pdp1@EARTHLINK.NET on thu 27 jan 05
iknstutionalized fatuousities of 'convenience' verses
sense...and...off the cuff...
Hi Steve,
What fun...
Some little more below...amid...some earnest, some passion,
some fun...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Slatin"
> Phil -- SAE goes back to 1905 --
The Society of Automotive Engineers...
I admire all their early efforts.
Then my admire falls off, slowly, at some point, then, in a
steep
curve 'downward'...
That was a fun time, 1905...unlike now, where one needs a
lobotamy, or the metaphysics of obscure Saints, or both, to
stand it...
> it was the ISO of its
> day, and interchangability of parts is its heritage.
No, the ISO seems entirely evil to me, indifferent to many
deferences which Civilization requires to distinguish itself
from mere ugyness and indifference.
Too...it had been not so much of parts, but of screw threads
and recommendations of recognitions of Alloys, methods,
materials, qualities of things...and some other
things, agreements for co-ordinateing some of the sizes of
things, integrations of progressions of
sizes of things, NOT diminution of sensible things
irrationally coerced into increments of sizes or variations
or
progressions, but, an integrity of them...an agreeable
integrity of them, and it was not international, it was
National. At least, so far as I recall...(SAE)
But you are correct to some extent as for the parts
themselves, but that was only very slight, very VERY few
parts interchanged, or had any reason TO do so, nor should
they have interchanged, from
one make to another. Hoses, Belts, small things were also
standardized according to conferences or co-ordinations in
which the
manufactureres of those things elected to adopt some
uniformity of nomenclature, ranges and classes or kinds of
sizes that would interchange incidentally ( Tires and so on
also)...in
their way...
Fan through a 'Hollander' or other 'Interchange Manual
sometime, I mean, one from say 1934...
There was not a great deal of interchangeable 'parts' other
than one's wits TO make them do so. At least not from one
make to another.
If a manufacturer used the same Clutch disc for a certain
model, as another manufacturer did for one of their models,
well...sure...this was so for many renewable parts anyway,
as a natural occurance after a while...
but less so for those permenent parts...maybe that's what
you meant anyway...sorry, getting rambley...
Roller and Timkin and Ball Bearings were already
standardized as for their sizes, or became available in more
variation as a natural consequence of the uses to which they
were being increasingly put, or increased their
offerings as more applications evolved...and, Manufactures
wishing to use them accomidated their uses to respect the
vast array of sizes these were to be had in anyway.
The Ford Motor Company made many of their own roller
Bearings anyway, for their own Cars...for a long time.
You know, the popularization of the Bicycle, remains
unheralded as for it's pro-genitor's role toward the
Automobile, the Airplane and the Motorcycle ( of course)...
Not only in terms of the Bicycle having been a confluent of
both the Ball Bearing and of the Pnuematic Tire, of
sprockets,
roller-chains and alloys brooded on, and for components and
methods in
general, but, maybe most of all, for the psychology of
individual autonomy to celebrate the possibilities
OF...'mobility'...
> It takes time to change standards,
And to change psychology...
Look at a modern car...what a piece of unhappy hodgepodge IT
is, in every way. What a simpering, appeaseing, wasteful,
silly nothing.
Yet we are educated to admnire them...somehow...or to aspire
to have one ( or two, or three).
I hate them.
Sure, it 'works' on some levels...it gets one from one
place to another. Okay...while, it fails miserably, deeply,
on so
very many more levels...
They have become merely topically 'personal' while being
endemicly indifferent and impersonal.
Who can work on them?
Who would even want to do so?
Yuck...uglyness incarnate.
But then, who is to say? What 'levels' matter? Or 'why'? Or
what matters on what 'level'?
Oats before the Horse, Oats after...is what comes to mind
for me...
We are educated to see these Oats, as improved for the Horse
having eaten them.
> I still think of
> the film in my camera -- the one that uses film -- as
> having ASA speeds.
How much charm may remain, in decades to come, of our
digital pictures?
People are sodden with surfeit of casual expediency...
> The moving finger writes, and,
> having writ, moves on, eh?
