"hobbyist" mine skip load in haulage shaft

Using coke (baked coal). Is like a tall thin blacksmith's forge.

In the brief time I did it, making equipment for the divers was likewise - assume very limited to zero visibility, currents - and gloves on. Makign sure anythign I made would work in "real" conditions.

--------------------------------- Thanks for reminding me that working under the car on the exhaust yesterday was far from the worst job, though the freezing temperature and nose to wrench clearance were similar. And not having the dealer do it was worth $160 an hour.

OTOH my dealer service department promotes the use of Nitrogen for tire inflation, so, when the tire symbol lights up I go there and let them top up my tires for free!

OTOH my dealer service department promotes the use of Nitrogen for tire inflation, so, when the tire symbol lights up I go there and let them top up my tires for free!

----------------------- ... and look for something they can charge you to fix, or suggest buying a new one. Last week I asked to sit in a Ford Bronco and they offered to let me take it home overnight. A year ago when I tried the Maverick (liked it) their lot was nearly bare, enough to practice tight parking maneuvers in it. What I really want is a new 2000 CRV, which I'm slowly getting piece by piece.

I use the special 78% nitrogen blend. My local auto dealers don't seem to stock that. Fortunately I have a lifetime supply on hand.

I use the special 78% nitrogen blend. My local auto dealers don't seem to stock that. Fortunately I have a lifetime supply on hand. Bob La Londe

------------------------

I do too, the blend with 0.94% Argon. By my calculations the pressure reduction/volume expansion from tank to tire reduces the relative humidity below 50%, and the water trap in the line has never showed one drop. I might add an inline drier cartridge to the inflater. Before the Thanksgiving trip

28PSI from summer had decreased to 25PSI at freezing.

Actually, someone had swiped the fancy all metal "N" valve caps from the curb side wheels (for their bike?) so I ended up with four nem caps for free. -high value item you know!

Thanks Jim for link to 254-page report. Being very cold and needing to warm up a friend who had chilled, I made a fire in the stove and whiled away time writing my interpretation of "events".

"Mine skip and guides - 254 page PDF" Have I got "The Cold War" context right? (1977) Rich S

Thanks Jim for link to 254-page report. Being very cold and needing to warm up a friend who had chilled, I made a fire in the stove and whiled away time writing my interpretation of "events".

"Mine skip and guides - 254 page PDF" Have I got "The Cold War" context right? (1977) Rich S

-------------------------------- I heat my house with a fire in a stove too. It came with electric heat that looked so promising when they thought nuclear power would be cheap. That's why I have a 200A 240V electric service, 48KW available for welders and machine tools. Our electric rates are nearly the nation's highest and my consumption averages 2-3 KWH per day.

I realized after skimming through much of that .PDF that it probably didn't apply to Condurrow, but I had it on screen and sent the link before moving away. I had been looking for more historical, less automated mining equipment descriptions. I've found that solutions from one field can be helpful in another, knowing a different previous application of [something] got me out of an intellectual property theft lawsuit.

Dunno about the Cold War context. After the Army I didn't get back into government work until the 1990's when it was over and not missed. After WW2 we studied the enemys' war efforts in considerable detail and found that shortages of Nickel, Chromium and Tungsten had greatly hindered the Germans, though they had a frighteningly large surplus of Uranium from Radium mine waste. Somehow it disappeared after the war.

An example of the detail:

"Portsmouth" is the naval shipyard in Portsmouth NH USA. Type XXI is a Diesel-electric version of the unsuccessful peroxide-powered experimental U boats, which had improved submerged hydrodynamics relative to previous models that were optimized for surface travel and more internal volume to accommodate the bulky peroxide tanks. After studying German advances and deficiencies we realized we could go further if the boat didn't need to run on the surface on Diesel power, so this is the prototype for nuclear hulls:

The day I visited the former commander of the shipyard was aboard waiting for a film crew and I peppered him with more technical questions than he could or should answer.

All in all, I'm still glad I joined the Army, learned computer electronics and was paid to fly and drive around Europe.

I understand that with U-boats "the hunter had become the hunted".

I suspect it went like... a U-boat could sink one merchant ship with the loss of all its cargo; with the certainty of that U-boat then being destroyed - and the loss of a U-boat and all its crew cost the attacker more than the target lost. The one about on a first voyage a U-boat and its crew had a 30% chance of not returning. Those losses made the service non-viable. They mean it could have no body of experience and no mentoring?

