Paul's Miscellany

Where is N778MA?

Posted 08/22/23

I first wrote about 737-800 N778MA in June of 2022 when it was parked out on the back lot behind the North State hangar at Smith Reynolds. The owner, Miami Air International, filed for bankruptcy in May 2020 and lost its Certificate of Public Convenience in May 2022. The plane sat at KINT until October when it flew off to KTUS (Tucson), where it sat some more, until June 2023, when, per planespotters.net, KaiserAir picked up the lease and ferried the plane to KOAK (Oakland). That term "ferried" suggests that the plane may have been moved under an FAA Special Flight Permit, which would have been the case if the Certificate of Airworthiness for the plane had expired as it sat in the Arizona sun. Perhaps the plane will now get the attention it needs to go back into revenue service as part of KaiserAir's small fleet of charter 737s.

Interestingly, KaiserAir flew under Miami Air International's Certificate until it obtained it's own certification around 2011.

The photograph is one I took in July 2022 at KINT.

What Would You Call It?

Posted 08/21/23

My father called his a kit bag. His background was Merchant Marine/Navy. The man credited with inventing the form, Charles Doppelt, a Chicago leatherworker, started selling them in 1919. They were known as toilet cases, back in the day when the word toilet meant something closer to the original French which meant dressing room. At some point his marketing men hit on the idea of calling them Dopp Kits, which helped sales, but the big impetus came in World War II, when his company got a contract from the U.S. Army to make millions of them. Many were sent to Britain to equip the British Army, and the term Dopp kit for the form is still nearly universal there. Maybe they have still not outgrown their awe at this expression of Yankee ingenuity. The term Dopp kit is still widely used in America, but most people know them as shaving kits.

I polled three friends who served in the army as to what they called their shaving kits. One said he referred to it as a toilet kit when he didn't just call it "that yellow thing in my overnight bag". The second said he called it a Dopp kit, because that's what his father, a World War II veteran called his. He noted that while the old man was an American, he was probably issued his kit in England. The third replied that he and his comrades simply called them shaving kits.

One noted that his favorite sailing author, Tristan Jones, referred to his as a kit bag, so perhaps that is the common name among mariners.

I made mine from a video by Right On Jon Crane and I must say this is one of the most entertaining and informative productions I have seen. From the very start I noted that he was wearing a shop vest that looks a lot like Chris Schwartz' notorious $193 Moleskin Vest that he sells over at Lost Art Press. But I'll bet Jon didn't pay quite that much for his and actually he probably made it for himself. Next I marvelled at his cutting table covered in 16 gauge sheet steel for hot-knifing synthetic canvas like Sunbrella and Top Gun. This looks like a great addition to my sewing set-up but I would have to give over a room for it - maybe the living room, since the back bedroom is already crammed with sails and anchors, and the front bedroom and dining room both host sewing machines as well as functioning in their intended uses. Since he designed his kit bag to mass produce and sell on his Etsy site, he took the time to cut out, again from 16 gauge sheet, a template for laying out the two identical cloth parts - the outer and the liner. He made a small wooden template to make the cuts for the boxed corners and measure sticks to determine the center point of the sewed-up body and lengths for tabs and straps, just as Chris would do with woodworking jobs. Then he sewed the whole bag on a massive triple-feed Consew 206RB, truly a machine to lust after. I can't have one because I would have to find yet another room to accomodate it. Even then, I might have to beef up the floor joists as the head, table and motor weigh a cumulative 200 pounds.

Following Jon's instructions, I had next to no problems making the bag. One thing though, he didn't mention that the inside and outside should be sewn right side to right side, and the zipper sandwiched in between should be right side to the outside. I scratched my head over it for a few minutes, but having made a few bags I had some idea of how the zipper should go. I followed his instructions to the letter except that I dispensed with the tabs at the ends of the zipper and put handle straps on both ends. Since I didn't have any nice leather, I used webbing for the straps.

I made mine from ripstop nylon with some kind of indeterminate tight-woven cloth for the liner. While Jon used Tex 135 thread to make his, I used V69. My Singer will stitch V92 but it is a stretch, and it is happier with the lighter thread. I was prepared to jump over to the Sailrite if I needed to, but the Singer handled the whole project, no problem. It took just three hours to do, and the next one will probably go quicker.

So, I'm very glad I found Jon Crane's website. He's a true right on guy for showing us his methods and guiding us through building a shaving kit.

Levi's mother Peggy told me this story about her father's shaving kit. None of the kids were allowed to touch it or see what was in it, probably out of concern about the razors inside, nor were they ever allowed to go into their parents bedroom. But once, when she had her appendix removed, her mother let her stay in the dark, quiet bedroom while everyone else went off to work or school. While she was alone in the house, she gave in to temptation and carefully opened the shaving kit, which smelled of leather and shaving soap and allspice cologne, and then got nervous and quickly closed it without touching anything in it. When her mother came home, she could smell the faintest scent of allspice on Peggy, and knew she had been in the shaving kit. She told Peggy's father when he came home from work and he checked out the kit, found nothing missing or moved but still with the sense that we all have about our personal possesions, knew it had been opened. He went and asked Peggy if she had done it, and she burst into tears and admitted it. He sternly warned her never to do it again, and she never did.

Bucket

Posted 08/15/23

Car covers don't last forever and every few years I have to get a new one for the jeep. The last one I bought shipped in a 4 foot long drawstring bag. It occurred to me that I could cut it in two, sew the bottom of the top half shut and have a usable drawstring bag, and make a bucket out of the bottom half. I made the bag a while back but the bucket sat around in a half-finished state for a long time. I finally completed it, and it looks pretty good. It has a wooden circle in the bottom to give it some rigidity, a bolt rope around the top, a deep folded seam below the bolt rope, and rope handles set in spur grommets. I'm not sure what I will do with it in the long term, but for now it is full of rolls of webbing and velcro tape, things I use in bag and tote making and other canvas work.

A Visitor

Posted 08/07/23

Far off in a back corner of Smith Reynolds Airport (KINT) Goodyear N2A is moored. According to FlightAware, the airship has staged at Smith Reynolds for the last several days and has made periodic short trips in the area. I doubt if they will fly today as we are currently under a tornado watch. Driving in from Washington Saturday I saw her over Greensboro.

Young Sailors

Posted 08/06/23

Students from the Washington sailing school blast across the bay aboard a Vanguard 420. Hey guys, you're in a no-wake zone!

I recently moved my boat to the town dock at Washington and it's been a pleasure to watch the Vanguards and Opties of the sailing school, as well as the trains crossing the trestle.

TJ's Boatyard

Posted 07/24/23

Sunrise at the boatyard a few days ago.

Maximizing Volume

Posted 07/15/23

In a video about making what she called a duffel, but is essentially a soft suitcase, the presenter noted that she and her husband were going on "holiday" and flying Ryanair, the low cost European carrier. Since, in order to provide cheap tickets, Ryanair charges extra for almost everything else, they decided to make a bag designed to maximize the dimensions the airline allows for carry-on luggage. I believe the Ryanair policy is that your carry-on has to fit under the seat in front of you, so an elongated cube makes the most use of the space. Hence, the bag they designed is cubic. That means that each panel is a rectangle, so the fabric can be cut from a dimensional list. The presenter showed a bag she made to American Airlines carry-on dimensions, marveling at how big it was. The rectangular panels also make it easy to block fuse.

Construction looked intimidatingly difficult, but the presenter assured viewers that it was actually quite simple and easy. I didn't really believe that, but just to reward them for their "stick it to the man" bag design philosophy I bought the pattern ($9.00, or £ 7.5 if you live in Cornwall), which includes copious instructions, cut lists, a template to scale the panels up and down, and the actual printable patterns. Looking through my fabric stocks, I found enough of the ripstop camoflauge that I had used to make Lars' most recent vest left to make the pattern, plus remains of coated polyester left over from some forgotten project to make the liner. I figured I could cut out the exterior and liner panels, and then when I got back from the boatyard I would order stabilizer since that didn't seem like anything I could find in town. But then I got to thinking that the pads I keep on the boat to absorb potential oil or fuel spills might work, and I had plenty of them around. (These things are 3 for $10 or 100 for $20, so I had bought 100.) I used one as a sample, finding that it cut and stitched easily, so decided it was suitable for the job. Looking through my big box of sewing tools and supplies, I found zipper stock. With that on hand, I had everything needed to make the pattern, except for bias tape binding, which would only be needed at the end of the project.

It ended up being extremely time-consuming, taking me something like ten hours to complete, but just as promised, it wasn't all that difficult. The video instructions were very helpful. With everything done except binding the raw edges on the inside of the bag, I drove around town looking for bias tape, finally relenting and buying it at JoAnn's. If I build another, it should go quicker. Maybe the next one will have interior dividers, to make a nice padded case for a camera and some lenses. Lars is getting this one.

The Other End of the Sewing Spectrum

Posted 07/09/23

After bringing Marie's Brother XL-2610 back to life after it gathered dust for 15 years, I gave it a run-in by making these small sunglasses sleeves. Everything is working a-okay.

A Sewing Job

Posted 07/08/23

The PATH awning got damaged in a windstorm at Summerfest this year. Rips developed around the grommets all along the edges. I offered to take a look at it and try to repair it. The fabric was fairly light and well within the capabilities of my Sailrite machine. The only problem was its size - I didn't measure it, but I think it is about 25x25'. Fortunately, all the rips were along the outer hems, so it wouldn't be necessary to get a lot of cloth under the harp of the sewing machine.

