The Northward Contrail

On not giving up

Each year while the 24 Hours of Le Mans is going on, hubby and I take part in our annual model building challenge, constructing an automobile model entirely within the 24 hour span of the race.  This year, since we weren't able to get to Daytona for the Rolex 24, we did the same thing just for laughs.

The ratty pic above is of my entry in this year's competition, a Revellogram C5 Corvette that I bought for no particular reason many years ago.  It had been on my pile of stuff to sell.  But, for various reasons, none of the more appealing stuff in my stash really called to me.  Okay, well, the Tamiya Porsche Boxster kit did, but once I got started, I realized I'd misplaced the instruction sheet.  Okay, well, back to the Corvette kit instead.

This build seemed doomed almost from the start.  First were the multiple primer coats, because I couldn't get a smooth coat that didn't have a blotch or a piece of dust in it, so I had to sand all that out and re-prime it multiple times.  In between, I worked on the chassis and interior.  That went reasonably well, until I tried airbrushing the seats a different color and found not only that the color wasn't as complementary as I'd thought, but the paint was also too thin.  That's not to mention the adventures in assembling some of the trickier parts, including a rear suspension component that took flight and didn't turn up until I was cleaning up before bedtime.

The body continued to be its own adventure.  After much agonizing, I decided to use a can of Tamiya's Racing Blue, a very dark metallic blue I'd bought for the FW24 kit I have upstairs.  I liked the idea of using a Formula One color on a street car, and I love Tamiya's spray paints because they set up quickly and smoothly.  I put a pretty good progression of coats on it Saturday night, and left it to set up overnight.

Things were going reasonably well until I looked for some pieces and couldn't find them.  It turned out the kit was missing an entire runner of clear parts.  The windows were there, as were some other things, but the kit was missing its taillights, rear marker lights, and a couple other clear parts.  I don't know if the kit never had them, or if I lost them, or what.  Regardless, rats.  I tried to figure out what to do, since I was too far in to just throw in the towel.  Besides, something inside me didn't want to give up, anyway. 

Just before bedtime, I had a thought.  Upstairs I had a kit of the C5R Corvette, the fifth-generation Corvette built as a racer for Daytona and Le Mans.  On a hunch, I test fit one of the C5R's taillights on the stock C5R.  It worked fine.  I decided I'd thermoform new taillights for the C5 kit using a C5R taillight as a pattern.  Simple enough.

Sunday morning dawned and the race coverage came back on, and after a bit I went back to work.  That's when I realized that not only were there imperfections in the body's finish coat, but I'd missed a couple of recessed areas and some undercuts.  So I sanded out the imperfections as best I could and re-shot the body.  The second attempt was much better, but as I polished it, I got the hood a little too thinly coated.  So it was one more shot of paint, just on the hood and front fenders.  This one worked, and it polished out reasonably well, so I was happy.

By the time I had the body in shape, the race only had about an hour and a half to go.  I had to hustle if I was going to make it.  So I masked off all the stuff that needed to be painted on the window trim areas and such, and went to paint them black.  That's when I remembered that I forgot to clean my airbrush's color cup the night before; sure enough, it had a solid coating of dried paint inside.  While it soaked, I'd have to find another one.  Okay, well, our airbrushes use the same color cups, so no hassle.

I was starting to think I would make it.  Then I installed the windows.  Windshield went in okay.  The rear window...well, it was a little too close to some super glue I used to install some interior components a minute or two before, and within a moment or two there was a smoke ring crazed into the rear window.  That's when I decided the model had beat me, and I put it aside to watch the last half-hour of the race.  I didn't like how I was hurrying in the last stretch.  I was disappointed, because it's the first of these three builds I've not completed by the end of the race, but by that point, it wasn't worth it.  (Hubby, meanwhile, had completed a gorgeous build of a Toyota Celica from a Tamiya kit.)

The race ended.  I folded laundry after it was over.  My stuff was still set up on the kitchen table.  And I started to think about how I'd thrown in the towel.  We'd just spent the last day watching a race that's all about endurance, where the success goes to the people who don't give up even when things go wrong.  You routinely see teams a hundred or more laps down, long out of contention, but they'll bring their cars in, patch them up and change stuff out, and get back out there.  Because, you see, merely finishing a 24-hour race is an achievement in itself.  As long as your car can start and its engine can send power to four rolling wheels, you're not out of it.  We have pictures taken at past Rolex 24s of cars missing all manner of body components, looking beat to kingdom come, but they were still out there when the checkered flag flew, plugging away.

And that got in my head.  Why not?  So I sat down and started to work, fixing the things that bothered me.  I got some thermoform plastic and smash-formed the missing taillights.  I popped out the crazed rear window, used my polishing kit on it, and got rid of the smoke ring.  I fixed as many of the little things as I could.  And I got it finished.  There are a few touch-ups I have yet to do, but that little model is, for all intents and purposes, finished.

