Neanderpundit

associated with a memory like mine.

Like, I can remember with perfect clarity, the last time I saw my father outside a casket, on a stainless slab at St James Hospital. I can remember the way it felt the first time someone kicked me hard in the nads. I can remember in exquisite detail walking in on my ex-inlaws in flagrante delicto.

There are a million of those memories I would love to have an erase button for; Most of the time my piss poor retrieval system protects me from the worst of them, but sometimes something triggers the old synapses and a creature climbs out of the old memory hole and assails me with it’s obscene clarity.

I someties wince at those old moments that come out, but most of the time I can get some stupid song stuck in my head and drive the rest of the crap out.

On the other hand, I can remember when the nurse put my infant daughter in my arms for the first time, and the memory is far better than any picture. I can see the dirt on her little shoes as she squishes beans into the indiana loam for the first time at six. I can see the flush in her face as she wins her first fencing match. I remember the smile on her face when she graduated 8th grade and the church had a bat loose inside making everyone giggle.

I’ll happily take the bad with the good. If i live long enough to develop Dementia, I figure I can make ten good years on the good memories alone.

comes as often as not to those who don’t deserve it.

Today a miracle has been visited upon me, and never was there anyone less deserving. The noise the truck has been making has gotten worse, and tonight I decided to rip the right front off the truck on general principles. The halfshaft is cheap enough, so I go get one and in the process of ripping it apart I discover that the inner segment of the axle is not snapped into place, and comes out with the CV axle. So i pry them apart, widen the circlip that holds the inner shaft segment in place, and snap it back in.

It’s a bit annoying that I’m so good at this, I’ve had the front end of Exploders apart so many times. I managed to rip off the outer quadrant of the suspension-Wheel, brake, rotor , bearing, upper, lower, knuckle, CV voint, go to the store and get a replacement joint, and reinstall it all, by myself, between seven and nine. In fact by Nine proper I was already here eating dinner and beginning to type this.

And the noise is gone.

Oh, it’s still loud, it’s a 13 year old ride with 160,000 miles, and big crossover tires. The unwanted, unexpected noise, otoh, is gone.

I’mna have to go to mass twice this weekend.

While I was taking my apprenticeship, a thousand years ago, we were tested in a lot fo different individual skiills. One of them was flamecutting- most people think of an acetylene torch as a cruse tool, but a skilled operator can burn a 1/4″ nut off a bolt without damaging the bolt. I can still do that, and have done so as recently as a couple months ago. The tough part is freehand torchwork- the most many people can ever do is to get two pieces of metal to separate- but if you practice you can do some pretty amazing stuff.

Our step test, at the time, was to make a 12 x 14 angle iron frame. The tolerances were a little tricky, it had to be +0-1/8″. You had to have five centerpunches on each side of the cut, and the centerpunches had to be cut exactly in half, and the centerpunches had to match when you folded the corners. The gap at the corners when folded could be no more than 1/8″.

This doesn’t sound like it would be tough, but try it sometime.

I ran across my test piece a couple weeks ago, in the basement. I don’t know if I’ve got the freehand skills for that anymore, but I damned sure did then. I remember that of 35 or 36 of us, only twelve passed right out of the gate, and only two of us did it on our first try.

At the time we were also taking a math course and a metalurgy class. I remember doing sectional etchings so we could see electromicrographs of the hardness of the materials and how the differential temper caused stress internal to the material. Internal stresses in metals can cause catastrophic failure if the stress cannot be relieved. Prince Rupert’s Drops are pieces of glass in which the internal stresses cannot be relieved.

The glass has incredible impact resistance but if you snip it’s tail, as show in the video, the internal stresses are relieved. Similar things can occur in metals, especially small pieces of steel or other alloys that have been treated for hardness but not adequately tempered- the proper application of heat will draw the brittleness out of steel.

Anyway. I was in my early twenties when I took that apprenticeship. Now those skills are old enough to drive, drink, vote, and hold public office. They may not be as good as they once were, but they’re still there, the knowledge of metallurgy has if anything improved, and I wonder, where does all that knowledge go when I die?