I cleared out my living room and pulled my dining room table into it. The Sailrite got set up on the table, V92 thread and a size 20 needle. I brought in several lights so I could see what I was doing, and an oscillating fan - moving large cloths is heavy work. The unfolded awning filled most of the room.

For each rip, I removed the light, frequently bent aluminum grommet, then zig-zag stitched the rip together, folded a length of synthetic canvas (Sunbrella, Top Gun) over the section and zig-zagged it down, to patch it and serve as a gusset for the new grommet. Once all the sewing was done, I dragged the awning out into the front yard and installed new nickel-plated brass grommets. A few grommets that hadn't ripped out but looked weak got sisters.

With all the grommets in place, I did a final inspection and folded the awning. Since this was a fairly long, heavy job, I cleaned and lubricated the Sailrite before I put it away. Then it was just a matter of rearranging the furniture to get my living room and dining room sorted.

So the Sailrite came through again and has proven a good tool for heavy jobs. Since I bought it I have installed luff tapes and sacrificial cloths on two sails, repaired the clew of a damaged sail, re-stitched the tramp of Mark's Hobie Cat, and now done this job. Of course, I have made much use of it on smaller jobs as well. Anything that needs a walking foot or zig-zag stitch gets done on the Sailrite.

At the Station

Posted 06/23/23

Lars displays his lack of sartorial judgement, but at least he has a nice vest.

Train 76

Posted 06/22/23

Lars and I went to the station in High Point to watch the afternoon Piedmonts. The northbound Train 76 was right on time but the southbound 77 was as usual running late, so we didn't wait for it.

Brother XL-2610

Posted 06/17/23

In a pile of junk in the corner of Levi's garage, I found this old Brother XL-2610 that I bought for Marie in November of 2006. At the time it cost me $120, which seemed fair enough for a new machine from a reputable maker, and in fact it seemed quite capable and well-built. In 2023 they are still available new for around $350, or used for $75-100.

I don't think Marie actually used it much, and for the last 15 years it has sat idle in various dusty, trashy locales as she has moved from place to place. Lately she has expressed an interest in taking up sewing, and so I picked up the old machine and took it home to see if it could be made to work. Unfortunately, the foot pedal and the bed section that snaps off to allow it to be used as a free arm machine were missing. Perhaps they will turn up. In the meantime I ordered a replacement pedal from an Ebay seller. The bed section is not critical, but Joe and I could probably make one out of wood.

First thing, I wiped the machine down to get off the dust. Next, I turned it over with the hand wheel, noting that it was stiff but not binding or hanging anywhere - a good sign. The needle bar operated as it should, as did the hook. There was a bobbin in the holder, so I threaded it, put a cone of top thread in place and followed the very simple procedure to thread the machine. The automatic needle threader worked fine. Hoping to sew a few stitches with the hand wheel, I put a folded piece of cloth under the needle and lowered the presser foot lever. However, the presser foot didn't go down.

Either something was bent or jammed inside the machine, or the presser foot bar was seized inside its guides. I would have to dig into the guts of the machine. Fortunately, one of my favorite Youtube sewing machine repairmen, Wes, the Sewing Machine Repair Guy, had a good video on the almost identical Brother XL-2600, which showed how to get the thing open. Once inside, I found the presser foot bar, determined that it wasn't bent or jammed, and started flooding the bushings with oil in the hopes it would loosen up. After a while, I took the foot off, wrapped the bar in cloth and tried gently pulling on the bar with a pair of pliers, but still it wouldn't move. As a last resort, I got out the Son-of-a-Gun and sprayed around the bushings. I'd rather not use this stuff around all the plastic, but it seemed preferable to try it rather than just junk the machine. After a few minutes, I put a big scredriver across the top of the bar and gently pushed down. More oil, more gently pressure. Finally, it looked like it moved a tiny bit. A little more work and I was able to persuade it to slide down through the bearings to the lowered position. With the lifting lever, I was able to raise it back up, but lowering the lever didn't make it drop back down. The spring pressure was still not enough to overcome the friction in the bushings.

I soaked in some more oil, and turned to another task. A couple of minutes later, I heard a satisfying "thunk", and turned to find the presser foot in the lowered position. Working it a few more times got it back to normal.

All the while, I had been oiling any metal contact points plus the "four critical shaft bushings" that Wes says need to be oiled even though Brother claims they are "lifetime lubricated". Perhaps that is Brother's way of tacitly admitting these machines are expected to have a relatively short life span.

With the covers off, I was able to give the area around the hook and bobbin a good cleaning. I found an enormous amount of lint.

Oil attracts lint, so it is important not to over-oil a sewing machine. Since the Brother was now swimming in oil, as I tried to get all the parts running free, I thoroughly hosed down the interior with electrical contact cleaner, which flushes out the oil and then evaporates. Then I went around and added one drop of oil to each point where metal slid on metal, plus the four critical shaft bushings. With that done, I put the case back together.

I rethreaded the machine and ran a few stitches using the hand wheel. Straight and zig-zag both came out even and regular. I didn't mess with the fancy stitches, but maybe I will once the foot pedal arrives.

The Brother XL-2610 uses the plastic rear cover as a frame, and I wouldn't expect it to stay in adjustment or last very long. Most of the working parts are metal, but still, the machine is laughably overpriced new at $350, and even $75 for a good used one is a stretch. On the other hand, the machine is probably worth keeping if you get it for free. The main justification for buying one would be to keep as backup for zig-zag and buttonhole capabilities for someone with a vintage straight stitch machine. A better choice would be a vintage Singer, Kenmore, Pfaff, or one of several others from the 1960s or 1970s. A good reconditioned one would run you about $200.

Classifications

Posted 06/10/23

Where are the jobs? Surprisingly, they're not in retail. Wolf Richter is good at analysing government employment data and picking up details and trends. In a recent post, "Why Jobs in Retail Are at 2007 Levels: It’s Structural. Jobs in Ecommerce & Services Boomed but Aren’t in 'Retail Trade.' And Half of Retail Trade is Moribund", he shows what "retail trade" actually means to the NAICS economists - and that's not ecommerce, customer service or logistics. The only part of retail trade that is expanding is groceries, and it is telling that Walmart's ecommerce sales went up by 27% in the last year, grocery sales went up by 12%, and retail sales net of grocery sales went down 10%. Jobs in retail trade across the whole economy are now at approximately 2007 levels.

Not surprisingly, job openings in retail are relatively easy to fill, unlike some other sectors that still see labor shortages. This is concerning because retail is a last bastion of employment for undereducated workers, along with "hospitality", i.e. restaurant work, and what might be called "pick and shovel" jobs like general construction, that are too physically rigorous for many people. "Get thee to the community college," to paraphrase Shakespeare.

Lowering the Feed Dogs on a Singer 15-91

Posted 05/30/23

People who do embroidering, darning and quilting on a sewing machine sometimes want to lower the feed dogs to allow for freehand maneuvering of the fabric. Most newer machines - by newer, I mean 1960s and later - have a button or lever to lower the dogs. Some very old Singers didn't provide for lowering the feed dogs, but the 15-91, and probably all the other 15 series machines, did.

The picture to the right shows the mechanism for raising and lowering the feed dogs. Tilt your Singer backwards, and you will easily see it on the long shaft along the front of the machine. This view shows it in the position to have the feed dogs up. To lower the dogs, back out the thumbscrew far enough to allow the lever coming forward from the shaft to pivot in the slot to the top position. If it is hard to pivot, either the thumbscrew is not backed out far enough, the mechanism is gunked up with dried oil, or the feed dogs themselves are jammed with oil and lint. I backed out the thumbscrew on mine as far as it would go, not forcing it, and there seems to be a stop when it is far enough back. Then I applied a drop of oil where the lever pivots on the shaft, and another where the lever slides along the slot. At this point the lever slid freely along the slot.

The picture to the left shows the mechanism in the position to have the feed dogs down. I don't know if I will ever have a need to lower the feed dogs, but if I do, I will know how to do it. The hard part will be to remember to raise them after I am done.

Walking Foot

Posted 05/27/23

When I bought my Singer 15-91 it came with a box of attachments, and some time later I identified them as rufflers, binders and various special purpose feet. A few minutes of fooling with them convinced me they were more trouble than they were worth. On the other hand, a walking foot might prove useful, and since one didn't come with the machine, I ordered one - an Alphasew P60400, and put it away in case I needed it.

It's a rare day when I don't have much to do, but today some plans fell through and I was left with spare time. I pulled the old Singer off the shelf and started working on the thread tensioner, which hasn't worked recently. Since I have the Morse and the Sailrite, I hadn't worried about it. An hour of work and a couple of Youtube videos and I got it straightened out. The issue was that on my machine, the tensioner is evidently a very old style that has been superseded, and the new one has the thrust washer for the release pin in a different place. All the instructions and videos describe the new one. Last time I had it apart for cleaning and oiling, I reassembled it with the washer in the wrong place. After a few attempts to get it back together, it was obvious that it couldn't work the way I had it, so I experimented with other arrangements until I found the right one.

With the tensioner working better, the machine started laying down beautiful regular stitches, so since I had it out anyway I made a couple of balls. After that, I got out the walking foot just to give it a try. It handled four layers of stretch denim with no trouble, so maybe someday soon I'll try making a T-shirt with knit fabric.

