OT: Auto OBD not ready?

"Michael A. Terrell" on Wed, 31 Jul 2013

14:44:25 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Like hell! Those guys saw it happen, and they made sure it was not going to be permitted on German roads.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Funny how having a small livable area does that to one?

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

"Jim Wilkins" on Wed, 31 Jul 2013 15:59:58

-0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

That's true.

I'm not sure if "couldn't" or "wouldn't". One major difference I notice between the Americans and the Continentals, was the American attitude of "Let's try it and find out." Not to mention we seemed to be all natural DIY. And that included cars. It may be that cars were a more integral part of US culture longer than they were in Germany. So we had parents who had been messing about with cars when they were "our age." I can't be sure, but I think my Dad was at least familiar with some hot rodders ... in his day.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Those increasing fees with age - one reason you can get Japanese engines "cheap". The engines are still good, but .. they've out lived their allotted burocratic life.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

I looked hard for cultural similarities and differences, but I didn't have enough opportunity for social interaction with the Germans to see if they were tinkerers. The hobby stores there were amazingly well stocked, but raw materials like wood were expensive and hard to find.

For that matter most Americans weren't too good at auto repair, or manual tasks in general, even in the Signal Corps. At the base where I ran the photo lab not one person asked to use it to develop and print their own pictures. I was apparently the only NCO willing and able to change his own truck tire.

A roommate ran the crafts shop, mostly to manufacture hash pipes. We made little commando raids into the countryside to covertly snip off suitable briar branches from hedges.

jsw

After seeing what Shultz would let slip through for a chocolate bar, or a pair of nylons, of course! ;-)

"Michael A. Terrell" on Thu, 01 Aug 2013

11:01:16 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Ja, ja.

FYI: One of those interesting trivial bits was that Hogan's Hero's, dubbed into German, was one of those "cult classics". in syndication.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

We weren't allowed to watch 'Hogan's Heroes' when I was in basic training. One of the DIs had the nerve to state "That's nothing like a real POW camp!" Talk about stating the obvious.

Hogan's Heroes is on one of the 'free' OTA subchannels, but I can't connect to TVGuide.com right now to find it. I get Antenna TV, ME TV, Retro TV and This TV with a QAM tuner in one of my computers. OTOH, so is M*A*S*H.

I logged in and created a custom lineup to add a station from outside the Boston metro area, and to delete all the Spanish and shopping channels. jsw

Was it made clear that this was possible/allowed? (E.G. was this a hobby lab supplied for the soldiers, or a lab normally used for normal "business" purposes?

I certainly would use it if I did not have my own photo lab at the time. (But I was not in the Army, so perhaps having my own photo lab was easier. :-)

I lose track of the number of rolls of B&W (Usually Tri-X, occasionally Plus-X) and Ektrachrom X/Ektacrhome-64 that I've processed in my day. :-)

That is sad.

Enjoy, DoN.

If it was like the few I frequented, they tended to be bare bone equipment, you'd be best to bring any special "tools" you might want.

Processing one's one film, is a pain. Been there, done that, nothing like tossing a roll because you were too sick to properly evaluate it, or wait for it to dry. And then realize what you did - yesterday.

Pushing tri-X to 1600. OH, and for what it is worth, you get an interesting effect developing Tri-X in the paper developer. Grain that you could see. As I stopped doing my own processing, I switched from BW to color, form SLR to instamatics.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

"Jim Wilkins" on Thu, 1 Aug 2013 08:05:04 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

I wonder how the "sociological" elements impacted all that. I was an Officer's brat, so I moved in a more "rarified" atmosphere - largely it was "Uncle Sam has decided to send us here for 2 (3, 4) years" realizing that folks back home were scrimping to save up enough to spend two weeks. I.E., Going broke saving money on furniture you can't afford in the states. I would also wonder how many of the troops were of the opinion "I don't want to be here, I was drafted, I don't like it here" and refuse to exploit the generosity of their Uncle Sam who sent him someplace for a year or two where other people will save up for years just to drop in for a week?

Well, I'm glad to see that someone was taking advantage of his skills, and opportunities.

