Because apparently, what seems to be the "maker culture" today represents the level of understanding of a "monkey wants MaKey MaKey and banana" chimpanzee, whose biggest achievement was to buy a Makerbot. The problem is not that the projects are trivial. Trivial is good, after all that's how people learn, and making should be about beating one's own limits, not competing with Hackaday (though of course at some point your limits may surpass the average project on that site). The problem is, "maker movement" got spotted by media, mixed up with startup community, packaged and is now sold for $1200 a piece.
- ethbro 12y agoYeah, those boring Westerners. ;) http://www.digitalafro.com/michigan-man-builds-real-batman-tumbler-in-his-garage/ http://www.digitalafro.com/michigan-man-builds-real-batman-t... http://www.gizmag.com/home-built-dark-knight-batmobile/16736/ http://www.gizmag.com/home-built-dark-knight-batmobile/16736...
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoIt's nothing like what goes on in most of the US either. There are people building tractors in their garages literally from scratch, welding together backhoes and front-end loaders to riding mowers, making adapters to get engines from one type of car onto another. This goes on all the time, in all 50 states and has been happening since the country was founded. It just doesn't get labelled "maker culture." Maker culture, as far as I can tell, is a term that applies to people who have never built anything in their lives suddenly figuring out that they can. Absolutely nothing wrong with that and I applaud it. I'm just not so thrilled that it's now labelled and packaged up like a nice little commodity.
- normloman 12y agoYou can't sell a car in the US unless it goes through extensive safety testing. How can I be sure this car is safe? DIY is nice, but my life is far more precious.
- gtCameron 12y agoI must have missed the part of the article where he was trying to sell you a DIY car
- normloman 12y agoHe's not. My comment is that I wouldn't try to build my own car. And that almost nobody should drive a car they designed themselves on a regular basis.
- 72deluxe 12y agoIf only the same approach to safety and quality was applied to software! Like me, I am sure you have used some absolutely abysmal software. Desktop software from big organisations is the worst: Sony, BT, and Cisco come to mind.
- gvb 12y agoInteresting tidbit: the barrier to legally registering a custom automobile in the US appears to be pretty low: http://www.dmv.org/other-types-of-vehicles.php http://www.dmv.org/other-types-of-vehicles.php The ones I browsed call out a safety inspection, which is probably the highest hurdle to jump. I strongly suspect this is just basic safety, e.g. turn signals and brakes work.
- kazinator 12y agoI think the barrier would suddenly rise much higher if you proposed to build a million copies of the unit, and sell them to others. Or if it suddenly became commonplace for people to make their own cars. Even if self-built automobiles aren't safe, on an absolute scale, there are too few of them to constitute a safety threat compared to other large-scale problems like distracted, reckless, unskilled and impaired driving. Also, the legislators probably figure that people who build their own car are likely to drive with care. The last thing that a hard working maker wants to do is to wrap years of work around a pole.
- mzs 12y agoNext try getting insurance.
- s_q_b 12y agoSome states don't require car insurance, e.g. Virginia.
- EssenceOfStupid 12y ago>“Therefore, my advice for the do-it-yourselfers who might want to “reinvent the wheel” as I did would be not to waste so much time on this venture. Buy a car from a dealer, now it is not a problem anymore.” Building your own car and making something sounds cool, but this really hit home for me. What am I working on, and what problem am I really solving? A good question we should ask ourselves, in my opinion.
- 72deluxe 12y agoVery interesting video that is embedded in the article. He gets about 10 liters per 100km, or 28.24 MPG.
- carlob 12y agoThat's pretty bad for a car that size nowadays. I'm sure you can get to 5-6 l/100 km, that should be 40-50 mpg.
- 72deluxe 12y agoHe could put skinnier tyres on and coast everywhere. That would help.
- carlob 12y agoAlso remove the clutch and gears and brakes. Those just add weight. Moreover stopping by backpedalling gives you a much better feel of the road.
- 72deluxe 12y agoHe could put steel wheels on if they're alloys already. The steel wheels keep momentum better. Also, he could just drive down hills, not up them. And with a prevailing wind.