What is a hillbilly tinker?  Well I consider myself a hillbilly, I live in the hills of SW Virginia.  Waaaaay back, moonshine country.  I love it peace and quiet, beautiful mountains.  All those that live around me have the same mentality, they just want to be left alone to do what ever it is they enjoy.  Its not easy getting here, and when the weather is foul it is not easy getting out.

The Appalachians have long been a formidable place, its geography making it out of touch with the places around it.  This has given rise to much mystery and hearsay about these hills.  It has been at different times considered a magical mystical place, and a backwards, ignorant holdout.  Truth be told it is isolated, and as such has created a people that are staunchly independent, proudly self reliant, and endlessly clever and ingenious.

This is were I come in.  I was not born here, but my family line is only one generation removed from here.  I returned, feeling drawn to these mountains.  My family is not the brightest in the worldly sense.  But when I was a small child, I clearly remember my grandpa, making various little things.  A country Christmas “village” made from craft sticks and old Styrofoam containers, complete with lights.  Long before such villages were popular.  A toy biplane which I adored constructed from a Better Cheddar box and three pop cycle sticks.  And perhaps my favorite creation, replacement wooden feet for a much loved and high producing laying hen, who lost her original feet to frost bite.

I am forever fascinated by technology new and old.  Ingenious ways of doing something, practical or not.  I not only want to know how and why it was done, but I want to do it myself, experience it myself, to gain the deepest understanding and appreciation for it.  Especially when one is doing it with whatever materials is at hand.  Hillbillies and other poor folks around the world invented recycling.

So that is what a hillbillytinker is.  It is also what this blog is about.  I wanted to share with everyone what I am doing.  Sometimes it is practical, other times not.  Sometimes it is of my own creation, sometimes I am building off what others have done.  I hope this inspires others to go out and create and build.

 

Enjoy