This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Machines in Repair

Posted by ehren

AC Automotive's Chip Wood was the first repair shop manager to accept my challenge, and on the phone he quoted me prices for tire swapping, a safety inspection, and theoretical other repairs as the safety inspection demanded, and said he could get it all done Tuesday (not true). We dropped off the bus Tuesday morning at 7:30, when the place opened, and caught city transit back into downtown. The library wasn't open yet, but on finding internet I did a last furious hour of work for KARNAGE. According to the client, it's working great.

I went back to the library shortly after it opened, finally managed a CVS update of SPECTRE (an intermediate server had switched IPs, and the script my partner wrote to auto-add my dynamic IP to his firewall's allow list became angry). I had considerable difficulty getting anything substantive done on Tuesday. In the afternoon I walked across I-5 on Pine and then north on Broadway, through a cool area with less money and more yutes. My walk ended at the Asian Art Museum in a hilltop park looking across a small channel at UW. The craftsmanship and detail of the older pieces were impressive, as was a unique exhibit about Japanese firemen's jackets from the 18th and 19th centuries. Viewing the amazing things people make is a frustrating inspiration. Even though the last pieces of the bus are just over a month old, my hands itch to do something other than type and drive. The veggie conversion...between work, travel, mailing parts ahead, and securing enough 110V power to drill through the frame...it's just going to take a long time.

Around 4:30 I called AC Automotive:

"How's the school bus coming along?"
"Oh, we've been fighting the rain all day. We'll probably finish it up tomorrow."
"That's ok as long as we can live in your parking lot tonight."
"Yep, no problem."

At 5, after spending too much time looking for little, easy things to do instead of making progress on the big, difficult things, I bagged the library and went to the downtown mall to read "The Good War" (Noah's suggestion) until Miro arrived for the 7:30 showing of Star Wars III, which I assume everybody has seen, and I enjoyed more than the first two, but that's about all I can say.

After the movie let out I got into contact with Steve and Karen, newly arrived in Seattle from a Portland wedding, and I walked down to 2nd Ave to meet up with them. After grabbing dinner at an Italian restaurant we went to the bar with the mechanical bull and played a few games of 3-way pool before driving back to the bus in their rental.

I set the alarm for 8, just in case they'd forget we were in there and jack up the bus. They said they'd be finished by 2 no problem (not true). Chip Wood (and that is his real name) runs the shop, and I talked to him for a bit about the Boeing tour, but he recommended that instead we go to the Museum of Flight restoration center, also in Everett. His family apparently donated two of the aircraft, a United 727 and a C-247 (Boeing's precursor to the DC-3/C-47 workhose).

Steve, Karen and I grabbed breakfast at Denny's (as Andy's Diner, a literal pile of railroad cars converted into a restaurant adjacent AC Automotive, showed no signs of opening) and drove up to Everett around 10. We were informed that the first available tour would begin at 2pm, and naturally the rental car had to be returned at 2:30. Fie.

Unable to take the Boeing tour, we drove back along Airport Rd. to the Museum of Flight restoration center. Even though it wasn't the "real" museum near SeaTac, we found that the restoration center is one of the best non-flight aerospace experience in existence. The parking lot was tiny, the entrance so unadorned we drove past it and parked in a nearby small business' lot.

Most of the restorations were organized around a donated aircraft, with an all-volunteer workforce. Homemade posters and diagrams would explain work in progress, and several of them were soliciting help of any skill level. Oi! No museum-quality cutaway can replicate the depth of view you get from seeing a real historic airplane half disassembled by real engineers trying to fix real problems.

The main room, perhaps 75 x 300 feet, housed at least a dozen cramped aircraft restoration projects. Stripped airframes hung in the air, jet engines stood endwise on palattes, their wires and fuel lines loosely dangling. A Crusader bomber shared an aisle with a flying wing, a DeHavelland Comet's nose poked through the last hangar door, and inbetween it all were racks and bins full of akimbo parts, canopies on flaps, hydraulic actuators used as paperweights on ancient photocopied blueprints. A squadron of salty retired Boeing engineers stood clustered around every third project, attempting to out banter each other.

I should come clean here and admit that I was completely obsessed with aviation between the ages of roughly 13 and 19 (an aeroastro major freshman year), which implies that I am still uncontrollably excited about airplanes. I watched enough episodes of Wings on the Discovery Channel to, even now, provide me the knowledge to confidently scoff at the suggestion that a Harrier could do a better job than a C-130 at delivering emergency supplies to a windy mountaintop (it came up last week). I know what an empennage is, and how to perform a coordinated turn. I logged 50 hours of flight time in high school, perhaps 10 or 15 short of a license, in skittish little Cessna 152s and the larger 172s (highlights include: almost hitting a deer on a taxiway, zero gravity dives, and landing one of those teeny planes in Oshkosh, on one of the biggest runways in the world).

So, this was really quite exciting.

The openness of it all was almost confounding. No barrier, tape, or signs kept you from sliding back the cargo door on the Sea King helicopter, and inside there was simply a note asking you not to climb in any further. The Comet's cockpit was open for unescorted tours. You could get as close as you wanted to almost anything, short of climbing in jet intakes. I walked close to a workbench to view work in progress, and the guy turned around and started telling me about the 727 air conditioning system he was cleaning. Then he invited me out to look at the plane, as he had something to check on. After showing me a few choice segments, he happily started answering my question "So, what else have you found jerry-rigged in passenger aircraft?" before another coot came along to confer about how they might route the fuel lines around the fuselage tank they didn't want to deal with repairing.

Steve, Karen and I poked for a few hours, and based on a tip from one of the restorers we then drove a short way to a private company working on Messerschmidt 262s, the first operational jets from WWII, the Luftwaffe's last desparate stab at reclaiming the skies. Their tour was mildly engaging, with great details of how the original engines used to set the runways on fire, and lasted around 18 hours before self-destructing on average, and came standard with 2-stroke gasoline starter motors.

Steve and Karen dropped me off near AC Automotive and continued to the airport to return their car, and I spent the rest of the afternoon hovering around Chip and his minions, making my presence felt and thereby ensuring that the bus was actually finished on Wednesday. Though truck repairmen know they could probably build a better RV than ours if they were so inclined, the bus definitely wins their approval and a kind of trust. I got to hang out in the workspaces, and was even asked to hold the torch for a bit while they hammered out the exhaust pipe into a trumpet shape.

So, the report:

The only surprise was that the safety inspection was $73/hour, not $73 total (they only charged us for 2 hours) so for $240 we got bunch of things fixed, and most importantly, have peace of mind about the remaining distance of the trip, and long after that.

So by 6 I left AC Automotive, parked in our old haunt on Utah Ave., and I cleaned and took care of odds & ends while Miro, Steve, and Karen came back from downtown. I'm not sure if Miro has noticed yet, but I threw out the large sheetmetal panel he suggested keeping, or at least cutting down to save the placard with weight and tire specifications on it, for nostalgia's sake. All the info has been written down, and that damn thing attacks me with sharp corners and edges wherever I put it in the bus, and that's been happening for six months. Cruftlabs' recently instituted policy of "Fix it or fuck it" in order to throw out useless junk was the main inspiration for my callousness on this subject.

We dropped Karen off near the airport, then Steve, Miro and I ate a cheap dinner at Happy Hut Teriyaki, then drove to Wal Mart in Renton where we passed out around 10.