Hi, I’m Andrew! I’m a mechanical engineer working for an R&D company and in my free time I can’t help but tinker to make all of my hobbies more enjoyable.
I joke that I’ve never met a hobby I didn’t like. In college I got into bowling and even started playing billiards competitively on intercollegiate leagues! I also got into photography with my first DSLR (a Pentax K10D) because I wanted to always have cool desktop backgrounds! And of course that lead me to needing to get to the places that had the picturesque settings, so I’d mix hiking and photography sessions together, often taking my Miata places I joke Jeeps shouldn’t have gone!
In college I worked on making cars drive autonomously. Our team came in third in the DARPA Ubran Challenge and we won $500,000! On that project I learned to fabricate things in a shop including how to weld. For my senior design project I was on a team that needed someone to build and pilot R/C aircraft, so I learned how to do that! After college I would buy numerous other aircraft, including R/C helicopters and quads, and even got a few Savage monster trucks! Next thing you know I’m modifying those and making custom carrying cases for protecting them.
Of course I like the adventure of seeing new places and so exploring new areas, whether man made or natural, and often pairing that with camping became a natural pairing. After moving to the DC metro area after college my wife and I found ourselves in a lifestyle rut and found that when we bought a new Nissan Xterra that it was the catalyst to get us out exploring the region around our new home. Next thing you know we join an off road club, and I end up being President for over 4 years!
On our adventures I realize my GoPro video is too shaky due to the terrain we’re driving over, so I design and fabricate an isolation mount! Airing up my tires after the trip becomes an annoying process because you have to kneel in the mud and so I come up with a solution to avoid that. When my sockets in my tool bag kept falling off their holder I designed and sewed a few pouches to better contain them as we rock and bounce all over the place!
Beginning in college and continuing after I graduated I started experimenting with high speed photography. Here I am shooting BB guns in an apartment in the dark to capture a picture of a subject too fast to see with the naked eye! I even got to hold an art show at a community theater featuring my work! More recently I’m exploring the other end of photography, trying my hand at astrophotography, where instead of trying to capture images faster than a camera shutter can open and close I’m taking photos that are minutes long to see the universe around us!
Inevitably the best locations to do such photography are remote, and it helps to have a vehicle that can get you there, and while you’re there you might as well camp, and during the day some fun entertainment might be to pull out an R/C vehicle… You see, while other people have a hobby or two, I can’t seem to not mix them together and while doing so try to improve the equipment I’m using.
My wife, Cherie, is almost always along for the adventure as well. We met in college and have been inseparable ever since. She supports me and my crazy obsessions involving my latest and greatest hobbies and creations and is super talented as an artist in her on right! I’m also the proud dad of 2 awesome kids, who of course cut into my hobby time… but also make my hobby time more fun when they’re involved!
Thanks for visiting my site and I hope you find something useful on here that will make your hobbies more enjoyable.