"Reminds me of Czechoslovakia in the spring. I. er, have never been there, but that's what they tell me it's like."

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Most Army bases had a crafts shop, an auto shop and a photo lab to keep the troops occupied, since relatively few dared to roam outside by themselves other than to bar-hop downtown. The post I was at the longest had a USO-run theater group that I became involved in, and dragged in my friends and their wives.

Before I took over the lab's normal business had been storing and selling drugs. For the first two weeks after taking over I'd hear a knock on the door and open it to see an embarrassed-looking black face that turned and left without saying anything.

I put together a very compact no-darkroom film developing kit, mainly to quickly read the license plates of suspicious vehicles I was assigned to watch for and photograph. I took it to a friend's apartment and showed him how easy it was to develop and print B&W photos, but still he never used the lab. Probably the main reason was that it couldn't process color, for images like this:

Color film was cheap and convenient through the PX, and even the well-equipped and heavily used photo lab in Heidelberg didn't have color equipment.

I have a slide of that scene with my car parked on the side street. Many unbombed small towns looked like that.

The very helpful photo shop owner who set me up was later exposed as a Soviet spy.

jsw

The alternative was Vietnam. To my considerable surprise some people preferred it there, mainly minorities who told me how much they enjoyed being treated like rich mainstream Americans in Saigon.

Though we didn't lack for bitter draftee truck drivers a lot of the Signal Corps had enlisted to get into a school and learn a useful skill before the draft sent them to the Infantry. Each base was a relatively self-reliant closed commune with most of the needs of civilian society. We could do everything but grow food, either in base or when deployed to some isolated frozen mountaintop radio relay site. That's where you learn what your real "needs" are, just food, water, clothing and shelter. Heat isn't one of them.

Except for Heidelberg the Army bases weren't in cosmopolitan tourist destinations. They were old German Kasernes, some dating from Frederick the Great, with WW2 plumbing at best. The Germans there were indifferent and not too accommodating to non German speakers. I'm far from a fluent speaker but could understand it pretty well. I had taken German classes aimed at reading chemical and mathematical texts and was better at vocabulary than grammar.

jsw

My experience during the 2 years spent near Ramstein was every time I tried to use my best broken German, they immediately switched to Americanish for the practice.

Yeah, dormrats had it rough. The rest of us went offbase.

technomaNge

I hitchhike a lot back and forth from (near Augsburg) to Lausanne CH - and the same sort of story. Their English invariably was better than my German.

There are days when I wish I had signed up with Uncle Sam. Later I would say - company town, just spread out all over, and I knew how the company worked. And I would not have to wonder what I was going to wear to work today.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

O.K. While I worked on an Army base here in the USA for many years, as a civilian employee, I was not able to use such facilities, and thus it was not really worth my while to learn about them. :-)

:-)

O.K. Changing bag, developing tank, and bottles for the chemicals -- and running water for the developing.

For larger negative sizes (say 2-1/4" square and larger) contact prints could be made with sun proof paper -- but not good for long-term storage. :-) I guess a spare shutter, and a box with something like 4x5" film holders in the bottom, and a negative holder, and you might be able to expose contact prints at least. If the paper is small enough, it could be fit into the developing tank, but developing would have to be based on time and temperature, since you could not develop it by inspection as you could in a darkroom with trays and a safelight. If the bathroom or kitchen can be made dark enough, you could probably do it there.

But I guess that you were simply reading the license plates off the negatives -- perhaps even while still wet. :-)

So -- you did have some way to print in there. No enlarging, probably, but with large enough negatives, contact prints do a lot of what you need.

I used to take my developing tank and changing bag along on trips, so I could turn exposed rolls into negatives, and wait about the printing until I got home -- if ever. :-)

That is an intersting looking building -- with some history, I'll bet.

O.K. For Ektrachrome, you simply needed more bottles for the chemicals, a better thermometer, and a good timer -- and then a clothes iron to seal the slide binders. Toss in a slide projector and a flat-white wall (or better a purpose-designed screen) and the "enlargements" question is solved -- at least temporarily.