MOST people I have met who have been in the armed services speak positively of it. It used to be the case, and hopefully still is, that coming from a disadvantaged background you learned a Trade very well and got a good life after leaving the Services. Glad you did well out of it, with electronics.

The mine PDF. Yes you are right - contemporary technology. I didn't think of your deliberate choice there.

Thing is - I learned a lot - and that was always the point. I contribute - but gain.

Best wishes

I understand that with U-boats "the hunter had become the hunted".

I suspect it went like... a U-boat could sink one merchant ship with the loss of all its cargo; with the certainty of that U-boat then being destroyed - and the loss of a U-boat and all its crew cost the attacker more than the target lost. The one about on a first voyage a U-boat and its crew had a 30% chance of not returning. Those losses made the service non-viable. They mean it could have no body of experience and no mentoring?

MOST people I have met who have been in the armed services speak positively of it. It used to be the case, and hopefully still is, that coming from a disadvantaged background you learned a Trade very well and got a good life after leaving the Services. Glad you did well out of it, with electronics.

---------------------------

Allied technical advances including long range patrol bombers, antisub carrier groups, sonobuoys, homing torpedos, and your Huff-Duff instant radio-location came together almost simultaneously to locate and sink U boats just as they appeared to be winning.

The U boats stayed out until the end but kept quiet and didn't attract almost certain retribution, waiting for the promised magical wunderweapons that would give them the advantage again, as in German legend and opera. Unfortunately for them the Allies had excellent magicians too, such as Stanley Hooker, Barnes Wallis and R.V. Jones.

In the spring of 1945 when those new boats went out they were detected and sunk almost immediately, 1-2 a day. I have a memoir by a surviving U-Boot captain who was fortunate enough to be moved to Infantry as the desperate end approached.

April and May 1943 are the turnaround when losses more than doubled, they they decreased because the boats became less active. April and May 1945 are when the new ones came out. May losses were in the first third of the month.

The fleet of snorkel-equipped boats lying in wait for the Normandy invasion fleet accomplished almost nothing against the Allied defensive screen. Surface torpedo boats did more damage.

I suspect it went like... a U-boat could sink one merchant ship with the loss of all its cargo; with the certainty of that U-boat then being destroyed - and the loss of a U-boat and all its crew cost the attacker more than the target lost.

------------------------------ Worse. U boats were required to report convoy sightings by radio to bring in other boats, the "Wolf Pack". The transmissions were encoded and compressed into bursts that were too short for German radio direction finders to locate. Naturally those were the world's best.

However you Brits weren't using German equipment, your direction finders had been developed to map lightning strikes and could indicate the direction of a U boat transmission in its first milliSecond, without rotating the antenna. It didn't matter that the message was encoded if it contained what the hunters already knew, the local weather or Allied ship positions. The destroyers would head in its direction and watch for a blip on their undetectable centimetric radar. If available a plane would be sent to "accidentally" see and be seen by the target and conceal the real means of detection, in case the target evaded destruction. In high traffic areas planes would broadcast lower frequency radar known to be detectable to pretend it was all they had and to discourage the U boats from running on the surface to recharge their batteries.

ears locate sounds a similar way.

Amazing info. I gather you did well out of your time in the military.

Amazing info. I gather you did well out of your time in the military.

----------------------------- I heard a lot of stories of non-combat service from when my father was a company commander in the Air Corps. He and my uncle served in New Guinea where the commanding general was an engineer and inventor himself and encouraged any home-grown innovation that helped fight the enemy. MacArthur backed him as long as the results served the fight, strict rule followers were sent home for "combat fatigue". The natives had no money so loose control didn't lead to the corruption that occurred elsewhere. Otherwise they treated government property as toys to play with and especially customize as only engineers and mechanics can.

The Chief of Staff was Merian Cooper, a bold and independent pilot/adventurer who had created "King Kong" and served with the Flying Tigers. I was expecting hardship and discipline, instead the food was good and the Captain in Basic Training had bet that his company could score the highest on the final test three times in a row. We were the third, so they marched and ran us to their limits (I'd been a distance runner), but treated us with respect and gave us weekends off. We could see what other training companies experienced, were grateful and delivered the results that made him a Major.

Then in Electronics school my course was classified and no material could leave the building, thus no homework. I was free to explore nearby New York City on weekends. Nearing graduation we were promoted to the first level of NCO and made squad and platoon leaders, which made the school's boastful Air Force contingent furious, since they had to wait years for promotion.