Regarding the Singer 15-91 - the serial number on mine indicates it was built between October and December of 1934. The 15-91 and Singer 201 were probably the most popular machines of the era. The 201 was known as the dressmaker's machine for its smoothness and beautiful stitch, while the 15-91 was known as the farmer's machine for the strength to punch through heavy canvas and even leather. Both are amazingly well-built, and will essentially run forever with minimal maintenance under normal use.

Perfect Late Spring Day

Posted 05/26/23

With the temperature in the 70s and hazy blue skies it was a perfect day for a visit to Gateway Gardens, a project of privately-funded Greensboro Beautiful and the City of Greensboro. The two organizations also jointly manage three of our other favorite places; the Tanger Family Bicentennial Garden, the Greensboro Arboretum, and the Bog Garden at Benjamin Park.

Dinner

Posted 05/24/23

Marie turned me on to her recipe for potatoes, onions and carrots, oven-roasted in olive oil with oregano and parsley. I threw in a fresh ear of corn, the first of the season for me.

Stating the Obvious

Posted 05/21/23

It can be difficult for many to draw the simplest of inferences from data and evidence. That is where Professor Galloway comes in. In his post of May 19th, 2023 he explains exactly why the members of the Writers Guild are, to use a colloquialism, fucked. To do so, he analogizes from the disastrous U.K. coal miners' strike of 1984 - a bitter, violent affair that left the union totally defeated on all fronts - to today's strike of Hollywood screenwriters, which promises to be just as bitter and nonproductive, if less violent. Coal production in Great Britain peaked in 1913 and was in precipitous decline by the 1980s, for very obvious reasons, like the contraction of heavy industry and increasing availability of relatively clean North Sea gas. Likewise, screenwriting has declined in recent years due to the rise of reality TV, live sports, very deep libraries of popular shows to rerun, semi-pro Youtube/TikTok performers and, potentially, AI.

What is the society's responsibility here? It is not to guarantee the job and pay scale of every coal miner or screenwriter who prefers not to change careers. But a society that doesn't provide easy avenues for laid-off workers to shift into new, good-paying jobs is failing in a very fundamental way.

Difference of Six Months

Posted 05/19/23

Most of the United States is clear of drought except for the High Plains and a couple of spots in central Oregon and western Florida. The bright yellow areas are what the drought scientists refer to as "abnormally dry" while the darker shades are increasing levels of drought. Compare this map to the one from December 22nd, 2022, when the High Plains, most of the west, the Ohio Valley and parts of the coastal southeast were all in minor to severe drought. I doubt if anyone would have predicted in December that in five months California would be almost completely clear of drought.

The U.S. Drought Monitor map is published by the University of Nebraska on a weekly basis.

Quotes

Posted 05/18/23

Wallace Nutting, on the Colonial makers of vernacular furniture in the late 1600s - "They did what they could, and eagerly groped after beauty" - "Furniture of the Pilgrim Century", p 59.

Polybius - "Those who are incapable of taking an accurate view of opportunities, causes and connections attribute to the gods and to fortune the credit for what is accomplished by sagacity and far-sighted calculation."

The character of Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" - “I would rather make a stab at things in the hopes of expressing something difficult half-way than always be spouting excellent platitudes.”

Hermann J. Weigand in his critical analysis, "The Magic Mountain", of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" - “Long before he has reached the end of his career Hans Castorp has come to realize (as has Thomas Mann with him) that except for the infinitesimal number of favored individuals, the lure of disease as an avenue to life leads to utter destruction.”

Arthur C. Brooks - “No amount of sharing rage at the state of the world can make us happy.”

Tallulah Bankhead, as quoted by Alexander Woollcott - “There is less in this than meets the eye.”

Feasting on Maple Seeds

Posted 05/15/23

For a few short days each spring the red maple in my backyard is covered with immature seeds that the squirrels find especially delicious. They feed with reckless abandon, oblivious to the hawks flying overhead. Once the seeds start to dry out and fall from the tree, the survivors lose interest and go back to their usual habits of caution.

Pantego

Posted 05/15/23

Carolina Coastal Railway GP9R 4630 leads another unit and a few cars through a green tunnel in Pantego, NC. The engine started life as GTW 4933 in 1958. This time of year a train runs from Washington to Belhaven a couple of times a week to service a Perdue grain elevator at Bishops Cross and a Nutrien facility just outside of Belhaven. The old Perdue elevator in Belhaven appears to be closed, but the train still has to come all the way into town to run the engines around the train so they can back cars into the Nutrien siding and be on the right end of their train for the trip back to Washington. Photographed with Super Takumar 200/4 on my Fujifilm X-T20.

Northern Flicker

Posted 05/03/23

Perched on the light pole in the back yard.

Connector Trail

Posted 05/03/23

The new connector trail and bridge between High Point City Lake Park and the Piedmont Environmental Center opened in December, and we finally got a chance to walk it yesterday. It's funny, going between the two by road is a three mile drive, but by trail is only half a mile. The connector is a valuable addition to the ever-growing network of trails maintained by Guilford County and the towns of Greensboro and High Point.

New Vest

Posted 05/02/23

Can't complain a bit about how this latest vest for Lars turned out. Sure, it's amateurish, but not laughably so, and Lars is real pleased with it. The best thing to me is that the fit is just right.

Sewing

Posted 05/01/23

With nothing pressing for a couple of days, I decided to make a new vest for Lars using some of a couple of yards of ripstop camoflauge printed material that I bought last winter. For liner, I could use green polyester flag material that has been in my stash for a long time. How well the Morse would handle the ripstop was a question, but the only way to find out was to try it.

I started by printing a men's size 38 Twig + Tale Pathfinder pattern, shortened by a couple of inches and eased slightly through the waist. From this I cut out necessary parts to make a muslin from some leftover fabric, stitched it up and had Lars try it on. It fit pretty good, so I proceeded with the project. The Morse had no trouble with the fabric using V69 thread and a #16 jeans needle, in fact it was easy to sew. For the topstitching I moved over to the Sailrite, which has a walking foot and the power to punch through the eight layers of cloth around the shoulders.

Hurst/Olds 442

Posted 04/21/23

I photographed this classic 1984 muscle car at a Georgia Welcome Center on Interstate 95 in December 2021. The owner was towing it from New York to Florida, where a friend was going to restore the body, frame and motor over the winter. He said he would do the interior the next summer and then drive it for a while. He had his eye on a 1972 Ford pickup for the next project.

Coming Soon

Posted 04/21/23

On a recent trip to the boatyard in Belhaven, I found new grocery self-scanners at the local Food Lion. The manager told me plans are to roll them out to all stores in short order. That will be a long-awaited improvement. One advantage to being a late adopter is that Food Lion is able to get all the equipment and algorithms right from the first introduction. Harris Teeter had to go through several iterations of their scanners before they got everything working right. In my opinion, the Home Depot scanners are the gold standard. They always work, they are fast, and they don't bother you with a lot of marketing ploys or extraneous questions.

Harris Teeter has upped their self-scanner banks to six. One good cashier can keep them all moving. A cashier confirmed to me that they get a differential if they can operate a bank of self-scanners.

Fog

Posted 04/21/23

Early morning fog at Edenton Marina, September 14th, 2017.

Jenga Masters

Posted 04/20/23

This picture from May of 2018 at the McKenzie residence, Mark, Gretchen, with numerous family and inlaws.

Pilot Dan's Jag

Posted 04/20/23

Going back through old pictures and finding a few good ones that I never posted here, watch for them!

Not a real Jag, but still a great looking car. It's a modern fiberglass body, some kind of custom chassis and an air-cooled VW engine in the back. Pilot Dan was the playboy son of a rich man but he was still a good, generous friend. He had a collection of cool toys; a beautiful boat, lots of cars and a motorcycle, and several rare, vintage airplanes. He died a few years ago, and if there is a heaven he is sitting back, smoking a Winchester Little Cigar with all his toys spread out around him and a few cronies to talk to. I took the picture back in October of 2018.

Island Girl

Posted 04/01/23

At the boatyard last month, one evening after I had finished my work for the day, I decided to take a drive. I followed U.S. 264 east out of Belhaven, up the Pungo River. The road crosses the southern entrance of the Alligator-Pungo Canal at Ponzer, officially a populated place located within the Township of Currituck, a minor civil division (MCD) of Hyde County.

I was surprised to find a northbound tow of two barges and Stevens Towing Company tug Island Girl tied up to the fenders under the bridge. The light was failing and it was foggy, with a light mist, but I managed to get a few photographs. A crewman came out of the pilot house and we talked for a moment, and he told me they were "waiting for weather".

Back at the boatyard I checked the forecast for Albemarle Sound and found winds predicted to reach 30 knots out of the northwest, enough to produce bad conditions on the sound, and making things absolutely wretched on the Alligator River.

Kolsch

Posted 03/30/23

Is it a lager or is it an ale? To me it tastes more like a lager but according to The Buffalocal Blog, "...while technically it is an Ale, it also has some brewing traits typical of Lagers. That’s because warm-fermenting ale yeast is used during the brewing of Kolsch, but then it is conditioned at a cold temperature like a lager". I think it would be a good summer-time beer, because it is light and sparkling and tastes good ice cold.

