Projects built at home, for no reason other than wanting them to exist.
An old Joyner off-road buggy rebuilt around a Honda B18 engine and a five-speed transmission. The interesting part of an engine swap is everything around the engine: mounts, driveline, cooling and wiring all have to be reworked before a combination the factory never intended will run as one machine.
Once it ran, it earned its shakedown on the dunes and trails at Hollister.
A desk lamp built by hand from copper and wood. The body is copper tube, with a valve handle as the control: it turns a triac, so the bulb fades up and down instead of snapping on and off.
Most of the work went into the copper. Bending tube to a drawn shape means working against springback with Harbor Freight tools, and learning that a half-inch pipe and a half-inch tube are not the same thing, the hard way. The base is wood, shaped, sanded, primed and finished until it looked like part of the design rather than a block holding it up.
A small set of graphite sketches, mostly cars. Drawing is where the habit of studying how something is put together started, long before any of it became a job.