We had taken about as many beatings off of Ryan as we were going to
and we started devising plans for revenge. We were constantly working
out fantasy ways in which the 'Dingo Warrior' would get a world class
beat down. Some were just absurd, the creation of a gang with us at
the helm calling out thrashings on a whim. While others were more
practical, we would build cyborg strength enhancement suits and give
him the beating our selves. Well, that was obviously the method of
vengeance that we needed to pursue. We started by drawing up plans,
and by plans of course I mean we drew cool pictures of super awesome
robotic enhancements that a boy could wear. We had limited
fabrication facilities and abilities so we decided to find stuff that
looked very much like what we wanted the final product to look like
and make minor alterations. The chassis we found was a 5 gallon
square water container which we made wearable by cutting out a large
hole in the bottom for Justin's waist, a smaller hole in the top for
his head, and a couple of arm holes and we had a older brother
resistant armor.
 |
| We cut off all that handle and nozzle nonsense and added arm and head holes. Voila! |
Once we had the chassis is was time to start in with
the enhancements. We got a swamp-cooler motor with a cradle mount and
bolted it onto the back of the rig right in line with his right arm.
Then we smashed the end of a two foot long piece of electrical
conduit and drilled a hole through it and epoxied it to the shaft of
the motor. The fact that we only glued and didn't bolt or weld it on
may have saved Justin's arm from major damage. We wired the motor to
a power cord and put it through a box with a light switch for
activating and deactivating the super punch feature of our cybernetic
doom suit. We had originally designed it to be self contained but we
didn't know how to do that so we would have to only give retribution
in teams of two and within reach of a power socket. Justin slipped
the 5 gallon suit on and we tapped the conduit to his arm and giddily
readied ourselves for a real game-changer in the power dynamic. I
plugged in the motor and asked if Justin was ready, he was, and I hit
the switch. I don't think what happened could be called a unqualified
success. When the motor activated it tried to turn 360 degrees over
and over 1160 times a minute Justin's arm was more designed to go
maybe 90 degrees once, and not nearly that fast. His shoulder and the
motor were also not concentric and that immediately caused an
alignment problem with his arm being twisted not just in a circle but
backwards and down at the same time. He started screaming almost
instantly and quite a bit. Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ooooooooooow! His
screaming panicked me and I didn't turn the thing off for maybe 10
seconds. A couple of things probably save the functionality of
Justin's arm: 1: We had only taped it to his arm allowing for a
degree of slippage to occur, 2: we had only used a ¼ hp motor which
caused a lot of pain but was far below what was needed to jerk his
arm clean off, 3: The bars attachment to the motor shaft was round
and when the epoxy broke the motor shaft could spin freely. Those
turned out not to be design flaws but features, safeguards of
incompetence. We pulled him up off of the ground and sat him
uncomfortably in a chair, the plastic jug suit tended to pinch when
it any position but standing up and strait. We untaped his arm and
helped him out of the power suit of doom and took a look at his arm.
Bruised, quite badly bruised all over his shoulder and upper arm and
he said it hurt really bad when he moved it in any direction or held
it completely still. We decided that this advanced type of anti-bully
cyborg technology was years out and we shelved the project. Justin's
arm got better which is good because later in life he lost the use of
his legs in a traffic accident so two working arms is definitely a
plus. I also reaffirmed my conviction that I should never test my
inventions on myself.