Kolsch originated in Cologne; in the EU only beers brewed according to the Kölsch Konvention and within 31 miles of Cologne can be termed Kolsch. Of course, in America and Britain anything can be termed a Kolsch, and that is why Wake Forest brewer White Street can make one.

Doh!

Posted 03/26/23

Garment sewing involves a lot of clips, pins, basting tape and fusible interfacing to build the garment before it is sewn. The same building process for canvas and sail work is commonly done with spray adhesive and staples. The shirts I have been making have facings around the neck and front slot that need interfacing to stiffen them. Interfacing can be done with special fusible or non-fusible cloth, but an extra layer of the primary cloth usually works just as well. Most experienced sewers will suggest that non-fusible interfacing is probably too hard for beginners like me to handle. I agree.

As many articles and videos on interfacing as I have looked at, none of them has been explicit about whether the fabric and interfacing should be cut out before or after fusing. In fact, many imply that you cut them out and then fuse them.

I make my own fusible interfacing by spraying 3M 45 General Purpose Adhesive on the interfacing and placing it on the primary cloth, just like I would when applying a panel of sacrificial cloth to the leech of a jib. I had always cut both pieces to pattern and then carefully positioned the sticky interfacing on the primary cloth. But then it occured to me that I could get a better match if I applied the interfacing first, and then cut them out together. So I cut them both a bit oversized, stuck them together, and then cut to pattern. It came out perfectly, and I just had to wonder why it took me so long to figure it out.

The only issue I could see would be using heavy or thick cloth. The shirt facings were cut on the fold, so that meant four layers of fabric, but my rotary cutter had no problems with this light cloth. Canvas would be a different story.

Columbine

Posted 03/18/23

Eastern red columbine at the Bog Garden in Greensboro. SMC Takumar 55/2.

Goose Creek State Park

Posted 03/14/23

One of the newer NC state parks, established in 1974, Goose Creek is on the Pamlico River between Washington and Bath. This part of the state is far from the metropolitan centers and the park is not as heavily developed as the Piedmont ones that have to serve hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. The main features are a trail network that can serve as a loop around the park of about 8 miles, plus two campgrounds - one, an RV loop with hookups in a field near the entrance to the park, and second, what they call a "primitive" campground, for tents and small RVs, located deep in the park along the creek. Primitive it may be, but it still provides tap water and modern-style composting privies. It is set in a second-growth pine forest, and some of the sites are close to the water. The campsites in the primitive loop are widely spaced, and each has room for two cars and two tents, with a picnic table, fire ring and raised grill. The only drawback I could see was that the road was a bit dusty, and during dry season could be a nuisance.

Goose Creek carries eight feet of water a short distance in from its entrance, and I could anchor in sight of the campground. It would be fun to meet up with friends who were car-camping.

Here is a link to a map of the park.

And While We're on the Subject of Shoes...

Posted 03/02/23

My oldest pair of New Balances just got resoled - for the second time. They should be well and truly worn out by the time they need soles again.

Depreciation

Posted 02/27/23

It is the nature of consumer goods that the depreciation is heavily front-loaded. In other words, if they are used even once, they frequently lose half or more of their value. Take for instance these New Balance walker/runners that someone bought, wore perhaps once or twice, and then - discarded? The shoes cost someone in the neighborhood of $60, and I bought them from an EBay seller, in functionally new condition, for $28.

Some people have concerns about buying shoes by mail, on account of fit. In truth, quality shoe manufacturers have refined their lasts and production methods to the point that, if you find a certain brand of shoe that fits at a given size, all shoes of that brand and size will fit.

Charter

Posted 02/27/23

Sitting out in Joe's back yard this afternoon, drinking beer after a few hours of shopwork, we watched an inbound narrow-body jet on approach to Smith Reynolds. It wasn't in any of the familiar liveries - United, American, Air Canada. On my way home, I swung by the airport in hopes of seeing it on the ground.

Behind the terminal I found GlobalX N276GX loading a few executives from a golfcart. In a few minutes, the airplane taxied the short distance to the holding area at the north end of the Runway 15/33, then waited for two business twin-engined jets to land. N276GX then taxied onto the runway and went straight into its takeoff roll.

GlobalX is a charter airline headquartered in Miami operating a small fleet of Airbus A319s, A320s and A321s. N276GX is an A320, built in 2006 for Japanese airline Starflyer. The plane later spent time in Frontier Airline livery, and has been leased to GlobalX since January 2021. Flightradar24.com shows the plane flew into Smith Reynolds from Bedford MA, arriving at 4:10 PM. NG276X departed at 6:14 PM, bound for State College, PA.

Early Morning

Posted 02/26/23

The early morning view from the cockpit of my sailboat, on the stands at TJ's Marina & Boatyard, Belhaven, NC. Super Takumar 35/3.5.

Utility Sewing

Posted 02/07/23

Fire might be Mankind's most useful tool but rope is not far behind. Cable and cord is nothing more than rope that can carry electricity. Rope, cable and cord are all things that I find indispensible, but they can also be the most aggravating of tools, as they tangle and twist. For that reason, I have a general principle that ropes, cables and cords should be controlled: two corollaries - fiber rope should be stored in a secure coil, and things that use cords or cables should be contained in a bag.

Long ago, at Matthews Point, there was a table where people could put things they didn't want anymore, and anyone could take them. Someone left a set of small sails for a dinghy. Cori and I divided them between us - she took the main, and I took the jib. I still have a few remnants of that sail. They are good for cutting heavy interfacing, and for utility bags, like the one I made yesterday for a set of jumper cables.

Southern Shortline

Posted 02/02/23

Looking like a scene from John Krause and H. Reid's Rails Through Dixie, this photograph was taken between Belhaven and Pantego a few days ago. GP9 4630, built for Grand Trunk Western in 1958 and currently on the roster of Carolina Coastal Railway, is preparing to back 12 gondolas loaded with lime into the Nutrien facility. The elderly locomotive, battered cars of low-tariff commodity and worn jointed rails are reminiscent of the Southern short-line railroading at the end of steam that Krause and Reid documented 70 years ago.

The Carolina Coastal Railway (CLNA) got its start with the 17-mile branch between Pinetown and Belhaven in 1989 as a spin-off from Norfolk Southern. Eventually NS sold them the whole line from Raleigh to Plymouth, part of the original Norfolk Southern which ran from Norfolk to Charlotte and was acquired by NS predecessor Southern in 1974. CLNA also picked up the old Nash County Railroad from Nashville to Spring Hope as well as operating rights to Morehead City terminal trackage. The whole shooting match is owned by Regional Rail, LLC, which also owns several other shortlines, including the Florida Central, Florida Midland and Florida Northern.

Locals tell me that the train runs down from Pinetown about once a week. The line abounds with good photo locations as it crosses numerous creeks and runs through several small towns.

Distinctive Fungus

Posted 01/18/22

We ran across this very distinctive fungus on a walk near Pilot Mountain a few days ago.

Roadside Find

Posted 01/11/22

Found along the side of the road with some other household items, this Made in Thailand Windsor-style chair needed just a small amount of work to be usable. After a quick wipe-down with water and ammonia, I re-glued one rung, tightened the screws on leg braces, put pads on each foot and gave the whole thing a coat of wax.

These modern-day factory-built Windsors are a lot more comfortable than ladder-backs. We find them on the roadside now and then, and usually it's just a matter of gluing a rung or two to get them back in service. Joe and I repaired one last year that had been gnawed by a dog, and even that wasn't too much trouble. Since I already have plenty of them, this one will probably go to Levi's household.

Lex's Turn

Posted 01/07/22

Both boys like to take pictures with my camera. Lars knows how to use focus peaking, but it's all Lex can do to hold the camera up and point it in the general direction. So, to give him the best chance of getting a good picture, I stopped the lens (Vivitar 19) down and zone focused it. He got it pointed in the right direction and captured this nice picture.

Non-Fiction

Posted 01/06/23

For scholarly magazines and periodicals, JSTOR is the place to go. JSTOR used to be very exclusive, if you didn't have some kind of university affiliation, you couldn't read most of the articles. But somewhere along the line they figured out that they would lose relevance if they didn't loosen up a bit and let the general public into their trove. So now, you can self-identify as an individual researcher, sign up for a free account, and you get to read 100 articles a month. You still can't download whole articles, but it is easy enough to copy and paste what you need for reference. I doubt if there are many scholars, university-affiliated or not, who read more than 100 articles at JSTOR in a month, so this seems to me to be the moral equivalent of open access.

Just as with periodicals, scholarly books used to be carefully guarded by the Universities. I think the old model was, that if you heard of a good, useful book on your subject that you wanted to read, you went to the university library and tried to check it out - this if you had some sort of affiliation with the university that allowed you to have a library card. The librarian then told you, perhaps, that yes, the book was in the collection but checked out to Professor So-and-So, no telling when or if he might return it. So you made inquiries as to when he might have office hours, went to his school and waited, finally got in to see him, and he promised he'd return the book as soon as he damn well pleased, maybe never. Or the librarian might say that it was not in the collection, see if the department head would authorize its purchase out of his book budget, $79.95 from the University Press of Quaint College. Oh wait, it's out of print.

Seriously, there is no money to be made in printing scholarly works, even at grossly inflated prices. Many authors have figured out that getting wide exposure is worth more than the few dollars a quarter in royalties they might receive for hard-printed tomes. How can this be done? “The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in The Hague. OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books.” They operate OAPEN Library - “a central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books”. These are not out of copyright works, they are current non-fiction works available for free download.

