I've often thought that it would be satisfying to make bricks or something like that. No bugs, no complexities. If you have 40 tons of bricks in the back lot, you don't have to worry much about them.
There are a lot of Larkin's around. There's a Larkin Street near here, and Larkin Valley to the south. He was Scottish, I think, and I'm Irish.
The Scots and Irish seem to trend towards engineering and similar hands-on stuff.