My uncle was a mechanical genius

[DILLARD000]

Is this another "pointless thread"???

No, no, of course not!

 

[DILLARD000]

Humans are only here because the scumdogs of the universe came here and had their way with apes.

Apes? Not sure I believe that; at least the last 5 generations of my family walked upright; got pictures to prove it !!!

 

[Blmpkn]

Apes? Not sure I believe that; at least the last 5 generations of my family walked upright; got pictures to prove it !!!

This all happened years ago.

It wasn't soon after the mating that the scumdogs realized these 'humans' they accidentally made are all filth.. and then started the noble quest of killing each and every one of us, cleansing the earth.

There's been.. around a dozen albums made chronicling the story. The first installment is named Hell-o. Very much reccomend.

 

[doorgunner]

Chapter 1

I............................Got.........................................Nothing.



(working on Chapter 2)

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

I'm just a simple man trying to make my way in the universe.

 

[Blmpkn]

Chapter 1

I............................Got.........................................Nothing.



(working on Chapter 2)

Instant best seller!

 

[19Walt93]

My mother's older brother was a clever guy. He grew up less than 1/2 mile from where I'm sitting on a dairy farm and spent WW II in the Army Air Corp in Europe. He set up a workshop in my grandfather's barn and maintained all his construction equipment after he gave up farming. He built my cousin a tractor using a rear end out of an old car with the wishbones becoming the frame. A 3 speed transmission was grafted to the pinion flange of the rear end and driven by a horizontal shaft Briggs & Stratton engine. We ran that thing all over the hill. My older cousin used to tap the maples on what is now my land and he used an early 50's Chevy to make a tracked vehicle to drag the gathering tank around. He took the body off, cut the frame, and mounted the rear end so he could adjust it fore and aft. He cut the tread off 2 of Gramp's old tractor tires and stretched them around the Chevy wheels, then pushed the rear end back to hold them tight and fabricated a driveshaft. He split the parking brakes so he could turn it like a skid steer. Since the car had a Powerglide, he figured it was useless for anything else. Make your own, make due, or do without was the operating philosophy.

 

[Josh B]

My father grew up in Dallas, around 12th Avenue, which was a tough bit of ground, and he did a lot of street fighting.
His dream was to be a farmer and in his pre teens he would ride a bicycle 110 miles to his uncles farm and work there until his father would eventually take him back to Dallas.
He didn't talk a lot about himself but over the years you could put a bit of a picture together. I'm not sure when they got into airplanes but the uncle spent the rest of his life (after WWII) working on them.

My father joined the army and was placed in the Army Air Corp, where he spent the duration of his service as a pilot trainer, although he rarely ever mentioned it.

Most who were in the thickest battles came home and rarely ever discussed it, they had seen far too much death up close to wish to discuss it.

My father was the same way tho he never set foot on a foreign shore.

I spent most of my life rambling and doing whatever came along, but don't think it wasn't interesting, I was in a 8000 ft. gold mine in South Dakota and in Oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico, and a bit of anything in between. As you fly into and out of DFW Airport you can see at least 6 of the high rise office buildings I drew and helped design there.
In my entire life my father never told me as much about his past as I put about mine in that one paragraph.

He did tell my brother in law about sitting in the cockpit of a B-17 on the tarmac waiting for a slot for him to take up some more pilot trainees when they heard it coming in over the radio that Japan had surrendered.

From that I finally gathered why, after seeing a newsreel at an air base of some coffins lined along the tarmac, which is basically any part of an airport that isn't runway, why he never spoke of it.

The runways then were full of planes taking off bound for overseas laden with soldiers and bombs, which would soon be returning laden with coffins, which would be lain along the tarmac as they waited to be shipped to their homes, as the planes they came in on left again, laden with soldiers and bombs.

My father saw as much death sitting right there on that tarmac as anybody saw in those battlefields, and had the same reason for not wanting to discuss it.
There are so many things I may never know about him, but I do know and firmly believe they were the Greatest Generation

 

[19Walt93]

My father didn't talk much about it, either. He told me about my uncle being shot by the 12 year old German and some about what my uncle had done. He told me about being in a public bathroom in Paris where the toilets were in a line, not in stalls, and having a woman come in and sit on the one beside him. He told me about the radar unit they towed around with a truck because it filled a tractor trailer, I found out that he was in the 605th anti aircraft battalion in the last year when I found some old stuff. He told me about what they had to do to drive through deep water- that's when he mentioned Omaha beach. Breaker points generate ozone so distributors had to be vented, to water proof them, the drivers would run a string to the distributor from the drivers seat and stick it over the vent with bees wax. Once out of the water, they'd pull the string and hope the vent was uncovered. If the distributor wasn't vented, it would blow the cap off.

 

[superj]

i am glad i never got sent to any of the war zone stuff when i was in the army. my stepdad never mentioned anything about vietnam till one day we were outside having some beers after work and playing basketball. then he told me a whole bunch of stuff about being a door gunner on a huey and you had to shoot anything that moved because kids would shoot rockets at you and old women would shoot at you. he said he changed jobs as soon as his first enlistment was up so he could get away from that. a guy at work said the same thing, it was horrible because he had to shoot kids and older folks

 

[Josh B]

My uncle was a mechanical genius even as a child. He built his own radios as a boy, eventually became a mechanical engineer who helped design missile guidance systems to win WWII. When you went to his house he had a half dozen cuckoo clocks he restored on display. He even had a working pinball machine and an HO railroad set that measured about 10 x 30 in the basement. It had banks of switch tracks and it astonished all the relatives at Thanksgiving. He eventually rose to be the Vice President of General Dynamics, an aerospace company based in New Jersey.