It gives me some hope that I did this.  If there's one quality I really like about myself, it's that I never completely give up.  Yes, there are times when I get really down and out and feel hopeless, but those tend to be short; most of the time, my mind is working, itching to get back into the fight so I can knock the problem into submission.  I don't like it when problems win.  I'm one of those people who has that test pilot mentality: when other people are going "Oh, no!  I've only got ten seconds before I crash!", I'm saying to myself, "Hey, I got ten seconds!  I bet I can save this thing!"  And that's how it was here.  Maybe I missed the end-of-race deadline for the project.  But the only disgrace would have been if I had put the model back in the box, taken it back upstairs, and put it back on the shelf as a failure.  Instead, I have a pretty nice little model -- not perfect, but not bad, either -- and a lesson from it.

Oh, and if all goes well, next year's Rolex 24 will be with us once again in the stands.  (Though I seriously doubt we'll bring model kits to build as the race is going on.)

In memoriam

It's once again time to observe a grim trio of anniversaries: Apollo 1 (1967), Challenger (1986), and Columbia (2003).  Apollo 1 was before my time, but memories of Challenger and Columbia are extremely vivid.  In a way, my life's trajectory was changed so much that morning in 1986, and I didn't know it.  It's hard to believe it's been a quarter-century, because it seems like only yesterday.

Here's NASA's official Day of Remembrance site.

The littlest things

As part of our recent shakeup, I've not only inherited some old equipment, but some other castoffs as well.  And I'm reminded it's funny what will make you happy. 

For years I've wanted a storage locker for the area just behind my office.  There's been these piles of stuff back that needed a home, but it all had nowhere to live.  A few months ago, when our stuff was moved out due to the involuntary reorganization, one storage locker suddenly had no home. 

Well, now it does.  It's back there now, and those boxes of trinketure, utilities and other odds and ends are now living inside, all happy on their shelves and everything.  My office is (slightly) less cluttered.  It's a sign of how happy I get about little things (or perhaps a sign of something else) that I actually got excited when that storage locker was finally in position and I started putting stuff in there.  Finally!  Life is organized!  And there was much rejoicing.

If I'm that way about an old storage locker at the office, I'm a bit frightened to think what will happen in a few weeks when hubby and I get some bookshelves constructed for the spare room. 

Wired and inspired

Yesterday we actually joined the modern age.  We'd been restricted to dial-up where we lived, because we're way out in the sticks and there's no way we're getting anything but copper wire any time soon.  (As I've said, I think the laugh I got from the phone company guy a couple years ago, after a road grader took out our cables and network boxes, told me a lot.)

Yesterday, though, we had a satellite Internet connection put in, thanks in part to a federal initiative to bring broadband out to the sticks.  An hour or so after the workers arrived, the connection was going, and I was shoveling 1s and 0s like there was no tomorrow.  I'm still getting used to the idea that I can actually access a pretty fast Internet line in my own home -- that it's not something I have to wait to get at work or in a hotel room, but it's now a part of everyday life.  It's not as fast as the really big pipe we have at work, but what we got is more than enough for what we do, and an awful lot better than the temperamental dial-up system we were using.

Better still, this let me do something really neat.  We suddenly had a phone jack free in the computer room, because we no longer have to keep our computers plugged into it.  So I went in the other room, got one of my 2500s, and connected it to the wall jack.  For once, it's nice to be able to use a phone line as a phone line -- and to not worry that I'll miss a call if one of us is on the Internet. 

And, better still, if the phone rings while I'm online, I can take the call on one of the most indestructible communications devices ever built.  You can't beat that.  (Well, only if the computer has a Model M attached.)

The first time I tuned in yesterday

It was a June afternoon in 1983.  We had gone to the nearest Really Big Town, one of those places we went maybe twice a year, for my mother's birthday.  While out and about, we'd go to one of the restaurants they didn't have in our part of the world, and we'd go shopping.  The malls in Really Big Town had stores they didn't have in our little hometown mall.

I was young enough that the toy stores still held some appeal for more than just model kits.  But any visit to the mall also obliged us to visit the record stores, too.  The first one we'd come to at this mall was a Record Bar, one of those now-defunct chains of yesteryear.  Somewhere near the back of the store, I discovered this display of cassettes, packaged in form-fitting plastic, with title cards above.  The title cards had interesting artwork on them depicting the stars of the shows, or the themes thereof.  It was a series of old-time radio recordings marketed by a company called Adventures in Cassettes. 