The German I studied in college may have directed me to serve in Germany where I travelled around and needed it. Discipline there was reputedly strict, however ambitious civil rights lawyers were exploiting accusations against "ethnic" personnel as racial incidents which hurt the careers of any officers involved. As a result discipline nearly vanished for everyone, drug use was accepted and barracks inspections ceased so they wouldn't have to ignore the punchbowls of hashish etc. Interestingly everything kept running smoothly, the small percentage who make things happen continued to and the rest smoked their dope and stayed quietly out of our way.

Shortly after arriving I was promoted to a tech grade of sergeant which allowed me to act independently wherever I went and get things done. My job was fixing code machines that never broke, though other equipment did and the phone lines the Army leased to link computers were their worst, barely usable whenever it rained.

I was on call and couldn't be given a task I couldn't drop when a plane arrived to take me on a repair mission. After a reorganization we lost air support and drove, in military vehicles until they broke down and then in Army civilian vehicles or our own cars if we could pass the driving (sign reading) test. Beware of Glatteisgefahr and be sure to Einfahrt Freihalten. Due to Vietnam's cost there was no money in Europe for spare parts, and no local source for anything not Metric. Private mail orders kept Jeeps running, usually with higher performance parts that made them dangerous at German road speeds. BMWs handle well for good reason. Since few left the base to go drinking the military pay gave us cash to burn on cameras, audio equipment and car parts, although in the US married servicemen qualified for welfare. Gasoline was very cheap because we didn't pay the 3/4 of the posted price that was tax.

Thus I became the post photographer and helped out in the motor pool and with the USO whose director wanted to run a small theatre group. I was the prime choice for meet-the-Germans trips to local attractions like the neat, flower bordered and Teutonically organized sewage facility they were so proud of. Methane from a sludge digester ran a huge Diesel that powered the facility. OTOH being the token enlisted man at an officers' banquet in Heidelberg Castle was fun, I danced with the Colonel's wife on the huge wine barrel (the younger wives were ignoring her) and saw how bored and unhappy the officers' wives were. I recruited wives into the USO theatre group to keep them busy and out of trouble. I was selected to attend a grad student's Drug Education program which was mainly about his research into how various popular intoxicants inhibit blood circulation in frogs' transparent feet. He was very surprised to find a trained scientist in his class when he expected all useless losers who could be spared. Conveniently it was held next to an old airstrip we used for emergency landings. Once we tied up Stuttgart's international airport while we made a very slow emergency landing in an old radial-engined Canadian bush plane.

I had learned enough of German (and French) language and culture to get along. Most Americans hadn't, felt left out and stayed on base. Two "ethnics" reenlisted to get back to Saigon, their reason being that in the US and Germany they were distinctly second class but in Vietnam they became rich Americans for the first time.

At the time the saddest day of my life was landing back in New Jersey.

-------------------------------- An A-20 is a light bomber, a B-25 a medium, comparable to a Wellington.

Accounts vary on this. We had given the Dutch (displaced from Indonesia/Netherlands East Indies) the squadron of B-25s but they had no pilots for them. One version is when Gunn and friends learned they were sitting unused in Australia they made a midnight raid with forged papers to claim them and bring them back, off US records and free to be modified. Notice the official acceptance of the acquisition. I think we paid off the Dutch to keep quiet.

Their firepower was enough to suppress (kill off) Japanese ships' antiaircraft defenses and allow other bombers to skip bombs with tenth second delay fuses along the water and into the sides of the ships, like the Dambuster raid. One bomber had flown so low over the explosion that it returned with part of the ship's logbook stuck in a radial engine.

Carrier fighters and bombers used similar methods to cripple the heavy AA defense of the two largest Japanese super-battleships and sink them with torpedos.

(because?) America was in turmoil then??? The Northern and "rust-belt" cities were in economic and social collapse? The "hippy culture" was kind of alright for those involved but the country felt directionless and without a shared vision?

I was in the USA in 2001 to 2002. What I saw as a complete inversion from confident, outgoing and self-believing to paranoid and inward-looking was horrendous. There was no need for the American people to be drawn into that trap, yet the "leadership" took everyone in that direction, as it seemed to me. America seemed to have rebuilt itself from what documentaries show of the early 1970's. Maybe I am a naive idealist seeing a great country doing well and for good reason when I arrived in early 2001.

