Many years ago while I was in college I came home for Christmas break, 300 miles from campus. When it was time to go back for spring semester we had a bad snow/ice storm all the way to Austin. This is rare for Texas but it happens and with 1/2" of ice on the roads you don't go anywhere. My father didn't want me driving 300 miles in ice and snow but we found that buses were running so he put me on Continental Trailways. The bus made it to some little town south of Dallas then decided roads were getting bad so turned around and went back to Dallas. By then roads were too bad to go north of Dallas so I was stuck. I met another guy in the bus terminal who was also stuck so we banded together and rented a hotel room in downtown Dallas. The next day buses weren't running so we went to Greyhound and they said they were going to run so we bought tickets and made it to south of Waco. We somehow missed the bus when it left so we were stuck in Temple overnight. The next morning we met a guy from Sherman who was driving to Austin to pick up someone and take them back to Sherman so we hitched a ride with him to Austin. And sure enough when we got to Austin there was a thick coating of ice on the roads. It took us 3 days to make it 300 miles to Austin.
My father owned an auto repair shop in north Texas and had a friend who had a farm barely into New Mexico, about 300 miles away. He sent us a pickup to overhaul and then I got to drive it back to NM and pick up another one. I was out in the middle of nowhere and the pickup stopped running. I stopped by chance in front of a little barn on the side of the road. After awhile I realized that the distributor had come loose and rotated out of time. I found a piece of bailing wire at the barn, rotated the distributor where I thought it should be and wired it in place. The engine ran good and I made it on to NM.
My dad had bought this old delivery van and we decided to take it on a hunting trip to the Texas panhandle, on a very cold day. The van quit running somewhere in the middle of nowhere. We finally managed to get a tow into the small town nearby, to one of those gas stations that used to exist where there were a couple of bays to pull your car in and get it repaired. This was good except the cashier said there was nobody working who could fix our van. Remember my father owned an auto repair shop and we had already figured out that the engine wasn't getting any fuel, so 2 of us stripped down the front of the engine and tightened the bolt on the front of the cam that holds the eccentric that runs the fuel pump. Basically remove grille, radiator, fan, water pump, timing cover, tighten the bolt, put it all back together and we were on our way.
My wife and I were on a trip to a family member's wedding, on the way home we stopped in a small town for lunch. When we got back in the car it was hard to start. We stopped in front of a little store, on a Sunday, and the car wouldn't restart. I was trying to figure out how to get across town to a Walmart so I could buy a battery when someone came out of the closed store to ask us what the trouble was. Turns out it was a garden store but also a hardware store and they sold car batteries. I had my tools so switched batteries and we were on our way.
I just realized this is in the rocketry and space related ... so my apology for being off topic. Maybe this thread should be moved to the other subforum.
Rocketry related I have fewer interesting experiences.
I was building rockets a long time ago, starting around 1965 or so. Looking for different things to do I decided to try launching a rocket from underwater. I put the igniter in the motor, used a needle to punch 2 small holes through a cardboard disk, ran the igniter leads through the holes and taped the disk to the back end of the motor. I put some glue around the igniter leads to seal them up. We probably just jammed the launch rod into the mud at the edge of a pond, hooked up the igniter leads and slide the rocket down into the water. We launched it very quickly after that and it seemed to fly normally.
One day around 20 years ago I built a small Alpha-sized rocket but left the motor mount out. I put in a bit of nose weight, added fin tip to tip fiberglass, and up in an F72 motor. The only software I had back then was wrasp. The thing simmed to mach 1.4 and 4000 feet in wrasp. I thought even if the software was way off it would still be very fast and high. When it ignited it just disappeared as if it had never existed, and was not recovered. Since then I try to keep my rockets in sight. I should build a similar thing in open rocket and see what it says.