And it was a revelation.  I'd heard so much about these programs of yesteryear, and I loved reading about broadcasting history, but the only exposure I'd had to any of it was the odd mention of it on television.  The chance to buy the real thing, more or less unadulterated?  It was too much.  Worse, deciding which ones to buy with the $20 or $30 or so I had in my pocket was quite the decision.  They sold for, if I recall, $3.98 each.  If I also recall correctly, my purchases included a collection of old-time radio commercials, Jack Benny's 1952 broadcast in which he was visited by IRS agents, the "Hitchhiker" episode of "Suspense," a collection from W.C. Fields' programs, an episode of "The Shadow," and "The War of the Worlds" (which, since each tape was 30 minutes, required buying both parts separately).

Some of these tapes got a lot more play than the others.  The tape of commercials was a particular favorite, as was the Jack Benny tape (and my love for Jack Benny was forever cemented with it).  The darker stuff?  Well, I was still young, and it took some getting into.  As for "The War of the Worlds," well, by that age I had heard of the stories from 1938 of panic and so on, and I approached it carefully.  My brother listened to it that night after we came home, and he thought it was really cool.  As for me?  I listened carefully.  To me, the images of the Martian invaders storming through Manhattan weren't what really terrified me (although Ray Collins as the last reporter, atop the network building, reporting until the poison gas overcame him, was still kind of eerie).  No, what I found creepiest at that young age was what happened a moment later: a long silence, followed by network announcer Dan Seymour breaking the dramatic tension:

You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells.  The performance will continue after a brief intermission.  This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.

I don't know why, but that always seemed eerie to me.  I think there was something else about some of these recordings that stuck with me, too: these recordings were low-fidelity, often had dropouts and such, and a certain amount of surface noise.  On some of them, it almost sounded like rain.  I think that started the idea I've held, to this day, that the ideal time to listen to old radio (or, likewise, watch recordings made from old kinescopes) is on a rainy afternoon.

Over the months and years to come, I bought so many more of these old recordings.  The record store nearest us started carrying them, so I'd always check those out, and on the rare occasions we'd get back to Really Big Town and that Record Bar, I'd get a few more with each visit.  Those tapes were constant companions for me.  I also sent off for the Adventures in Cassettes catalog and asked for some cassettes for that Christmas.  Oh, what a happy Christmas that was, too, with so many of those wonderful cassettes to listen to, including stuff you couldn't find in stores. 

Nowadays, there's so many places I can get these old shows.  There are so many places online where you can download them, of any genre, including stuff that you couldn't find back in the day, as well as dealers who will sell you DVDs with dozens upon dozens of MP3 files on a single disc.  The Internet has been a truly glorious thing for the amateur archivist; thanks to it, even my tiny collection has more video and audio than I will ever find time to watch or listen to.  But, much as I loved media history as a child, it was forever cemented by that accidental discovery on my mother's birthday so many years ago, when I was able to bring home the first pieces of my little empire and take that first real trip back in time.  There's a few moments in life I can say influenced me forever after, and that was one of them.

The Island of Misfit Hardware

Longtime readers know I loves me the gadgetry, and working in a profession in which the equipment gets old in a hurry gives me the opportunity to rescue a few items every now and again.  We've had an equipment purge at work the last couple years, and this has meant I've scored lots of neat stuff.  For instance, there were a handful of Selectrics that were somehow hanging on until last year, and then they were condemned to the scrap heap; when we were told "take what you want, because it's going to the dump at the end of the week," I was suddenly three Selectrics richer.  (None of them work at the moment, but that's beside the point.)  The demise of our trusty traditional landline system in favor of a Cisco VoIP network meant I ended up with two more ITT/Cortelco 2500s.  (Don't want your old corded phones?  I'll gladly take them.  I'll give up my home landline when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands.)  Unfortunately, the last of our old Sennheiser 421s has gone away, so I haven't been able to grab one (though, in fairness, the last one we had looked like it had been through World War III); still, I'd like to have one someday because that's what we used back at the radio station where I used to work, and every time I see a 421, it brings back a lot of memories.

It's a long story, and it's a story that has meant a lot of sleepless nights and probably a few years shaved off my life, but our television facility is getting a long-overdue facelift.  It's a very thorough facelift.  Our old equipment was on the trailing edge of "new" when it was installed in 1994-95, so you can imagine was it was like last year.  That's right; it was steadily losing its grip.  Plus we were having a lot of trouble supporting it.  Anyway, to make a long story short, we're on the cusp of getting a zoomy new setup for everything, where the whole control room will be run from a console roughly the size of a matchbook.  (Okay, not really.) 

So we had to take everything out of the old control room.  And I knew exactly what I wanted from it.  So, right now in front of me is the old computer we used to control our teleprompter.  The reason I wanted it?  It uses a very special Model M.  Oh, you can find your IBM Model M keyboards anywhere, but this particular Model M has a Wang Computer logo on it, and I haven't seen too many of those. (And, no, it's not because of the comic factor.  Get your minds out of the gutter, kids.)