These are digital books in pdf format. If you cannot read a book on a screen, you'll miss out, but if you can, you will be able to access the OAPEN Library's trove of over 19,000 peer-reviewed, scholarly books, plus a directory of 17,000 more open access works at other libraries.

I have a virtual stack of books from OAPEN Library, some of which I have read and some of which I will read. Here is a sample:

Book	Author or Lead Editor	Publisher	City	Date
The Spanish Lake	Spate, O.H.K.	ANU E Press	Canberra	2004
The First World War and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy	Rauchensteiner, Manfried	Bohlau	Vienna	2014
A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth	Byron-Smith, Joshua	Brill	Leiden	2020
Conceptions of Time in Greek and Roman Antiquity	Faure, Richard	Walter de Gruyter	Berlin	2022
Snow in the Tropics: A History of the Independent Reefer Operators	Lennerfors, Thomas Taro	Brill	Leiden	2019
Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent	Stallard, Avan Judd	Monash University Publishing	Clayton, AU	2016

Grim Statistics

Posted 01/05/23

JournalNow.com published an interesting article today listing the 50 NC counties with the most per capita traffic fatalities in 2020, the latest year with statistics available. I had expected that the large metropolitan counties would have made up the worst cases, but in fact most of the top ten were small rural counties, including a cluster in the northeast part of the state, and another near and along the South Carolina border in the southeastern region. Below are the top ten summarized with the total populations and largest towns listed.

Rank	County	Fatalities per 100,000	Total Fatalities	Population	Largest Town
1	Northhampton	55.8	10	17,471	Gaston
2	Montgomery	54.1	14	25,751	Troy
3	Robeson	46.3	55	116,530	Lumberton
4	Hertford	45.4	10	21,552	Ahoskie
5	Bladen	43.2	13	29,606	Elizabethtown
6	Halifax	42.6	21	48,622	Roanoke Rapids
7	Warren	42.4	8	18,642	Warrenton
8	Columbus	38.9	20	50,623	Whiteville
9	Rutherford	37.2	24	64,444	Forest City
10	Hoke	36.4	19	52,082	Raeford

Balls

Posted 01/01/23

It's easy to make these balls out of scrap cloth and lathe shavings. Some of them are laced with catnip, and will be given to friends who have cats. Others will serve as playground balls. They are heavy enough to throw, but soft enough so that if some oblivious toddler strays into the line of fire, no damage will be done.

The catnip balls are stuffed with cloth scraps so that if they get shredded, they are easy to clean up. The playground balls are stuffed with lathe shavings so that if they come apart on the playground they don't have to be cleaned up.

Rarity

Posted 12/30/22

If you see a live, licensed, evidently running Yugo Cabrio in the wild, take note, because you will probably never see another. Only 500 of these cars were built in 1990 and 1991 and only around 100 were brought to the United States. The sedans were more common, with almost 150,000 sold in America between 1985 and 1992, the death knell being when almost every one was recalled by order of the EPA for violating emissions regulations. Yugos were known for having perhaps the worst build quality of any cars in the world, and the chances that more than a handful of Cabrios have survived are slim. They cost just under $9,000 in 1990, and for $2,000 more you could have a convertible Geo Metro. A couple of years later, the people of Yugoslavia decided that violent ethnic strife was more rewarding than working in Eastern Bloc factories, and production of all models fell. It didn't help that NATO accidentally bombed the car plant instead of the affiliated arms manufacturing division. Eventually things got back under control and car production restarted, but nobody has suggested that trying to sell them again in America would make much profit - or sense.

Drought Monitor

Posted 12/26/22

University of Nebraska-Lincoln publishes this interesting and useful map as part of their website which serves as a portal to data gathered by the U.S Drought Monitor. Four organizations collaborate on the Drought Monitor - the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The map gets updated weekly, so current conditions are always available. The small areas of drought along the southeast NC coast have been receding, and the latest round of heavy rains will probably leave almost all the state in the clear.

Tate Street

Posted 12/21/22

Hot cocoa, peanut butter chocolate chip brownie at Tate Street Coffee - what could be better? X-T20, kit lens, ISO 2000, 1/8 second hand-held, I'll take it.

Hams

Posted 12/03/22

Stuffed hams are not for dinner tonight. A tailor's (or pressing) ham is a tool for ironing seams on convex surfaces, like you find in hats, shirtsleeves, and collars. They are best stuffed with wood chips, sawdust, or, as these, shavings from a lathe or plane. Many people use fabric scraps for stuffing. Like a lined jacket, they are sewn inside out and then pulled through a turning hole, which is where the stuffing goes in. They need to be stuffed as tight as possible, and then the turning hole is hand-stitched closed.

The big ball is for hats, the long thin one for sleeves, the medium size one is a traditional all-purpose ham, and the red one is just a ball, for the kids to play with.

A Sewing Project

Posted 11/28/22

The New Zealand designer calls this her "Breeze" shirt, and says it is patterned for light fabrics; in other words, a summer shirt. With winter coming in my hemisphere, I won't have much need for a Breeze shirt for a few months, so I decided to make what could be called a "fresh breeze" (Beaufort Scale 17-21 knots), suitable for the colder months, for myself. I had already made a couple of shirts to the child's pattern for Lex, so I knew I could manage one using slightly heavier fabric, in this case, upholstery canvas. I used my Morse 4300 which had no trouble punching through the multiple layers of cloth, with V69 unbonded polyester thread and a size 16 needle.

My friend Mark, who is a machinist and needs to have pencil, pad and rule close at hand, noted, apropos of nothing, that a shirt is worthless if it doesn't have a pocket. I wouldn't go that far, but his comment did prod me to put a pocket on mine. The finished product is one of the most comfortable shirts I own. I don't iron my clothes any more, now that I am retired. The iron is strictly for the construction stage. I think this shirt looks just fine with wrinkles.

I have oxford and broadcloth on order to make more Breeze shirts for next spring, plus some ripstop camo to make one for Lars.

Bluetails

Posted 11/12/22

United narrow-bodies congregate outside the hangar at North State November 10th, 2022, in this picture taken with my SMC Takumar 55/2.

Anyone wishing to see the detail and resolution this 50 year old lens is capable of, click on the picture to see it screen size, then click again to see it full size.

A320 N413UA is scheduled to fly out of Smith Reynolds (KINT) for Houston today at 3:00pm, and later in the afternoon, on to Mexico City. Tomorrow, the 13th, it will come back to Houston and make a turn to Los Angeles, then late in the day back to Mexico City. The next day, the 14th, it will return to Houston and fly from there to Tucson, back to Houston, and later, to Mexico City. Masterful asset utilization.

Posted 11/08/22

This hawk (I believe of the red-shouldered variety) spent a few minutes in my backyard yesterday morning.

They Hold Their Value

Posted 11/02/22

When I needed a sewing machine capable of the heavy stitching involved in roller furler conversions of hank-on jibsails. I looked far and wide for a used Sailrite, with no luck. I came to the conclusion that these machines either changed hands privately or were passed down to the next generation. In the end, I ran out of time waiting and purchased a new machine, a standard no frills LSZ-1. Sailrites don't get discounted, you pay full list, and I paid $990.88 including taxes and shipping for mine. I made it back in savings the first two jobs.

The price for a new LSZ-1 like mine has gone up by $100 in the two years since I bought mine. So, approximately $1,100 delivered.

Lo, a used Sailrite LSZ-1 has appeared on Ebay! My internet research shows it to be the first series of LSZ-1 sold between 2000 and 2007. Asking price - $999.80, plus $95.05 shipping. In other words, $1,100 delivered. It does have a case - mine doesn't. Will the seller get his price? I don't know, but I doubt he would have asked it if it wasn't in the range of possibility.

Several decades ago there was a late-night talk radio host named Bruce Williams, who had a call-in show focused on personal finance questions and issues. One night he was explaining to a caller the economics of buying and driving a luxury car. As he put it, tens years earlier you could have bought a Cadillac or a Mercedes for $10,000 (that shows how many decades have passed). As Bruce put it, now, after ten years, the Cadillac would be worth $5,000 and the Mercedes would be worth $10,000. In ten more years, the Cadillac will be in the scrap yard and the Mercedes will be worth $10,000. I think Sailrite machines have a lot in common with that Mercedes. But one difference - that first series LSZ-1 sold for $499. It's worth more now than when it was brand new.

Photograph by Lars

Posted 10/28/22

Out walking yesterday Lars asked to use my camera to take a few pictures. I had the SMC Takumar 55/2 mounted, stopped down to around f/5.6, ISO set at 400, and it was fairly bright, so that should give him moderate depth of field and high enough shutter speed to make up for some camera shake. As always when I use my manual lenses, focus peaking was enabled. First thing Lars did was ask me why there were red lines around Lex, and I told him that meant Lex was in focus and he should take the picture. Then he noticed as he moved around, different things would come into focus and go out. I explained how to turn the focus ring on the lens until the subject got the red lines around it, which he quickly understood. After that he could pretty well nail focus on most of his shots, as this picture shows.

Late Afternoon

Posted 10/24/22

A late afternoon ride out to the airport netted this picture of the Smith Reynolds terminal with the Winston-Salem skyline in the distance. Super Takumar 200/4.

The Miami Air International 737 flew to Tucson on October 11th. The Arizona desert is a good place to store a plane long-term, since there's no humidity.

