The word "tinkerer" is correct and usable in written English.
It typically refers to someone who tinkers with machines, experiments with solutions to problems, or builds things from scraps. For example, "My dad is a tinkerer—he loves creating new inventions from spare parts in our garage."
He was a natural tinkerer, fascinated by how machines worked and how they could be made to work better.
He is a tinkerer not an engineer; his favourite word of praise is "piecemeal".He puts more faith in organisations with names such as the "Association of Former Women Fuelwood Carriers"—homespun organisations, set up by insiders, in response to a concrete need than in organisations with names like the Millennium Project or the World Economic Forum, run by outsiders in pursuit of cosmic ambitions.
One tinkerer has Pachube's computers control the fan in his office, guided by temperature readings uploaded from a thermometer on his desk.Such experiments are free, but those who develop more serious applications and do not want them to be available to anyone else have to pay.
EVERYBODY loves the garage tinkerer who sells his brainchild to a big company and becomes a billionaire; and everybody sympathises with the plucky entrepreneur seeking venture capital for his little start-up company.
Knowing how to tune a car engine does not allow a tinkerer to build a competing product, whereas software that cracks a copy-protection system can easily be used to distribute millions of identical copies.
Keizo Obuchi, the Japanese prime minister, got it right when he said this week that Mr Morita was "the engine that pulled the Japanese economy".At heart, the man who made Sony a worldwide name was a tinkerer.
He is a tinkerer, too, which is one reason why even businessmen who approve of his economic management have reservations about him.
For much of the period from the beginning of the industrial revolution, scientific and technical advances including the occasional stroke of brilliance were within the reach of the diligent amateur and the garage tinkerer.
Mr Mann is a compulsive tinkerer, even designing the hydraulics on the gates to his Los Angeles estate.
Blanchard began as a self-taught tinkerer.
In 1939 the Noyce family moved to Grinnell, Iowa, where the father had accepted a position as a Congregational minister and where the son began to demonstrate the traits of an inventor and tinkerer.
