Catapult to Oblivion

    Stu sent me a link to some pictures of WW2 British aircraft. I'm looking through them and I come across this picture. From the shape of the light blue panel on the underside of the nose of the airplane I deduce that this is a Spitfire. But wait a minute, the Spitfire was a land based fighter and isn't that an aircraft carrier superstructure in the background? I don't recall ever hearing about Spitfires being operated from aircraft carriers. Filename of the picture provides a clue: Seafire. Reading about this plane I come across something called "catapult spools". Searching the web turns up several instances of the term, but no good explanations. I do come across something else that captures my attention: Cata-Fighters. These were land based fighter aircraft launched from catapults installed on Merchant Marine vessels for defense against German bomber attacks.

    How did they recover the aircraft? They didn't. The pilot bailed out, and was picked up out of the water by one of the ships in the convoy. The plane is lost. Since they quit losing ships after they implemented this system they considered it a good deal. Lose one airplane but save an entire shipload of war material.
    I still don't know what a "catapult spool" is, but that's okay. My brain is full.

Globalisation

Iowa Andy sent me this picture from the East Coast of the USA: a package of firewood imported from Estonia. I am not sure which is more surprising,  the fact that we are importing firewood from across the ocean, or that someone is going to the trouble to label them for sale in California.

At Safeway (national grocery chain) my daughter spied a Milka brand candy bar that is popular in Argentina. I've never noticed it here before. I just looked at their web site and discovered that Milka is now part of Kraft Foods. I wonder when that happened?

Ship of the Day

I'm not quite sure just what kind of ship this is. An ocean going ship? An airship? A spaceship? In any case I really like the picture. By Mozchops, found on Concept Ships.

The Joy of Auto Repair

Suburban Front Disk Brake

Jack asked me to give him a hand doing the brakes on his car today after lunch. It was a simple job, just replacing the front brake pads on his GMC Suburban, something he has done many times before. He only needed help because his shoulder is still recovering from surgery and he didn't want to strain it, and he predicted that he would only need help with getting the wheels back on because they are kind of heavy. He has a hydraulic floor jack and a pneumatic air wrench, so none of the other work should cause him any undo strain. Famous last words.
    The left side was a piece of cake, well, except we had to use the old fashioned lug wrench to break the lug nuts loose because some knucklehead at the garage used an air wrench to put them on. So it was a good thing I was there to break them loose. Finish up the driver's side and go around to the passenger side and it's the same situation. The Harbor Freight air wrench hasn't got enough oomph to break the lug nuts loose, so I have to do it manually again. Okay, no problem, the lug wrench is a good one and I break all six loose and turn it over to Jack to spin them off. Four come off no problem, but the last too are still a little snug, so I have another go at them with the lug wrench. Boy are they tight. And they don't loosen up, every little bit of motion requires full force.
    Eventually one comes off. The interior of the nut is almost completely stripped. The stud doesn't look too bad, not great, but possibly usable. The last one unscrews for a while but then it stops. It goes around easily, but it is not unscrewing. There is maybe only one thread left holding it on, but it will not let go. We attack with hammer and tongs, but no luck. Finally resort to using a Dremel tool with an abrasive cut-off wheel to try and cut through one side of the lug nut. Get maybe 75% of the way through. Attack the cut with a chisel, only succeed in making the cut wider. Nut still won't come off. Finally Jack digs up an old brake adjustment tool and uses it to pry on the lug nut while I turn it with the wrench and it finally comes off.
   So Jack got the new pads installed and the wheels are back on, although the right front one only has four lug nuts holding it. Getting that fixed could be a problem. It might be possible to clean up the threads on the studs and and just put some new lug nuts on. It might be better to replace the studs, but that could be a real pain because, you guessed it, it's four wheel drive, and there's no telling how much of that front wheel assembly will have to come apart in order to be able to get the hub out so you can replace the studs.

Update from Jack: Took the ‘burban to Les Schwab’s.  They replaced the studs without removing the hub.  $50 and 45 minutes!

Update February 2017 fixed broken link.

Norway

A true hero. Seeing the stick bit reminded me that Stu had something to say:

If we were playing tennis and I hit a ball over the net but away from you, then your brain can predict where the ball will be in the future and you will run over there. Dogs don't do that; they watch the ball and run towards its present position, effectively running in what is called a curve of pursuit.

I had never noticed this. Of course if the dog starts from the same point as where you are throwing the stick, or ball, or whatever, then a straight line to where the ball is now is no different than the path to where the ball will be. Another reason I may not have noticed this is that dogs are really fast. They are able to compensate for their lack of predictive ability just because their closure rate is so high that any change in trajectory is minuscule. Or maybe I just never thought of it this way.

Lap Around The Boat

I finally hooked up my new-to-me computer and I can watch videos without hiccuping, which is really nice.

All You Need to Know About the Middle East in Three and a Half Minutes (in Song, No Less)

The song is from the movie Exodus. There were a number of covers of it in the `60s.

Stolen entire from E.B. Misfit.