Memories of Days Gone By

Everything was different then.

And slower.

Yes lyn that is so very true. But sometimes those days seem fonder to the heart than now. Slower for sure, but some of that old slower built stuff lasts longer that the speed of light stuff built today.

I know. Just got back from the farm. They run on a slower schedule back there.

Great pics....I saw a guy riding down the road on one of these the other day, I wanted to follow him to see him get off hopefully without breaking his neck, but I had a beer in my hand ...

Is there a calendar on the far wall in the upper-left pic? What's the date? Also the printing on those prop blades and on the ID plate affixed that radial engine in the left-centre pic. Is that a stack of magazines in the lower-left pic? What is the resolution of these images? Can they be zoomed without too much blurring?

You can but they do begin to blur a bit.

These were sent to me by one of the guys in my Piper Arrow Club. These were the Kodachrome High tech shots fo the times. I will forward the email to your Cr4 mail box.

Oh yea 1943-44 is when the pics were susspected to have been taken.....I think it is cool in the office one the old Coffee cans is on top of the wood burner i just can not make out the Coffee brand.

I can tell by the decals applied to the props that they were manufactured by Hamiliton Standard Co., a major supplier of piston engine props before WWII, during WWII, and afterwards.

The radial engines appear to be Curtis-Wright Cyclones, quite possibly R-3350's......but I cannot count how many cylinders it actually has. If it has 18 cylinders its a R-3350. If 14 cylinders it is a R-2600.

It looks very similar to a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 with the three blade prop used on the Corsairs. The prop on the Corsair was approximately 13-feet in diameter, which was one of the largest and most powerful combinations when paired with the R-2800. They had a 11 to 1 kill ratio versus Japanese pilots in WW2.

I think you're right spot on Old Coal Man about the bottommost pic, as it does look like a Curtiss-Wright R-2800 engine actually attached to a F4U Corsair. Or it could be a Grumman Avenger....just not enough pic there to figure it out. No other WWII USN fighter (the F4U) had such a large prop to swing. The only other WWII fighter, the USAAF Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, swung such a large prop, but that was a four blade monster.

So far, I haven't figured out the radial engine model depicted in the photos above that one, where the props are stacked up behind the lady and the engine....just not able to count the total number of pistons on the sucker! Could be a R-3350.....maybe, maybe not!

Come back, Kodachrome. All is forgiven.

One thing that I've always noticed about old (circa 1900) "non posed" pictures is that men invariably wore hats in those days. I wonder why? Or perhaps I should be wondering why we stopped?

Not wearing a hat allows more sunlight to hit the solar panel for the sex machine...

A man whose hairline is receding is a Thinker.

If he's losing it from the top, he's a Lover.

If he's losing it from both places, he only Thinks he's a Lover.

Damn...

Oooooo

Shag me baby!

Or, as the thinking once went- "Dad--Why don't you have any hair on your head?" Well--Glad you asked--See--It went this way--My hair and my brain had a fight, ...and Well--you can see who won...."

Too bad we don't see more hands-on production in today's economy.

Looking at the one, "Santa Fe R.R. shops, Albuquerque. Hammering out a drawbar on the steam drop hammer in the blacksmith shop." I had deja vu moment. I had to perform the analysis of and design additional steel for, a big building at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to equip it for a new use. The size of some of the old equipment, some still there and some only the diagrams and foundation pads showed what they were. Parts for the biggest ships were made and machined there, lathes more than twenty feet long, a drilling machine that was three stories high, two above the floor and one in a pit.

We had one of the 3 storey drilling machines at the shipyard where I cut my engineering teeth. To enable it to machine precisely, it was mounted on a concrete "island" vibrationally isolated from the rest of the world.

One of my first real jobs there was arranging the movement of 540 tonnes of vessel section from one end of the yard to the other, via public roads.

This was somewhat less than 70 years ago - and I think I was probably the last generation to see things done that way. Certainly, I was present for the last dynamic launch at the yard.

Not exactly a memory of yesteryear, well, sorta kinda: Years ago I had the opportunity to visit Morton Thiokol Corp. - the folks who made the solid-fuel boosters for the Space Shuttle. One of the most interesting and in retrospect, fondest, memories of my tour was when our guide - this grizzled, hard-as-nails Texan - took us to the motor stand where they ran the full-scale booster tests.

The stand didn't look like much when closed; a large, nondescript sheet-metal building big enough to house an assembled booster and the 'wedge' against which it pushed during live tests. The building's shell rode on railroad tracks and was moved out of harm's way during such times.

The 'blast deflector' was a hillside initially strewn with rocks and boulders. These all went away (very far away and very quickly) during the first test, which also vitrified everything else on the hillside that didn't get away in time. Melted the rock, it did!

Parts of the hillside looked like they were made of glass or polished obsidian. Our guide said also that the first time they lit one off, the exhaust plume it created quickly evolved into a thunderstorm! He said it happens sometimes when the conditions are just right. And it was then that I asked him the sixty-four-million-dollar noobie question:

"Excuse me. How thick is this pad?" referring to the concrete floor of the test stand, on which we were standing. The bloke just looked at me as if to reassure himself that I was not really some tentacled extraterrestrial wot just landed it's spaceship on his turf. I knew at that instant it was exactly the wrong question and that he was exactly the wrong bloke to ask. Then he spoke in a real measured Texas drawl, slow and deliberate like.

"Son...... Son, that ain't no pad," he pointed "You're standin' on one MILLION cubic yards of concrete, rebar, I-beams and crazy sh!t I don't even have a name for, all bolted to solid bedrock. And you know what? It's STILL not enough! This 'PAD,' as you call it, shakes and twists and shimmies like a bowl of g*dd*mn Jell-O in a f*****g earthquake, which is pretty much what's goin' down when we light these babies off. I swear. It's been called a lot o' things, son, but one thing it ain't and that's a g*dd*mn PAD! Jesus! Where the HELL do they dig you guys up?"

You'd think I'd just slapped his mother. Then he smiled and gave a quick wink.

He knew exactly how I felt: like crawling under a rock for a few billion years? I bet he also remembered asking a few naive questions of his own back when he was a Yung Dumbsh!t, as he was fond of calling us noobs. All was forgiven, however, but then he added, "And if I ever hear you call this thing a PAD again, son, I swear I'll kick yore ass straight into Next Year!"

Twenty foot long; that's a small lathe. I remember lathes 80' long with a 48" swing at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard and at the Boston navy Yard. Anchor chain was produced at the BNY on gigantic steam hammers. I'm sure seismographs in the area were picking it up. There were also some gigantic lathes used for ships gun barrels at the Naval Engineering Lab and Watertown Arsenal. Most of these machines have now been scrapped. I hope we never get into a situation where such a machine is again needed.

I remember reading a story where we sold our 16" projectiles to Japan as scrap after battleships were decommisioned and when Vietnam required battleships to be put back into service, we had to buy back the 16" projectiles from Japan. I don't know how true this is.

Here's a bunch more....

Killer bee...

http://www.shorpy.com/image/tid/179?page=1

Very Nice, thanks......

So Ok while we are on a bit of a Roll I have to share probably one of the very best named companys only Seconded by the "Big Ass Fan Company" (they have a picture of a donkey standing backwards for their logo).........so here it is, and you never want to be caught here with out them............................

I got a couple....

OH and By the way if or when you look at the full album.........I would get sick just so I could get a shor from the nurse.

good old days when family was more significant than any work