When I grew up in Manhattan, the best I could do was to have a small railroad set with 4 switch tracks. I did however do all the work on my bicycles and refinished a couple of old wooden bookcases. I rebuilt my first engine on an old MGB the first year I got my drivers license, but my economic situation being what it was I could only earn a two year Associate college degree while working days. I wanted to become a mechanical engineer but I struggled with advanced math, like calculus, and chemistry was a bore to me. Eventually, I did pass the test to build the Apache helicopter for Teledyne Ryan in San Diego, but I never took the job because I had previously agreed to give Hyatt hotels a two week notice where I worked as a wine steward. By that time, they had offered the job to someone else farther down the list of exam scores. When you snooze you lose they told me. Without an advanced college degree I always had to take lesser jobs than my famous uncle. I finished my career doing spot checks on taxi cabs and school buses as a transportation officer in Miami's Dade County.

I wish my uncle could have seen how self taught I managed to rewire a house or two, do basic plumbing jobs and spectacular landscaping with the aid of my Kubota tractor. We even have a four thousand gallon waterfall fish pond, fully landscaped that my wife and I designed. My uncle would be proud. Working with your hands is a skill sorely lacking in most people who drive around thinking that "modern cars are too complex to work on". What a bunch of b.s. ! In many ways, these old Ford Rangers are easier to work on. You'll never have to rebuild a carburetor, or set points, and nowadays the finicky rear drum brakes have all but disappeared, but I'll leave automatic transmission work to the bravest amongst us. Clutches and pressure plates are tricky enough. Sometimes, it makes sense to let someone else do the work. My wife was a trained carpenter in Germany, but she's too busy to do that kind of work now. She did just help me lay a bamboo floor in the upstairs guest room yesterday. Those German high standard they are so famous for left her busy looking for some "flubs" in the baseboards I covered up with a little caulk. It will never be seen - no one will ever know. I bet there are even a few flubs being passed over today at Teledyne Ryan.

That's really quite a story Garth, sorry I didn't mention it sooner. You were in some good company all around. I grew up in Ft Worth due to our small family farm not providing enough to raise a family and my father taking us there to live. Dad had a cabinet shop there for several years. In the 3rd grade my Mom kept me out of school one day and put a pallet in the car for me to act ill while we went to a nearby community and it seemed a parade of some sort. I very well recall LBJs big cowboy hat and to some extent JFK's limo. As we pulled into the driveway at home a neighbor came running out crying to tell Mom JFK had been shot.
It was all straight across the lake from Carswell AFB which at the time was one of the 3 Strategic Air Command bases. This was all soon after the Russian Missile crisis in Cuba and our school soon began an underground school building made to withstand a direct Atomic bomb, where I spent my junior high school years.
The best factory jobs nearby were across the lake near the AFB, at a place named.... Your uncle's
General Dynamics Bell Helicopter was also in big around DFW area

 

[19Walt93]

i am glad i never got sent to any of the war zone stuff when i was in the army. my stepdad never mentioned anything about vietnam till one day we were outside having some beers after work and playing basketball. then he told me a whole bunch of stuff about being a door gunner on a huey and you had to shoot anything that moved because kids would shoot rockets at you and old women would shoot at you. he said he changed jobs as soon as his first enlistment was up so he could get away from that. a guy at work said the same thing, it was horrible because he had to shoot kids and older folks

The mechanic in the stall beside me took over as parts manager a few months before I started running the shop. We'd eat lunch together at his desk in the parts room and he talked some about Viet Nam. He said the area where their tents were set up was surrounded by a chain link fence with a locked gate. Local kids would come in and do little chores like shining shoes, etc, in exchange for candy bars or cash. Then a kid who everyone knew came in and the guards didn't stop him, he walked to the tent that served as a barracks and detonated the bomb he was wearing. After that kids weren't allowed inside the fence, if they made it through the gate they were told to stop, if they didn't stop they were shot. He said it was hard to shoot a kid. I'm thankful I did get sent there.

 

[sgtsandman]

The mechanic in the stall beside me took over as parts manager a few months before I started running the shop. We'd eat lunch together at his desk in the parts room and he talked some about Viet Nam. He said the area where their tents were set up was surrounded by a chain link fence with a locked gate. Local kids would come in and do little chores like shining shoes, etc, in exchange for candy bars or cash. Then a kid who everyone knew came in and the guards didn't stop him, he walked to the tent that served as a barracks and detonated the bomb he was wearing. After that kids weren't allowed inside the fence, if they made it through the gate they were told to stop, if they didn't stop they were shot. He said it was hard to shoot a kid. I'm thankful I did get sent there.

That is a very tough thing that soldiers have to deal with when it arises. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had to deal with it too. At least they were't screamed at for being "baby killers" like the Vietnam Vets were. I'm glad I never had to face that issue or dilemma. It's you or them. Something the protesters in the 60's and 70's didn't want to hear.

 

[dvdswan]

this thread makes me think of Mac Davis...

I'm nowhere near perfect so my story is just like @doorgunner

Chapter 1

I............................Got.........................................Nothing.



(working on Chapter 2)