My earliest memory of working with electronics was as a child during a bad storm one summer evening. At the time I was quite fond of listening to weather radio during violent weather. During this one evening I was listening as the speaker was giving up to the second reports about a particularly turbulent storm that was passing through my area. The power had been knocked out, and this was the only source of information we had. This was during a time when no one had cell phones, wifi, mobile hotspots, or anything.
This was it, a little three by three inch box, a box of plastic made to look like wood, with a single button and an antenna. During the night, the main button stopped turning on the radio. With no luck in pressing the button in weird ways, I took apart the radio. I started my troubleshooting with the more likely culprit of the issue, the switch. I fixed it with Legos. I was young, and used what I knew best.
It operated by a lever latch system with a small plastic piece acting as a fulcrum. Which at the time I didn't know what a fulcrum was. I quickly saw that I had the perfect replacement for the broken plastic fulcrum, the smallest Lego piece, the flat one by one.
I quickly super-glued the Lego piece in, and reassembled the radio. It worked. At this time it was quite calm outside. When I turned on the radio, the person reading the weather news said tornados were spotted in my area, and we all ran for the basement. Still calm, it seemed like maybe it was an overreaction. Just as soon as I thought that, what sounded like an explosion started off the most violent storm I've ever been in to this day. The whole house was shaking, super high winds, large hail, debris flying past the small windows in that basement. Later, we found a major portion on the roof was ripped off, and many windows were broken, during those few minutes.
Fixing that radio could have saved some one. My earliest memory of engineering.
That radio was sold for fifty cents at a garage sale ten years later.
Cabe