Now all I need is my own television camera with a teleprompter setup (wonder if I could fit one of our teleprompters on one of these?  Nah, probably not), and I'm good to go.  I have the computer, the keyboard, and even the little controller unit.  The software's still on the machine, and there's even a diskette with the last few scripts still on it. 

This could get dangerous.  And fun.

Something new, perhaps?

A couple days ago a friend and I got into some e-mail correspondence about a topic of mutual interest.  It had all started with a shared link, and that became some shared comments and an offhand query.  Within a couple days, it had turned into an idea, and then a phone call.  Because it's still an idea trying to form itself into something more, and because I don't want to accidentally put a wither on it by talking about it too soon, I won't say that much about it, other than that it's potentially very exciting.  Better still, it'll give me an opportunity to get back into one of the things I love most, and that's archival research.  Out of it all could come something very wonderful, if it all works out.

It's still a young idea, and we don't know where it wants to go just yet, or even if we'll be able to get it done.  Even with that, though, the idea of a new project (and, better still, a shared project, meaning I won't have to carry the burden alone) has been enough to give me a glimmer of hope.  For too long I've focused on the grunt work in what I do, and I haven't given myself the time or opportunity to do much research and synthesis.  If this works out, though, things will change, and I'll get to make a contribution in a field about which I deeply care, and help create something that will be truly wonderful.  Stay tuned.

Three years in

It occurred to me the other day that I'm a little over three years into this little blogging exercise -- or, at least, the current incarnation thereof (we'll not speak of the previous ones, thank you very much).  Since my first post here on January 8, 2008, we've been through a lot together, and all two of you who have read this website more or less faithfully (and I know who you are) have taken a guided tour of various fascinations, frustrations, adventures and general brouhaha. 

I started this variant of the blog back in 2008 because it was a cheap and easy way for me to put some pictures up of some gadgets in my collection, and it gave me a chance to write about them a little bit.  It was easier than re-learning HTML (which I was never that good at, anyway), and it was a self-contained system.  It's worked well, and I've had fun.

Well, except that my purpose has ambled about, and I'm aware of that.  It's gone from a "girl and her collection of gadgetry and assorted odd curios" blog to me spleen-venting perhaps more than I'd have liked.  A friend describes my blog as one of those "slice of life" things, and that's probably the best way to characterize it.  And while that's nice and everything, I'd like to get back this year to doing more of the stuff I did in 2008: sharing pictures and thoughts about the stuff in my collections, or writing at length about some of the archival stuff in my collection (the pieces I did about Election Night 1960, and on how the third network covered 11/22/63, are pieces of which I'm still very proud, and I want to do more of those).

So, we'll try it again a little differently.  Regardless, thanks to all of you who look in on my little website, and as long as I'm still having fun with it, I promise to keep it all coming.

Getting closer

I had some time a few nights ago to get back to work on a project I've been working on for several months.  Its story has been the same as so many of my other projects: I get excited about it initially, tear into it, and then something happens and I put it aside.  It can be an outside event, or something about the project itself can get complicated or tricky or annoying.  Regardless, aside it goes.

In this case, it's a model airliner.  And it brought some challenges.  For one, I was doing a "stretched" variant, and it required cutting things and adding plugs to the fuselage and keeping all that aligned...and then doing a lot of seamwork.  That's not so much of a big deal.  But, as if that's not enough, the manufacturer really messed up on the shape of the engines.  They required a lot of work.  Plus, they don't quite fit well up against the wing.  And that required more seamwork.  It also didn't help that, since I'm wanting to depict the most current variant, I had to add a few additional elements that required some fine seamwork.

All this has meant that 90% of the project is done.  The basic airframe is together; the wings are on, the engines are in place, the bumps and gizmos and extra thingies are in place, and you can look at it and know exactly what it will be.  But the gulf between its current state and its painted, ready-for-decals state is all that fine seamwork, some of it in some really close confines.  And that's where most of my projects choke down, for I really hate sanding, priming, filling, sanding, priming, filling, sanding...rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.  But it has to be done if the thing is to look "rite."

The good news is, after my work a couple nights ago, I'm tantalizingly close to having it ready for paint.  There's a couple areas that still need a little care, and there's some rescribing I have to do, but it's getting awfully close.  It won't be ready for the club meeting this month, but I'm hoping next month will finally bring its moment.

(Oh, and I won't even get into the fact that, as I got this project ready for this point and had visions of completion dates dancing in my head, along comes an e-mailed update from one of my favorite suppliers, advertising a sheet of detail decals and photoetched bits designed for this very project.  It's always something, isn't it?  Of course, I ordered a set.  Why not?  This is a project that, as much as I'm interested in the subject, I want to do it exactly once.)

More found fun

I found a new time sink the other day: Classic Television Showbiz, which has tons of linked video goodness and greatness all ready to go for your viewing pleasure.  Too much there to tell you about, so just go there and enjoy.