Is there some sort of subculture of the maker movement that focuses on building stuff mainly from scavenged and jury-rigged parts, with minimal purchase of new parts? Any good examples or sites or subreddits? Cc
It is depressing that for most collections of random scavenged junk, even if very hi-tech, the most complex thing you can build out of it is generally “doorstop” or “art” (which doesn’t particularly interest me)
Junkyard engineering/mad-maxing reminds me of a weird branch of number theory/combinatorics called Ramsey theory, which is about questions like "how many randomly selected people do you need in a room for 2 people to share a birthday" (~22 as it happens)
Mutatis mutandis, how many randomly broken radios, based on typical failure modes, do you need in order to assemble 1 functional radio out of scavenged parts?
This is the simplest sort of homogeneous case. Ramsey theory covers a lot of such "structure appearing out of disorder via enabling conditions" questions
Heteregenous case: how many randomly broken bits of junk from from a particular subset of the economic production web do you need to assemble an arbitrary design in the combinatorial space. Eg... a 6-wheel vehicle with a snowplow attached?
I'm interested in synthesis side... what *can* you realize within the design space induced by the parts universe of a junkyard? Sort of like the Boydian snowmobile question (snowmobile = skis + motorcycle parts). How quickly does the expressivity of a junkspace increase with n?
Reminds me of shopping for an old-fashioned phone back in the early 2000's
I thought I had found it, a heavy Princess phone. Not the model I wanted, but seemed nicely mechanical & robust from what I could tell.
But that was a lie. A circuit board & a lead weight. That was it.☎️
It typically takes 4-5 borked up aeron chairs to frankenstien a new one. The plus side is you will still have parts left over for other frankenmodels. Kinda why people just have me build new ones