O'Keefe vs. Letten

Watch "@Project_Veritas detained while meeting former US Attorney Jim Letten - "Truth To Power"" on YouTube

The Yard, Alcatraz Island

The Yard, Alcatraz, a photo by Noladishu on Flickr.

MSY

Gee, I wonder why, a photo by Noladishu on Flickr.

Kids these days

Lucille Bogan - Shave 'em Dry (1935) {NSFW Lyrics}

Just a reminder that foul-language in music is nothing new.  I bring this up, because I recently had to explain to someone that a 24-year-old listening to "Fuck Tha Police" when it was first released is now 44-45 years old.

"We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control." - inscription in Ancient Egyptian tomb

Patches Update: Took my Chevy to the Levee Edition

The tailgate is now installed.  The truck is looking awesome.

Took Patches to Lakeshore Drive and took some photos.  

Painted the area behind the tailgate first.

4th of July Weekend Project

Here's what the front of the truck originally looked like:

And here's what it looks like now:

Much better.

Here's how it got that way....

The bumper was a little crooked and was installed upside-down.  I replaced it with a straighter bumper painted white.  Doing that required some cutting, grinding, and welding on the front of the frame.

Next, Patches got new shoes!  5 matching rims and tires!  What a novel concept.  I was getting some pretty nasty tread separation, so it was a good time.

The main project over the long weekend was cleaning, repainting the grille and replacing the (VERY corroded) radiator mount.  .  

Stripped out a bunch of old components, painted the connecting bits, then started reassembly.

Bit by bit it came together.  There are about a billion bolts holding the front together.  Almost all are the famous 1/2" GM Body Bolt.

Some minor electrical work, and Patches was rolling again.

Oh yeah, and don't forget the little tree and fuzzy dice hanging like testicles from the rearview mirror:

The next project is going to be replacing the tailgate.  Prep work is already underway:

Orleans Avenue Canal Wall Gap

So, the Corps was in charge of building a hurricane protection system around New Orleans, as ordered by Congress in response to Hurricane Betsy.  There are a lot of interlocking political entities that (levee boards, New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board [S&WB], etc.) that end up adding some complexities to construction.

The Corps eventually decides to build walls along the outfall canals (instead of moving the pumping stations to the lake; that's a HUGE issue all on its own that I won't touch on for now).  They build the canal walls on the 17th Street and London Ave. Canals.  There, fundamental flaws in the analysis of the soil strength (the sort that even an undergraduate in civil engineering should understand to avoid), will lead to their collapse.  

The Orleans Ave. Canal didn't fail like the others.  Why?  Well, that's sort of revealing.  Pumping Station Number 7 drains the area near Delgado and puts water into the Orleans Canal to bring it to the lake.  That pumping station is a masonry structure built all the way back when Albert Baldwin Wood was running the S&WB.  Masonry is relatively weak and brittle.  Since that structure is the closest to the lake out of all the pumping stations, if they were to add walls lining the canal, the lake water could push up against the walls of the pumping station and (if they rose high enough) collapse the walls of the pumping station.  That would be bad.

Fortunately, the Corps & S&WB realized this.  The Corps requested the S&WB reinforce their structure.  The S&WB says, 'we're broke, it's your project, you fix the structure, since it's hurricane protection and not internal drainage' [this is in ~80's-early 90's, so the S&WB was pretty broke].  The Corps and the S&WB then get into a big pissing contest.  Meanwhile, the walls are going up.  Eventually, they reach the section nearest PS#7 and they just stop building the wall.  About a 300' gap is left, that way if waters rise, it won't put undue pressure on the walls of PS#7.  

This gap is still there today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noladishu/8009389284/in/photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noladishu/8009394002/in/photostream

The thing is about this gap is it renders basically the entire wall useless!  The wall provides basically no protection for the city, despite several million dollars spent on its construction.  The reason the Orleans Ave. walls didn't fail is because they were never holding anything back!  

Now, I'm actually an engineer with some experience.  I actually see the situation the engineers were in.  Situations with ambiguous boundaries and split responsibilities happen.  You rarely know exactly what the final project is going to look like before you begin.  When you have a gap, you sit down and figure out whose responsibility it is.  Engineers have lots of meetings...  Usually, someone just mans up and takes it over (usually the one with the biggest budget).  It's a serious sign of how much of a cluster the levees were before Katrina that there was never resolution on this issue.  The gap continues to be a monument to "not my job" syndrome ( http://www.dw-jotd.com/images/notmyjob.jpg ).  

