Say you’re toiling behind a lawnmower and you notice your 7-year-old son riding merrily along on his electric go-kart. What would you do? Well, if you’re Jacob Strickling, a mechanical engineer and science teacher from New South Wales, Australia, you get inspired. Strickling found two more lawnmowers, assembled a three-mower gang setup, and attached the rig to the back of the go-kart. He then let his son Sam drive around the yard while he sat back with a cold one, as reported by The Daily Mail.
Strickling, whose YouTube channel Make Science Fun has almost 8,000 subscribers, invents fun contraptions for his son’s amusement and demonstrates odd science experiments in a manner that can best be described as thoroughly entertaining. One of the videos on the channel shows Strickling on live TV demonstrating three scientific principles, two of which involve fire, with two television personalities as his willing but somewhat cautious assistants.
Some of Strickling’s other inventions include converting a golf cart to a go-kart and inventing a whale-calling audio setup. According to the Daily Mail, the whale caller, which consisted of a pole with an underwater speaker on one end and a microphone on the other, was surprisingly successful. When Strickling tested the device off the coast of Sydney, using it to mimic the natural sounds of whale vocalizations, he found himself suddenly surrounded by a pod of whales.
The jury-rigged lawnmower gang, attached to each other with plain strips of wood and then to the go-kart, uses a configuration similar to what you might see mowing a golf course or a city park. In this case, however, the operator was a smiling young boy, with his dad sitting on the patio also smiling and saluting the scene with a bottle of beer.