I saw two Uniteds and an American clustered around the North State hangar, and an Air Canada just visible through a partially open door. There might be a few more planes in the hangar, but most of the mechanics were gone and it wasn't even 6:00. Two men were working on the engine of one of the Uniteds, probably wishing they were with their compatriots at a local bar.

Early Voting

Posted 10/24/22

Early voting is under way in North Carolina. Here are dates and locations for Forsyth County:

Dates

• Thursday - Friday Oct 20-21 8:00 am - 7:30 pm.
• Monday - Friday Oct 24-28 8:00 am - 7:30 pm.
• Saturday Oct 29 8:00 am - 3:00 pm.
• Sunday Oct 30 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm.
• Monday - Friday Oct 31-Nov 4 8:00 am - 7:30 pm.
• Saturday Nov 5 800 am - 300 pm.

Locations

• Brown & Douglas Community Center, 4725 Indiana Avenue - Winston-Salem
• Clemmons Branch Library, 6365 James Street - Clemmons
• Forsyth County Government Center, 201 N Chestnut Street - Winston-Salem
• Kernersville (Paddison Memorial) Library, 248 Harmon Lane – Kernersville
• Lewisville Branch Library, 6490 Shallowford Road – Lewisville
• Mazie Woodruff Center, 4905 Lansing Drive – Winston-Salem
• Miller Park Recreation Center, 400 Leisure Lane-Winston Salem
• Old Town Recreation Center, 4550 Shattalon Drive – Winston-Salem
• Rural Hall Branch Library, 7125 Broad Street - Rural Hall
• Southside Branch Library, 3185 Buchanan Street – Winston-Salem
• Winston First Assembly of God, 3730 University Parkway – Winston-Salem
• WSSU- Anderson Center, 1545 Reynolds Park Road – Winston-Salem

During early voting, you can vote at any location - doesn't have to be your precinct. If you have moved, you can change your address and immediately vote. You can also register to vote (see this link for details) and cast your ballot provisionally - the Board of Elections will confirm your registration and let you know in a few days whether they accepted your registration and ballot.

The State of North Carolina is doing everything it can to make it possible for all eligible citizens to vote. Take advantage of their efforts and go to the polls in 2022. The early voting sites make it possible to avoid long lines on Election Day. The early, late and weekend hours mean that even people with difficult work hours can still find a time when the locations are open. So, no excuses - go vote.

Overlooked Museum

Posted 10/23/22

Not far from home, just outside of Asheboro, is the North Carolina Aviation Museum. We visited on a recent Saturday morning and found ourselves the only ones there, apart from the lone staffer collecting the modest admission at the door (adults $10.00, seniors $8.00, students $5.00, 6 and under free. A few more patrons arrived during our 2-hour stay, but never enough to constitute a crowd.

The North Carolina Aviation Museum was formed in 1994. In its early years the focus was on light military propellor planes, but in 2006 the board expanded its mission to include civilian, vintage and historical planes, as well as aviation cultural artifacts. A big impetus to making the museum what it is today came in 2019 with a grant from the State of North Carolina for major infrastructure improvements. The collection is now housed in an attractive, clean, well-lighted facility.

The museum is located at Asheboro Regional Airport (KHBI), a small general aviation field off Highway 49 south of town. There was a lot of activity on the beautiful fall day that we visited, though I was told that much of it was transients refueling as they passed through the area. I could see how that would be the case, with the airport on the direct route from the midwest to the South Carolina coast, as well as from the northeast to Florida.

The museum comprises an entrance area with ticket and gift sales, and two hangers housing a collection of older light propellor planes and trainers, with exhibit cases filled with uniforms, badges, flags, paper and other memorobilia. In the first hanger we found a classic Piper Cub (not as clean and well-kept as my friend Pilot Dan's when I saw it in his Edenton hangar). Nearby was a Boeing Stearman, the primary trainer for the U.S. military during the 1930s. After the war these planes were surplused to the general public and thousands of them went into crop-dusting and general aviation. We found more trainers, an Aeronca L-13, a Pilatus P-3 and a Scottish Bulldog SK-61. There were several home-built planes, some of the very highest caliber of craftmanship, along with many large-scale models. In a corner was a display of gigantic rotary piston engines, including a Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp - the largest aviation piston engine to be mass-produced in America. In another corner was a wingless fuselage of a plane too damaged to be restored or exhibited. The public is allowed to climb into the cabin of this 4-seater and manipulate the controls. Lars enjoyed this exhibit immensely.

The second hangar houses the biggest exhibit at the museum - a Douglas B-26 twin-engine bomber, a WWII vintage airplane that saw military service until as late as 1969 due to its speed, load-carrying capacity, and ability to be outfitted with a formidable arsenal of ground-attack weaponry. A corner is dedicated to an exhibit of Piedmont Airline memorobilia, and another to a small collection of army jeeps and a vintage car - maybe placeholders until the museum can acquire more aviation items.

This is a great museum close to the Triad that has enough to keep kids occupied for a couple of hours or more, but not so expansive (and expensive) as to make you feel like you need to spend a whole day on it. It is an easy drive from any of the Triad or Charlotte-area cities. For anyone interested in aviation it is a must to see, for everyone else it is a fun and informative way to spend a few hours. For the pilot of a light plane, it would be the perfect fly-in destination.

Hats

Posted 10/21/22

Exploring the possibilities of making things on my sewing machines, I turned to hats. Bucket hats are the easiest, and I made a few, until I felt like I had some proficiency. Next I turned to baseball caps, or what are known as "dad hats" to the younger generation (because, as one explained, they are the kind of hats that 50-year-old men like to wear). These are considerably more difficult, and use several special parts that need to be ordered. But I figured out that only the plastic bill is really necessary, and all the other bands, straps and adjusters can be kludged out of fabric. I pulled a bill out of a worn-out hat and went to work. Some hours later I had a cap - rough, but wearable, and the next one should go better.

Friends with Expertise

Posted 10/16/22

I value all my friends, even the most inept and ineffectual ones, but I'm glad to have some with expert knowledge in a field that I don't have. For example, Joe served in the army as a mechanic, and then worked in the field for a while after he comleted his service. So when I have a car issue, I usually run it past Joe before I go to the shop.

Recently the truck started giving me trouble. It ran fine for a while, and then it would start to sputter and miss, but wouldn't quite stall as long as I kept the rpms up. Then it would clear out and run fine. This cycle would repeat every few minutes.

According to Joe, these were classic symptoms of a worn-out gas filler cap. So I ordered a replacement from Amazon, and a few days later it arrived. I installed it, and then drove the truck about ten miles, around town and on the highway, and had no further issues.

Air Canada Update

Posted 10/13/22

A320 C-FKOJ which arrived at Smith Reynolds on August 8th flew to Toronto the morning of October 9th and has since visited Vancouver, Edmonton and Philadelphia. Sister C-FKPT is still at Smith Reynolds.

Outer Banks Flooding

Posted 10/11/22

Mirlo Beach, midday October 3rd, 2022. In the wake of hurricane Ian, a frontal system has set up off the North Carolina coast and is pumping rain and wind in from the east. To the south, the water on Highway 12 is too deep for my car, so I turn back here and retrace my footsteps to Manteo and on to Edenton.

Cheap Gas

Posted 10/05/22

Lately the Raceway in Tarboro has been the place to stop for gas. This is by far the best price I have seen in a long time.

Mabry Mill

Posted 09/26/22

Ellie and I took a drive on the Parkway yesterday. We stopped at Mabry Mill and took a walk in the rain, where she got this picture with her cell phone.

Look What Flew in From Toronto

Posted 09/25/22

Air Canada Airbus 320-211 C-FKPT arrived at Smith Reynolds (INT) at 8:02 the morning of September 20th after a 70 minute flight from Toronto. She joins sister C-FKOJ which has been parked behind the North State hangar since August 8th.

Numerous American and United jets receiving service this Sunday afternoon.

NAMC YS-11

Posted 09/21/22

The first commercial airliner built by Japan after WWII, the NAMC YS-11 sold to two American airlines, Hawaiian and Piedmont. Piedmont started buying the planes in 1967 with an order for ten, after seeing the success that Hawaiian was having with theirs on similar short-haul routes, and by 1970 had amassed a fleet of 21. Piedmont's route structure at the time focused on serving small towns in mountainous terrain, including Lynchburg, Asheville and Bristol. Tom Davis, the founder and long-time president of Piedmont, is on record as stating "The YS‐11 was the only one we could find which would do it on an economical basis." The planes replaced WWII vintage Douglas DC-3s.

Ruairidh MacVeigh, a British historian, produces many short Youtube videos about industrial topics, all of them good and interesting, including this one about the NAMC YS-11. Wikipedia has a good article about the plane with additional information and lore.

My friend Dee was a stewardess for Piedmont and successor U.S. Air, and identified the two pilots in the photograph - Raymond Tysinger on the upper step and "Hutch" Hutchinson on the step below. She couldn't remember the two stewardess's names, but does recall serving with them. Piedmont was a relatively small, tight-knit company in early days (it grew to employ 22,000 by the time it was acquired by U.S. Air in 1989), and everybody knew everyone - especially Tom Davis, who seemed to be a personal friend of every employee. Dee's take on the NAMC YS-11 - "I loved that plane. It was solid, reliable and comfortable."