Very tentative almost-random thoughts there...

Best wishes, Rich Smith

(because?) America was in turmoil then??? The Northern and "rust-belt" cities were in economic and social collapse? The "hippy culture" was kind of alright for those involved but the country felt directionless and without a shared vision?

I was in the USA in 2001 to 2002. What I saw as a complete inversion from confident, outgoing and self-believing to paranoid and inward-looking was horrendous. There was no need for the American people to be drawn into that trap, yet the "leadership" took everyone in that direction, as it seemed to me. America seemed to have rebuilt itself from what documentaries show of the early 1970's. Maybe I am a naive idealist seeing a great country doing well and for good reason when I arrived in early 2001.

Very tentative almost-random thoughts there...

Best wishes, Rich Smith

------------------------------ The short answer is because it was New Jersey which we called the Armpit of America for its geography below Long Island, the sluminess of its cities and the foul chemical odors of the port of Elizabeth in the corner by NYC. The non-urban parts could be quite pleasant.

I'll have to consider and research a longer answer. In general I think we divide ourselves into self-reliant and productive people who reside in their own homes and dissatisfied, less well-adapted ones who tend toward urban apartments and liberal-arts jobs, creating words and pictures instead of useful objects. I've had experience on both sides. Geographically and politically that separates us into conservative and liberal regions plus many that are mixed, as liberals flee what they have created yet can't/won't adapt.

I remember the 70's as a time when we felt we'd lost our way, culminating in the Carter years. Afterwards things just became divided and confused. The idea of Make America Great Again has become an icon that arouses sociopathic hate from the left and I don't understand why. They appear too eager to blame everyone but themselves for their low achievement level, with terms like "underprivileged", denying the benefits of study and hard work. Society may have become too complex and difficult to navigate for some, but the history and literature of ancient Athens shows a similar rise, discord and downfall in a far simpler time.

Popular democracy still exists. Here in NH the entire town population can debate, amend and vote on a warrant that specifies the next years budgets and changes to town and school operations. In practice there might be a hundred or so who are sufficiently interested to attend and perhaps 20 of us willing to stand up and speak. The final vote is a separate day-long election that allows more participation.

We've had recent immigrants from more urban Massachusetts tell us we should just let our elected officials make all the decisions without interference. That symbolizes the gulf between independent self reliance and passive codependence.

Out of curiosity I attended an evening lecture in MA by far-left professor Noam Chomsky, I don't ignore views I disagree with. Before it began the people in front of me were discussing their pride in not needing to understand technology, specifically how to set time on a VCR, and gleefully ridiculing those geeks/nerds who do. I stayed quiet; my briefcase held a prototype of a miniature atomic clock I was developing for the Air Force.

Ahh... Right...

Interesting observation...

It is externally observed about Britain "The large number of unskilled 'managers'" That someone outside seeing a second-by-second reality here. Inured by years and decades of it, a friend still chortled when I portrayed an annoyance she related as being "a nothing" because it was "a laryngial reflex action". As in - there you are making the Company function, hooked into the vertical revenue-earning structure of the business

(there are "high-flyers" who strike the deals but rely on a raft of support making everything easy and pre-organised for them so they can walk in and concentrate solely on the arrangement which brings money into the Company and there are those who are not controlling the top end but are diligently "taking on-board" the needs of the topmost making everything happen as if it just does in return for a modest pouring of money to them)

with these horizontal stratems of "managers" whose job should be keeping the stationery cupboard stocked, booking-in the central-heating service company, etc. - who have transmuted into "managers" who pick into the revenue-generating activity.

But the big picture is - the economy is supporting some double-figure percent of people who seem to do nothing but these reflex actions without comprehension. Do these things and you are "managerial material" in Britain and you will be recognised, recruited and given jobs where you force people doing any actual doing to justify every little day-to-day thing - "taken on board" by those who self-validate as being a crucial.

Variants of the "How many managers does it take to change a lightbulb?" joke has got to extreme levels of sarcasm in response to the situation.

As I see it...

I am skeptical a successful enduring economy can come from this.

Those who have benefitted from talented success do identify similar. That the path they followed is not open now, and it would not be possible to replace a significant person in a Company because "the managers" would control it - with significant backing og the Law - "equal opportunities legislation and practice" - hence being able to insert one of their own.

Etc.

Rich S