I'm not making any of this up.  When ASCE came to town to write their Katrina report, they specifically highlighted the Orleans Ave. Canal Gap debacle as a symbol of how it was "a system in name only":
(~page 64.) http://www.asce.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/ASCE_News/2009/04_April/ERPreport.pdf . You can go there and see it for yourself, too. It's near where 610 crosses over the canal. Drive down the west edge of City Park and look for yourself.

Also, see Matt McBride's latest post at Fix the Pumps.

Also, test post from Blogger App. Not sure how it will work.

Old Chevy Ad

Original Ad from 1963:

Note that Patches is actually a 1962, but has the front grille from a 1963 truck.  Patches cost about $2,000 brand new and weighed in at 3,190-lbs.  Source.

Backstory.  (& Followup)  Something to think about next time you wander the aisles at a big box store.  (h/t Reddit.).

NOTE: Updated. For even more fun, try a Google Image search for Masanjia.

The main sin for most of these workers is being members of Falun Gong.  I've just been reading some WWII history, and I can't help but make the parallel between persecuted Jews by the Nazi's and someone who won't renounce their faith, even under torture.

Project Truck Update: Patches Home Again

So the garage that's been Patches' home for a while has become structurally unsound.  We've brought it home over the summer while I have a break from grad school to fix it up and do some work.  

In order to get it running, I first had to connect up the gas tank.  I did it just like I described in the previous post.  

The second piece of hose is to prevent the tubing from rattling against the tank.

Since Patches no longer has a roof over its head, it now has a nice new coat:

One of the other essential items for any pickup truck is a tool chest in the box.  Patches really needs it because there's very little storage space in the cab.  I found a plywood one that I cleaned up and painted red to match:

A never ending war with an old truck is the battle against the rust monster.  I've cut out a big chunk and cut a patch panel to roughly fit and riveted it in place.  I may come back and weld it in later.

I'm not entirely happy with the patch job, but rivets are easy to undo.  Also, I've put in some duck tape to smooth out the edges.

Patches took forever to crank when I finally got to running it.  I had to use the old trick of pouring a capful of fresh gasoline down the open throat of the carburetor.  The gasoline (despite using Stabil) had volatilized away.  After doing a good amount of work on it this past weekend, it felt really great to take it for a leisurely spin down Lakeshore Drive.

Some of the priorities moving forward are going to be finish repairing the cab floor, replacing the rims (which are dented and leak slowly) and tires (the rear wheels are so old and dry-rotted, the tread is starting to separate), and eventually replace the wiring with the harness I purchased a while back.  

Clean Patches

Clean Patches, a photo by Noladishu on Flickr.

Clean Patches

Project Truck Update: Lots of Neglect Edition

After neglecting poor Patches for ages, I've finally pushed & pulled her out of the garage and dusted her off. I've been really snowed under in Grad school (got a 4.0 this semester), but I've got a window to work on the truck over the summer to do some work, so I'll try to make the best of it.

I've brushed her off and found an old plywood toolchest to reside in the bed.

Candice spent much of today pouring almost an entire bottle of Armor All onto the bench seat:



The next challenge will be reconnecting the fuel tank.  While trying to do that today, the bell and spigot joint (which has given me trouble in the past) finally came apart.  The replacement fuel sender has a female threaded connection made of brass that's soldered onto a steel sender unit.  While trying to screw the male threaded connection on, the solder snapped and the end came off.  Here's what it looked like before.  Here's what it looks like for now:

Note the piece of brass sitting on the top of the hose clamps.

The solution I've come up with is to take a tubing cutter, slice the bell-end of the bell-and-spigot joint, take a piece of gasoline-rated hose and hose clamp it on with double clamps.  This should work reliably, because (unlike more modern cars, which use a fuel pump in the tank that pushes fuel to the engine), Patches has a mechanical fuel pump connected off the engine that sucks fuel from the tank.  If the connection starts to leak with Patches, air will enter the fuel line, the line will lose siphon  and the engine will eventually stop.  The implementation of the fix will have to wait until next weekend, though.

Great Research

Condensation, atmospheric motion, and cold beer 
Dale R. Durran and Dargan M. W. Frierson 

April 2013, page 74 

The latent heat released when water condenses is an important driver of weather phenomena. And as a simple experiment shows, it also makes it tough to enjoy a frosty one in the summertime.

Incontrovertible proof that beer koozies keep your beer warm.

Avondale

Avondale, a photo by Noladishu on Flickr.

Photo is a recent ad I saw in Offshore Magazine.

Here's a few recent updates on Avondale's situation:
* Delivery of the USS Alaska. The second to last Navy ship Avondale is scheduled to deliver.
* Avondale eyes energy industry. See photo. Offshore Magazine is the offshore oil patch trade rag.
* And a pair of articles from the Lens: Shipyard Rally and Jindal-nomics.