Not Every Day

Posted 09/19/22

It's not every day that I find a plane in Air Canada's striking livery at Smith Reynolds Airport. Airbus A320 C-FKOJ flew in from Toronto Pearson International on August 8th. Built in 1992 in Toulouse, France, in recent months it has been based in Toronto. Most days it makes a round trip to Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary or one of the other provincial cities in Canada, though now and then it ranges as far as San Francisco or Miami. The A320 is a strong, well-designed plane that first saw service with Air France in 1988, with over 10,000 built since then. The European Airbus consortium has been giving Boeing a run for their money lately, as Boeing keeps shooting itself in the foot with quality issues - the disastrous 737 Max problems that led to two crashes and the loss of hundreds of lives being the most notable.

I could see that another plane was behind the Air Canada, pushed into the far corner of the concrete. A North State line supervisor coming off shift stopped to chat and confirmed that it was the Miami Air International 737-800 that has been stored at Smith Reynolds since early June. He said they were waiting for kitting to come from the airline. I suggested that from what I had read (Miami Air's Certificate of Public Convenience has been revoked by the FAA), it might be a long wait.

Inside the hanger were three Americans being serviced. North State has an ongoing contract with the airline to provide routine maintenance, and American jets cycle through the facility regularly.

On the other side of the North State hanger was United N803UA, an Airbus A319 delivered in 1997. The A319 was introduced in 1996 as a shortened version of the A320, and variants are still in production. In 26 years of flying, the A319 has never been involved in a fatal accident. N803UA arrived at Smith Reynolds on September 9th after a busy day, departing Bergstrom International (Austin) in the morning for Dulles (Washington DC), then to Liberty International (Newark), on to Jacksonville, back to Dulles, and then on to Smith Reynolds in the late evening. The North State supervisor told me his crews were currently working on four Uniteds, with another scheduled to come in shortly.

Just the tail of United N17122 was sticking out of the hanger. This Boeing 757-200 was delivered to Continental in 1997. In 2010 United and Continental merged with the new airline using the United name.

Charging Station

Posted 09/17/22

You can charge your car in Edenton. The station is at Colonial Park on the waterfront. While you wait, you can tour the replica screw-pile lighthouse or visit the library, both within a few yards of the station. Just around the corner is downtown, with restaurants and a coffee shop. The Hampton Inn near the highway has a station as well, for the convenience of its guests. I don't know if theirs is open to the general public.

Shirt for Lex

Posted 09/09/22

Lex got his shirt today. It's a little tight going over his head, even though I made the slit half an inch longer than the pattern. Lex has a large head (takes after Levi). Other than that, the fit is good, which is the green light for me to make another. I'll modify the pattern a bit to make the head hole even bigger.

Sam's Club - Worth It?

Posted 09/06/22

Since Marie works at Sam's Club now, as a benefit she gets a membership. I went shopping with her today and bought a few things that I usually get at Food Lion, to see if Sam's Club prices are really that good.

Quantities in lowest common denominator, extended by the lcd unit price to the quantity purchased at Sam's. In other words, you can't buy 96 ounces of peanut butter at Food Lion, so I used the unit price for 40 ounces and applied it to 96 ounces.

Item	Unit	Sam's Club	Food Lion	Qty	Sam's Ext	FL Ext
Old El Paso Enchilada Sauce	Can	$1.00	$2.59	6	$6.00	$15.54
Jif Crunchy Peanut Butter	Oz	0.11	0.17	96	10.82	16.78
Dry Pinto Beans	Lb	.86	1.39	12	10.37	16.68
Corn Tortillas	Oz	.06	.06	101	5.98	5.99
Total					$33.17	$54.99

The prices at Sam's range from about the same to ridiculously less, totaling 60% of what it would have cost me to buy the same things at Food Lion. Note that there are no perishables in this sample - I didn't give them a close look, but other than potatoes and onions, the prices I saw weren't much better than Food Lion's, and the selection was meager. Nor are there any paper products or cleaners, major categories for most Americans but not for me. Anecdotal evidence suggests that paper products are one of the biggest draws for Sam's Club and Costco, so I would guess that the numbers might be even more skewed if I had bought them.

The savings would be enormous for a large family that buys a lot of grocery products, probably into the thousands of dollars a year. An annual membership costs $45.

So where does this leave the grocery chains? I'm sure the local Food Lion can't survive on produce, meat and dairy, and their selection of other items is not much better than Sam's Club. Sure, they have 50 varieties of cereal, 25 of coffee, 100 of potato chips, but no brown rice? No whole wheat flour? Food Lion seems to be positioning itself somewhere between a convenience store and a real grocery. Down the street is a Harris Teeter - more expensive - then Whole Foods and Publix - more expensive yet. They have reasonable selections, but the prices take a big chunk out of many people's salaries. It's not for nothing that Whole Foods has long been known as "Whole Paycheck".

The grocery industry got a big shot in the arm during the time when Covid ran rampant, but that is starting to fade. Inflation is the new motivator, and that sounds like it means more business for Sam's Club. As far as the question "Sam's Club - Worth It?" goes - my answer is, decidedly yes.

Motive Power

Posted 09/05/22

UP 8180 in all its grimy splendor waits on the ready track at Liberty Street yard for its next assignment.

Vests

Posted 09/03/22

Lars, Lex and I all have vests now so I am switching to shirts.

Airplanes

Posted 09/02/22

It's well past 5:00 on a Friday afternoon but North State mechanics are still working on this American Airlines Airbus A321neo N402AN which flew in from Phoenix two weeks ago for maintenance.

Hopping Nomad

Posted 09/01/22

Joe picked this up at Aldi and we had a round after shopwork a few days ago. It's a session beer, which means it's lower in potency than your average IPA, so if you are planning a serious drinking session you can keep going without passing out. We didn't have anything like that in mind, and limited ourselves to one of these and a Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing.

I wondered where Aldi was sourcing this beer and a little research showed that it is made by Octopi Brewing, a "leading contract brewing facility" in Waunakee, WI. It looks like Aldi wanted a house beer to sell. The brewmeister at Octopi said he'd mix up something good, Aldi found a creative designer to come up with the can graphics, and a new beer was born. And it's good. I'd buy it if I shopped at Aldi. Reminds me of the New Orleans grocery chain Schwegmann's, which house-branded everything - including beer, wine and liquor. Back in the day you could go into the Schwegmann's and buy a pound of Andouille sausage, a bag of red beans, and a bottle of Schwegmann's rye whiskey, and be set for the night.

My Vest

Posted 08/30/22

I finished the vest that I was making for myself. One more for Lars, and it will be time to move on to the next thing. Twig & Tale has a shirt pattern that I would like to try.

CJ5

Posted 08/28/22

Jeep made the CJ5 for thirty years, closing out production in 1983. This one has been restored and modded to within an inch of its life.

He Likes It

Posted 08/17/22

I gave Lex his vest today, and he eagerly donned it. After he wore it a while, I noticed that it was slipping off his shoulder, so I got it back from him for a few minutes and put a couple of darts in the back neckline, and that fixed it. Otherwise the fit is good, slightly loose so he ought to be able to wear it all fall before he grows out of it.

A Vest for Lex

Posted 08/16/22

I think many small businesses are still having trouble finding staff to keep up with the work. My fabric order, placed ten days ago, finally shipped yesterday. To make up for the delay, the seller is shipping Fedex two-day, which I am sure destroys any profit she might have had in my order. If she had asked, I would have told her to ship USPS, because at this point even Fedex isn't going to be able to get it to me in time for me to start work on my vest before I go to the coast.

I sifted through some fabric I had in the closet and found enough to make a vest for Lex. It came out ok, and made a good dry run to learn some of the techniques of tailoring. Today at the woodshop I told Joe that if I had taken the time I spent on this vest to work as an accountant, I could have bought Lex a professionally tailored vest made out of ermine.

Butterfly

Posted 08/11/22

Another look at an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail from a couple days ago.

Butterfly

Posted 08/09/22

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. We saw many of these along the Black Walnut Bottom Trail at Bethania this morning.

Sewing Projects

Posted 08/09/22

It's been a scorching hot summer, too hot to get outdoors much, so I have been doing a fair amount of sewing. Before I bought my Sailrite, I considered other machines. Several posters to internet forums suggested that older domestic machines, the all-metal, geared down ones from the 1960s were powerful enough to deal with boat canvas. Morse machines, built in Japan under contract by Toyota, of all people, were one suggestion. The important feature, in addition to power, was the ability to sew a zig-zag stitch. I found an old Morse on Ebay at a reasonable price and ordered it. When it arrived, I found that it wouldn't zig-zag, although the seller swore she tested it just before shipping and it worked fine. It sewed a nice straight stitch, but it didn't have a walking foot, and in general was not heavy enough to do canvas work. For the price, it wasn't worth returning, so I put it away. Soon afterward I bit the bullet and ordered the Sailrite machine, which has been eminently suitable for heavy canvas and sail work.

With all the major sail projects done, I turned to projects that didn't put much demand on the Sailrite, with its slow, powerful motor and walking foot - curtains, dish-cloths, and then a couple of duffel bags, and a whole series of totes. It occurred to me that the Morse might be well-suited for some of this lighter work, so I dug it out of the closet, cleaned, oiled and adjusted it, and tried a few small projects. It worked very well, making even, straight stitches, and it handled V69 thread just fine (it still won't zig-zag). So the next step is to try some very basic beginner tailoring.

