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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

If you like learning how things work, like to learn lots of things and want a good subject to motivate you, restore an older car to perfect working order. You will be investigating mechanics, electronics, chemistry, metal working, even upholstery. Hell, I got into 3D printing too since some of the older plastic parts simply aren’t made anymore.

And at the end of it, you get a sweet perfect vintage car to show for all your learning.

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And my personal corollary: R/C cars when I was a kid. I learned so many useful things from building, driving, breaking, and fixing them!

DC electronics, motors, suspension tuning and theory, PWM, basic mechanical “instincts”, soldering, how transmissions work (some models had even fluid-filled torque converters on them) differential gearing (and some had limited slip!) and even regenerative braking.

Years later I’d constantly be surprised how all of these things worked almost the same way in real cars.

Ha! I started on flight sim, made it to rc planes, and the first day of flight instruction, I told the instructor and he said: “if you can fly rc, you can fly full scale.” All I had to master was emergency procedures and some theory on the throttle vs pitch and I was off to the skies!

I’d imagine the stakes are a little higher when you're on the plane looking down than when you're on the ground looking up?

The rest makes sense. Controls are in different places, everything is bigger, but the basics are the same.

Is the bigger plane easier in the sense it is less twitchy?

I’ve tried a couple of RC helicopters and the larger one was much easier to handle.

Yeah, flying a plane is "easy". It's the taking off and landing that gets tricky. /s

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