Learned an interesting and handy new term the other day, kind of the opposite of unobtainium..
Scrapbinium.. Basically you make stuff out of whatever is in the scrap bin, I've built a considerable number of things with that remarkably protean substance.
I spent a lot of my working career fixing the unfixable, orphan (but expensive to replace) equipment where the manufacturer has long since gone out of business, parts, diagrams, schematics and information simply don't exist so you do whatever it takes. A lot of times it took just the right bit of scrapbinium and some reverse shade tree engineering.
Just seemed like a good thing to share with fellow frugalists.. 
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Technical skill is in direct proportion to the amount of equipment you have ruined..
Which is a fancy way of saying that you learn more from what you do wrong than what you do right.
Arthur Clarke once said that in order to learn the limits of the possible you have to venture at least a short distance into the impossible. Well, I've ventured quite a way into the impossible and have taken copious mental notes on what does not work from sometimes quite literally painful experience.
On one technically oriented forum I frequent that deals with scratch built electric vehicles they have two relevant acronyms, KFF and KFH, they stand for Kentucky Fried Finger and Kentucky Fried Hand..
A KFF looks like this..
And a KFH looks like this..
So keep on trying, every time you screw up you learn something new about what does not work, most of us who are better at it have just had more practice in discovering new and sometimes painful ways to break stuff even worse than it was broken in the first place.
You had me laughing about how reassured I should be, then relating the story about a vaporized guy. 
I have always found pride as a fabricator. Owning a landscaping company with tools, trucks, and heavy equipment going down all the time, it became a necessary skill, and some of the "Eureka" moments are indescribable. I'm gonna try and remember both of your terms!
Here's a pic of one of buddies. He's a machinist, evil genius, and an Incredible fabricator. One day he got bored sitting at his desk, then 2 hours later he drove the country mile between his house and mine for a beer. You should see what he can do when he's serious!
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Often out of necessity but looks like your friend had some fun!
This is a Bridgeport computer controlled milling machine that was made in 1982, the original computer system was the size of a refrigerator and the magic smoke had long since left the building, electronically speaking it was pining for the fjords but the mechanical parts were still in pretty decent shape although it was stone ugly after decades of cutting metal. I got the machine off Craigslist for the price it would have fetched at the scrap metal yard, then after I disassembled, cleaned, sanded, repainted and reassembled the entire machine I retrofitted new control electronics and motors and a PC with custom software and a touch screen monitor to run it. You can see the PC up top and the control electronics are in the box behind the PC.
Basically this thing was a battleship anchor, now it works better than it did when it was brand new. It took me nearly a year to get the machine to this point, it's an effort about equivalent to a ground up restoration on a vintage car.
Oh, and other than the PC and the touch screen monitor I got off Craigslist the new control electronics were all made in the USA, the custom software running on the PC is also from the USA.
Here's what it looked like when I got it..
I know, that isn't what you wanted me to be in awe of, but wow.
And yes, I am impressed with what you did too. 