A vest is about the simplest item of menswear that I could sew. There were a few decent-looking patterns available, but I felt like I needed some help. Unfortunately, there is no Sailrite video on how to make a vest, but I did find a New Zealand company, Twig & Tale, that sells patterns and provides lots of support in the way of tutorials and videos. I looked over their website and found a lot of affectedly quaint children's and women's patterns, but also a few straightforward pieces of men's outerwear. Their Pathfinder Vest was the simplest and easiest thing they had, and it looked like a good place to start. I ordered the "Digital Pattern + Video Class" online at a cost of $14.00, and was immediately able to download files containing patterns, instructions and a link to some short videos.

First I read through all the instructions and got an idea of how to proceed. The patterns were in the form of 29 pages of pdf files, which I printed out. The next step was trimming two edges off each page and then taping all the pages together. The patterns had lines for sizes 32 to 60, and I cut them out on the lines for 48 (the instructions show how to measure yourself and decide on a size, and then custom-tailor the patterns for your own body). All the trimming, taping and cutting has taken me a good two hours, and I'm not done yet, but in the end I will have a good set of patterns. The download includes a pdf file in a format that can be taken to a copy shop and printed on two big sheets of paper, if you want to save the time and effort of taping all the pages together.

There is cloth - black denim and tan canvas - on order from Nick of Time Textiles, and V69 thread from Amazon. I think I can find some remnants at home for the lining. I'm looking forward to working on this project over the next several weeks.

Tate Street Coffee

Posted 07/29/22

Lex deciding whether the cocoa is too hot.

Posted 07/26/22

A little bit of eye candy, my Super-Takumar 200mm f/4 that I bought from a fellow Pentax Forums member a few months ago. So far I'm liking it. It is optically better than my zooms that go out to 200mm, as well a lighter. If I have a special situation where I know 200mm will suit my needs, or if I can carry several primes to cover a full range of focal lengths, I'll bring the Super-Takumar. If I need the flexibility of having multiple lengths available and can't carry a bunch of lenses, I tend to carry my Fujifilm kit 16-50 and, lately, the Vivitar MC 70-210mm Macro f/4.5-5.6

CherryTree

Posted 07/22/22

Alex Payne made the case against what he called "everything buckets" in a 2009 article, unfortunately no longer available on the internet. Everything buckets are programs "that encourage the user to throw anything and everything into them. They’re virtual scrapbooks, applying a lightweight organization system to (often) unrelated data of varying types". Payne gave some examples, all of which have never gained much traction except for Evernote. Within the program, robust search components allow the user to find what they are looking for. Payne pointed out that computers work best with structured data, and suggested that a well-considered heirarchical filesystem works better than an everything bucket.

Point well taken, Alex, but in reality all data does not lend itself to heirarchical structure. An attempt to create a filesystem structure that includes a directory for every discrete subject ends up being - an everything bucket. For example, in what tree would I put Barry Rittholz's classic "Uh-Oh: Dangerous Black Swan Chart Formation!" graphic? Finance? Comedy? Or should I create a top-level directory just to hold this item? Some people might be methodical enough to develop a complete ontological world framework so that they could classify "Black Swan", but most people are going to file it as miscellaneous.

Clay Shirky makes the argument against heirarchical systems in 2005 in his article Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. While he lauds the periodic table as "Best. Classification. Evar", he notes that even so, there are difficulties. For example, all the way at the right, there are the noble gases. What is a noble gas? One aspect of a noble gas is that it is gaseous. And at the time the periodic table was being developed, for all we knew, all these elements had the attribute of being a gas. But in truth, helium, for example, is not "a gas", it is gaseous at the temperatures and pressures that scientists were able to achieve when they created the noble gas classification. One issue with heirarchical structures is that, without maintenance, they rot over time.

Shirky makes several more examples out of classification systems that once were considered state of the art. The Dewey Decimal System (anybody remember that? It was pervasive in libraries in the western world for the hundred years of the 20th century) has been wrenched into the 21st century with a major re-write in 2010, but for a long time the 200 classification, Religion, looked like this:

Dewey, 200: Religion
• 210 Natural theology
• 220 Bible
• 230 Christian theology
• 240 Christian moral & devotional theology
• 250 Christian orders & local church
• 260 Christian social theology
• 270 Christian church history
• 280 Christian sects & denominations
• 290 Other religions

Check out a recent permutation of the Library of Congress's History (General) category:

• DA: Great Britain
• DB: Austria
• DC: France
• DD: Germany
• DE: Mediterranean
• DF: Greece
• DG: Italy
• DH: Low Countries
• DJ: Netherlands
• DK: Former Soviet Union
• DL: Scandinavia
• DP: Iberian Peninsula
• DQ: Switzerland
• DR: Balkan Peninsula
• DS: Asia
• DT: Africa
• DU: Oceania
• DX: Gypsies

(Note the DR, DS and DT sub-categories).

Obviously there is a degree of ethnocentrism here, but the main reason for these subclasses is that the various library classification systems were not designed to put subjects of equal importance on similar levels - they were optimizing for the number of books on the shelf. In other works, they were arranged to make the work of physically shelving and finding books easier. "The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is 'book.' Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained...In the digital world,there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer." So just don't fall into the trap of making assumptions about what is being optimized for.

Shirky's suggests thorough tagging of individual documents will allow search facilities to locate digital assets. Full-text indexing can add value, and in most cases the overhead is much less these days due to much faster processors. But even he admits to a major problem - tags are subject to a degree of egocentrism that frequently makes your tags next to worthless to me. His solution involves statistically deciding which tags are important by the number of people who apply the tag. This works well with gigantic groups, like all the internet, or tiny groups, like a single person. In between, less so.

What does all this have to do with anything? Well, I like to save things that are of interest to me, and I like to be able to put my hands on them later. If I hadn't saved Alex Payne's article years ago, I wouldn't be able to refer to it now. Fortunately, I have a program called Tellico that I use to categorize books, essays, brochures, catalogs, manuals and all the things that used to be distributed on paper but now are kept in digital format. Tellico has a heirarchical framework (each author has a top-level directory with all their works in it), and it has a filterable tag system. When a document is placed in a top-level, I attach tags that are useful to me. That way, I can find a book by looking up the author or book name, and if I can't remember either of them, I can filter on tags that would be associated with it. For example, if I want to refer to a historical cookbook and can't remember its name or author, I can filter on "cookbook", "michigan" and get a list of all my downloaded cookbooks from the excellent Michigan State University collection of old cookbooks. If I don't find it, I can delete the "michigan" filter and get a larger list of all the documents I have tagged "cookbook" and maybe I can find it then. If I remember it is a church cookbook, I can add the "church" tag and find it that way. Works good for finding things in my 5,000 document collection.

That's all well for documents, but not so good for lists, notes, code scraps, and Barry's black swan. In other words, for things that might end up in Alex Payne's everything bucket. Over the years I have tried three programs to help me track this kind of thing. The first was RedNotebook, which served fairly well for ten years. It is still under development, but unfortunately the developer has broken it a couple of times trying to find the right data structure, and it took some trouble for me to fix my old data to make it readable. RedNotebook is fairly unstructered - the only structure is the date an entry was created. The rest of it is dependent on tags. A powerful word cloud function makes it possible to find specific entries. One big advantage of RedNotebook is that the user can embed graphics in the entries. To me, this is important, and it kept me using the program despite its flaws.

Next came Osmo. This program is a very light organizer program, with tabs for calendar, tasks, contacts and notes. The notes section is the only one of interest to me. Once the notes tab is selected, the user can create a new note or see a list of titles of existing notes. Notes can be tagged and sorted with categories. There is no feature allowing images to be imbedded, and the search only works on the note titles, not the body of the notes. I set up a custom Recoll routine to index the full Osmo program so I could search inside the notes, which helped, but the program is not adequate for my needs.

Recently I came across CherryTree. It is in active development so it should be around for a while. This program has most of the features I want. It has a heirarchical tree structure that is visible in the left pane, and the contents of the current node in the tree are displayed in the right pane. It has a powerful search feature that can find regular expressions across all nodes, and tagging of nodes to make search even easier. It allows images to be imbedded in nodes. So far, I haven't found anything not to like. One thing to keep in mind, the program literally embeds images in the nodes - it's not a link. The image is resized according to the user's wishes, converted to .png and included in the actual CherryTree database. This means the program file could grow to prodigious size if a lot of large image files were imbedded. I'm not too concerned. My machine has gigs and gigs of free space and additional hard drives are cheap. My main storage hogs are my library, managed through Tellico, and my photographs, managed through Gwenview.

So, it looks like, for now, I have a good system for storing and retrieving the things that might end up in /misc or some other everything bucket. But I'm still not sure where I am going to put Barry's black swan.

All photographs by Paul M. Clayton unless otherwise noted.

Posts from 7/22/22 through 8/22/23.

Newer posts -

• 9/4/23 through today.

Older posts -

• 9/15/21 through 7/18/22.
• 10/27/20 through 9/14/21.
• 5/13/20 through 10/23/20
• 10/1/19 through 5/12/20
• 2/28/19 through 9/30/19
• 9/1/18 through 2/27/19
• 3/1/18 through 8/31/18

If you enjoy this site, I invite you to visit some of my other websites:

• Neuse River Sailors
• Ferries, Freighters and Barge Tows
• The Woodshop at Joe's Basement