A Pictorial and Videographic Record Of My Greatest "Hamhocked" Projects

A "hamhock" refers to a household construction or recreational project done in a crude, inexpert fashion, resulting in temporary fixes or enjoyments that often break soon after. I present my resume.

Dunking Platform Opens, Plunging My Friend James 30 Feet Down a Well In Nicaragua

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Today’s post is a marked departure from my usual content, which I trust my paid subscribers will enjoy as much as I did in putting it together. For me, it allowed for a beautiful and funny trip down “memory lane.” It will show a personal side that readers will find amusing (as well as my friends and family, many of whom have joyful memories of using and/or playing with these hamhocked creations).

“Hamhock” is a word coined by a friend of mine to describe our approach to fixing things around the house or building random recreational projects that we would dream up (we did the latter a lot, as you will see). We used this term as an open acknowledgement that we often displayed little sophistication or talent in building or fixing anything.

It can only be used by someone like me and my friend - those with suboptimal “handyman” abilities, i.e., little training, expertise, or natural feel or intuition for carpentry, woodworking, plumbing, metalworking, electrical repair, computer hardware, auto repair, etc. I must admit, as you will see, the above applies to me more than to some of my friends.

If you are like us, our approaches often involved massive applications of duct tape, Krazy glue, and/or randomly affixed two-by-fours with long nails. Over the years, we would text pictures of our latest “hamhocked” fix or project that we had completed. They are hilarious. None would last for very long, but the pride beaming from us when our fix or project worked for even just a little while was massive :).

I first used the word “hamhock” in my recent “Nosocomephobia” (fear of hospitals) post, where I employed it as a descriptor for the DMSO/chlorine dioxide protocol I devised to treat a paronychial abscess. As I started to include examples of hamhocks in that post, it detracted too sharply from its intended focus, so this separate post was born.

Hamhock is such a versatile word, too - it can be a noun, verb, or adjective. I, for instance, am a hamhocker; I enjoy hamhocking, and I have a track record of completed hamhocked projects from my home-owning and child-rearing eras.

In the following, I present the pictorial and/or videographic record of some of our most famous hamhocks (nearly all were recreational rather than household fixes, as I did not document the latter as diligently, although I should have).