Up Periscope ! New KerKit product

I had a new idea for a project over the weekend.  A periscope.  It's been done I know, but in my opinion, not in a really cool way.  I want to make one where you truly can say "Up Periscope" and have some actual telescoping (excuse the pun) action.

I remember stuff from when I was a kid a fair amount. One sort of good memory I had was getting a submarine for Christmas.  Sounds good I know, but the circumstances were a bit funny.  Back in the day, I read a lot of monster movie magazines and in the back of these mags were incredible things for sale. Sea Monkeys for instance.  I would get the money together for these things, usually in the form of cash or even coins which I would tape to the mail order form with my address and mail to some place.  Surprisingly, this actually worked and I got the goods.  Usually like 3 months later, but that was life before amazon.com (WAY before amazon).

One of many incredible things I bought was a submarine.  Incredible what these ads would write.  The only thing more incredible was how gullible I was as a child and I bought into this stuff.  Literally.  It had a caption "with REAL working periscope".  I gotta get this I thought of course, and after a period of saving coins, off goes my order form.

About 4 months later, I hadn't received my submarine. I was disappointed, but 10 year olds move on.  Christmas morning rolls around about 3 months later and much to my surprise, there was my submarine under the tree.  My parents hijacked my mail order submarine and made it a Christmas present. I was too excited to consider the possible breach of parental ethics.  I commenced to get into my submarine.  It was of course, cardboard.  I guess my Pop had assembled it (tab A into slot B, etc).  Again, who cares?  I remember being a bit disappointed because even a 10 year old on Xmas morning has enough practicality to know that cardboard will not be waterproof.  But, I got in (crawled in though a hole in the back, not quite like the movies, but okay) and found the periscope.  There was no capability to raise or lower the periscope however, and that one really did bum me out quite a bit.  But it did work.  I could see outside of my cardboard vessel at my parents laughing (near me, not at me of course) and that was pretty cool.

BUT ! ....  No up periscope opportunity.  By 10 I had figured out the whole Santa thing, and I also knew enough to not voice my displeasure at my parents.  But it was kind of a gyp!  

40 or so years later, I'm gonna set things right. Laser cut wood parts kit to build an awesome periscope.  Fold down handles on the side and a crank that allows you to raise the scope 13 inches or so above the base part.  And with a fence mount so that you can hang it on the fence and see what is going on in the hood without surfacing.  Or could be a cube wall mount for the office place... Quick sketch below.  I'll share some screen shots of the CAD drawing as I work it.

Thanks for reading,  Kerwin Lumpkins