Today's Short Videos

Today's Short Videos

Sunny Living Room

Good looking room. Decorilla agrees. My wife remodeled the main floor of our house. She's in the process of decorating it. It looks pretty nice, too nice even, I'm afraid to go up there, afraid I'll spoil the ambiance.

Two Different Flavors of Junk

Can We Save This Forgotten Tractor? - Dad's Deere
Watch Wes Work

Longish videos but I enjoyed watching them.

One of these tractors in good condition is worth ten to fifteen thousand dollars. Scrap, it's worth about $1,000. If the engine is kaput it might be worth a couple of thousand for parts. So, whether the engine is in good running order is kind of big deal. When these guys started on the starter, my first thought was just replace it with a rebuilt unit, but a starter for this tractor would cost a couple hundred bucks. That's a lot of money to spend if you don't know the condition of the engine, and you won't know that until you get it running, if you can. Spending a few hours and $20 for brushes to determine the condition of the engine is a worthwhile bet.

Both of these $1500 BMW 3-series are still driving, but mechanically TOTALED for the dumbest reasons
Hoovies Garage

A junkyard might be able to make some money off of these, but even that would be a crap shoot. There might be plenty of good parts on those cars, but those are not likely to be the ones that people want. All cars tend to fail the same way. The back seat and the rear axle might be in good shape, but they are in good shape in most cars. The parts that people want are the same parts that are broken on these cars.

Fun with Chemistry

How an HIV Miracle Drug Vanished
Reactions

I know a tiny bit about chemistry, but it always struct me as little bit like black magic - wave your hands like this, recite this incantation, dump some of this mystery compound in the pot and presto, it changes color, blows up, or best of all, begins spewing poison gas. Seems to me like you need a ton of knowledge to do anything useful, unlike mechanics where all you need is a couple of hand tools and you can build a house.

The YouTube blurb:

In 1998, a pharmaceutical company suddenly lost the ability to make their lifesaving HIV drug at one of its production facilities. Then that failure spread to the company’s analysis labs. Then it spread to the other production facility, and within months the lifesaving drug had effectively vanished from the entire planet.  And this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. How does a chemical just… disappear?

 

The Ball by Victor Gabriel Gilbert

The Ball by Victor Gabriel Gilbert

1890 - Peak civilization.

I put together a jigsaw puzzle of this image, but it had a watermark, so I went looking for a clear version. Wikipedia has one, but it is much more yellow. Look at Google's results and you see that there are a whole range of tints available.

Victor Gabriel Gilbert (1847 – 1933) was a French painter mostly known for his Parisian scenes and portraying market scenes there.

F-84F Thunderstreak

F-84F Thunderstreak

From the cover of a Special Hobby plastic model kit. Several are available on E-Bay. Special Hobby was founded in 1989 in the Czech Republic. 1989 ring any bells? Like maybe the year the Soviet Union Collapsed? Don't suppose there is any connection, do you?

The Thunderstreak is a swept wing version of the F-84 Thunderjet. They built 3,500 of them, which is roughly half of the number of the straight wing F-84s. It sounds like most of them went to our allies.

Funnies