My parents got me a VIC-20 for Christmas. I must have been 12, 13? By then, I already wanted a 64 but they were still too expensive. I had used Atari 800s at a neighbor's and at a computer camp.
Another neighbor had a VIC in the basement, I borrowed game cartridges and I learned (through sheer stubbornness and curiosity, because I was left to myself!) how to copy them. I had an article in a magazine describing how to make a 24K RAM expansion for the VIC, I could only afford 16K. (Each chip was 20$ at the time, I remember that! It took a while to scrape that together at the time.) Radio Shack supplied the PCB and solder.
Eventually, by age 15 I had various odd jobs and bought a weird C64 motherboard from the surplus shop. This was from a "PET64". It was a 64 with modified ROM to boot up in black and white (because Commodore shoved those 64s into PET cases!) and no SID. This 4064 had no power connector or switch populated; seems C= just soldered them in directly.
http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/4064.htmlI shoved that motherboard into my VIC case, it's the same power supply and keyboard. The VIC case had a much larger expansion connector, but the rest was the same. The 64's narrower expansion slot fit just right, with the left over space used by the 64's built-in RF modulator. I drilled a hole in the top of the case to put a big old DPDT switch for the power.
Then I got a SID from the repair place, I popped that in and I had a 64 that booted with a B/W screen. This didn't affect anything AFAIR.
Eventually I got a 1541 drive, a 256K expansion, a 1581 3.5" floppy, a printer, and a proportional mouse for the thing and I was handing in printed assignments in high school. GEOS really made that silly 1526 (identical to the MPS-802. Why C= felt the need for two part numbers I don't know) printer much better, even if it took 20 minutes per page.... (No, I ain't kidding.)
I also got a replacement KERNAL to boot up with the correct 64 colors and boot up message.
Ooooh, I managed to upgrade that 256K expansion to 512K with DRAM chips I found in the bushes outside a Microserv. Someone upgraded their Mac and threw the old DIMMs out on the street. Didn't take me too long to pick them up and desolder the 41256 DRAMS!
This was all a lot of fun, and I'm not even talking about the warez scene at the time....