After slurping ice-creams, M. Vishal puts their sticks to good use. In a self-imposed summer project, the 13-year-old boy has made two time-pieces — one patterned on a pendulum and the other on a cuckoo clock — using around 1,000 ice-cream sticks.
Fully functional, structurally rigid and pleasing to the eye, these fancy clocks are among a hodgepodge of electronic items Vishal has ‘crafted’ with unlikely material. Recycled waste have gone into these home-made gadgets, which include an angular grinder, a mini juice mixer, a variety of study lamps, a drill machine, a radio signal receiving system and a miniature motorised boat.
Vishal has taken after his father Mahesh Kumar, a past master at working with mechanical tools, which he has hoarded in huge numbers. Most of them are imbued with antique value. His collection of ‘vise-grips’ is by itself mind-boggling.
Pre-empting a logical question, Mahesh says, “Except for the finishing touches, I had nothing to do with Vishal’s ‘ice-cream clocks’. From concept to execution, he did everything.” Vishal’s fascination for a 125-year-old pendulum clock — now in a derelict state — had sparked the project.
“With the intention of overhauling it, I had stripped down the clock. Impatient, Vishal decided to replicate the clock with ice-cream sticks,” says Mahesh. While working on the clocks, the boy made an angular grinder with a plastic spoon, the bottom of a tin, a sand paper, the cap of a pet bottle and a 6.5 volt motor. It served as a tool to intricately grind out the edges of the sticks.
For a mini juice mixer, Vishal used the cover of a ghee container as the blade, a pen-refill as the shaft, an adhesive container as the motor section, a fresh mint case for holding the battery and a plastic bottle as the mixing area.
A broken plastic ball, a bangle, a tin cap and bore filter make up the shell of an aesthetic lamp Vishal has made — it throws light in abeautiful honeycomb pattern.
Other inventions include a motorised drill made out of a powder box, a miniature motor boat carved out with an iron-box as the mould, a radio signal receiver created with an assortment of waste material and a clutch of study lamps made in a similar fashion. Vishal is on to another ambitious project — making a vise-grip.
