The Paint Can Go Kart - 5 Minutes of Fun - A Week of Laughs
The what? That’s right the paint can go kart.
When I was about 12 years old, my friend Willy came over one day and we decided to go out to the house that they were building down the street and rummage through the “to be burned pile.”
There were all sorts of goodies: nails, boards and paint cans.
I don’t know what came over me, but I thought we could make a go kart out of all this stuff.
So we busily started constructing the basic two by four go kart layout (good thing I brought my hammer along!)
Then it came down to wheels. What do we do for wheels? So I took four nails and pounded them into the center of a paint can directly into the two by four axial post.
I put four paint cans on the go kart and walla! Instant paint can go kart.
We got it out to the street and Willy sat on it and I started pulling, and pulling and pulling. We got that thing going about 10 miles per hour when all of a sudden the painted cans started coming off one by one.
By the time we got to our house we had two front paint cans and no back paint cans! The centers had wallowed out so much that the paint cans fell off, other than they worked beautifully.
Willy said that was the funnest and funniest day of his life.
I would concur, I can hardly stop laughing about it every time I tell the story!
You may be wondering, what does this hilarious story have to do with real go karts?
Everything…
The biggest fun about a joke, or a funny event is the fact that some law of some sort has been violated, and the violation of it is so outrageous, we can only but help ourselves from laughing.
The story was funny because multiple areas of Go Kart good design practice were tossed to the wind:
See if you can catch what areas really needed help in the story:
-Nails for Axel
-Paint cans for wheels
-Paint cans flying off
-Go Kart Scraping on the ground
Quite honestly we may all rush at the poor paint can, but in reality it was the nails and the fact that the paint can had such a thin wall.
The paint can could have worked if an axel tube were inserted in between the two lids. In fact it would probably have lasted quite a while.
But the nails, not having enough bending load stress, even though 4 nails were coupled to make an axel, they were not enough to keep the “paint can wheels on.”
The moral of the story: understand your mechanical structures, or at least learn from those failures, and laugh in the process.