The first three baths were with the developing tank closed, then it was pulled out for second exposure (waving it around near a No. 2 photoflood) and back into chemicals with the lid off for quicker pouring, or on for easier agitation (Nikkor tanks were my preference.)

I wish that I could find another three or four E4 kits. I've got just enough exposed and stored in the 'fridge rolls of Ektrachrome to use them up -- and I wonder what is on those rolls. :-)

Kodachrome was out of the question with the information available to me when I was doing my own developing.

Color negatives were a real pain by comparison. :-)

Fascinating.

Of course! Would that not be likely for anyone very helpful to GIs near an Army base in Germany at that time? :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

The hard part was loading 16mm Minolta film onto the spiral developing tank reel by feel in the bag. Wherever it jumped the track it touched another turn and didn't develop properly. I learned to judge and preset exposure and distance so I could shoot with my hand down at my side, or at right angles to the direction I was pointing the Pentax.

I never caught any. Apparently Black September, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Army Faction found out that we were alerted for suspicious activity, and carrying loaded weapons. It was fine with me that the front gate MPs didn't have to start a gunfight while I was waiting for a bus that never came.

I had a simple collapsible enlarger that took lenses from my old Leica III. The PX was well stocked with photographic and audio equipment, I suppose to compensate for our inability to keep or transport larger consumer goods. We were nomads who in theory couldn't own more than we could carry.

Every place had some history. I had learned enough of it in high school to know the context for local tales of Tilly or the wars of the Guelphs vs Ghibellines. One small town had a monument to a long list of casualties in the fierce battle against the American invaders. Over the centuries France had inflicted a great deal of destruction there.

The inside of the wall is covered with carved signatures, some by very old historical and literary figures. I recognized those of the writers Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, but didn't find Mark Twain's.

"The sad anecdote to this tale is that the mayor died minutes later, presumably from a combination of alcohol poisoning and kidney failure." The glockenspiel (clock-play) is an animated clock that acts out the scene. Many of the tales end on a sad, Kafkaesque note.

This was my favorite:

I stumbled onto it before it became a tourist attraction, when Americans were a novelty.

If anyone asked, I said I repaired office equipment, and never took color pix that might have revealed where I went on repair calls.

jsw

16mm film is a pain. I've done it -- including developing it by the see-saw method in trays. First time I did it, when the timer went off, I nearly threw it up into the pipes in the ceiling. That was a *loud* timer. (A wind-up one which was started by pushing a lever to the right and down. :-)

Been there. Mostly with the plastic-reeled tanks. Some of them might have been a bit easier to deal with it. The two flanges could be rotated a few degrees relative to each other and would feed the film in a little at a time. But I'm not sure whether those particular tanks could be adjusted down to 16mm size. I usually used the Nikor stainless steel tanks and welded wire reels -- easier to dry quickly to get another batch done in an evening. And loading film into a still wet reel is asking for trouble.

A 16mm Minolta held at the same time as the Pentax. Intersting approach.

I also remember in a camera magazine a large lens hood which held a mirror and had an opening in the side, so you could photograph at right angles.

As for preset exposure and focus -- I tended to frequently meter and adjust the exposure of the camera so I could get shots off more quickly when the opportunity presented itself. (These days, the Nikon D300s (and even the D70 before it) has fast enough auto-exposure so that is not necessary. Manual exposure for when you want precise control -- depth of field from aperture vs motion stopping/showing form shutter speed.

:-)

O.K. *that* requires at least a darkenable room, if not a made-for-the-purpose darkroom.

Leica lenses should have been fairly easy to find there. :-)

In particular, I was referring to that building, which looks as though it was much older than the surrounding area, and when the road was put though, just enough was cut out of one corner to allow cars and reasonable sized trucks to pass, while retaining as much of the building as possible. And this suggests that either the building had historical importance, or the owner at that time had significant political clout, or it would have just been knocked down totally.

O.K. I thought as I read that that it had the feel of a traditional song, and then reading the discussion, I see that it was, at least in part. Not one which I ever remember hearing, however.

An interesting story, as is the one about the "faithful wives".

It does look pretty and intersting.

Good cover.

Enjoy, DoN.