Yes...and seldom, has it the wisdom, to know when to quit.
The charm of many Poems, is their brevity.
Too, I wonder sometimes, you know, like the old saying goes,
just 'where' that 'finger' has been, too?...and whether
anyone washed it, recently? or since...?
I have my doubts, anyway...many in fact...
> In an international
> economy it makes little sense to maintain multiple
> sets of standards.
I loathe, deeply, and sometimes more vividly even,
everything
associated anymore with so called international
anything...economy...or
international coersions insideously diminishing people, or
diminishing people who are willing to be dimished, or
expressing their collective indescernments maybe, and the
loss at any rate, of their discernments and wholesome
eruditions under pretext of 'economy'...it is a headlong
rush into hell and an assurance of poverty of spirit and
diminishment of character while banks and politicians and
their cronies and pimps get fatter and more insideously
vile...like so many bloated 'ticks'...
The health or self esteem of Nations, depend not on their
being whores to eachother's roles in international Banking
enslavements, or impersonal generic crap
they can 'sell' someone else, but, rely upon their sense to
BE themselves in positive ways. To provide FOR themselves of
their own wits and efforts and trade with others of
meritorious and proprietary things. But I am fanning out now
into maybe overlarge worries of context...
Allways, I wonder...what is the context?
Sometimes I see there are many contexts...too many
maybe...at-once.
How elusive Common Sense can become...
Has become...
Is...
> I just wish I could use the same
> tools on the three vehicles in my driveway.
It used to be, you could, unless some of them were foreign
cars, in which case, as a sensible Mechanic, you had your
Whitworth and British Standard wrenches for your English
Car, your Metric (God help you, or, rather, he Won't but the
Devil will) Wrenches for your French or Italian Car, and,
your sensible American SAE sized wrenches for your Good,
reliable, well engineered, excellent Metalurgy of (being
playful, AND serious, for,
that is, your) American Cars...and these wrenches of course,
you
needed TO use, least of all...nor would you use them to
break off bolts and so on as you may have done on your
otherwise charming foreign Cars, and, there was nothing (
nothing) wrong ( wrong) with that ( that).
(Was that an echoe?)
Was there?
> Remember when essentially all headlights were round
> and you could buy one for under two bucks?
Almost everything I ever owned or drove, had Headlamps whose
Bulbs one replaced if needed. Which Bulb resided behind a
removable glass lense where the Bulb simply spigoted with
equal or off-set lugs in it's base, into the center socket
against which the reflector was poised, or had three hole
key-way flange for a twist fit, into or onto the center
aperature of the Silver plated reflector. One kept one's
fingers off the reflector of course...
Headlights or Headlamps were allways seperate entities,
'then', in those time's offerings...consisting of the outer
shell or 'bucket', the lense, the besel which held the lense
against the bucket, a cork gasket to keep water or dusts
out, the silver plated reflector, and sometimes some
internal focusing parts supporting the Bulb's socket.
How nice! How sensible, how respectable...
Some lenses, some years, sometimes, tipped-in ( 1933 and
1934 anyway) , and the shell had no detatchable besel (my
Dodge Bro's was like that, and a friend's Nash also...) and,
Headlamps were of quite a few makes themselves. No one
called them Headlights, hardly, untill the advent of the
'sealed-beam'...
It was Head Lamps...
The 'sealed-beam' was a silly and irritating 'progress' in
1938 or 1940 (making about as much sense as way TOO much of
everything else 'then' had began TO make) or so anyway,
requireing the owner of a Car to buy and cause to be
installed, a new lense, a new reflector, AND a new bulb, as
a 'unit', anytime the old Bulb merely burned out one or both
fillaments. The early 'sealed-beams' were nothing more in
fact, than, a conventional generic Bulb, soldered into the
center
aperature of a cheap reflector, with a cheap lense crimped
into the rim of the reflector. Costing far more than the
Bulb merely would have, and, were as much effort to install,
maybe more effort sometimes,
than it used to be to install merely the Bulb itself.
Why anyone 'then' or since would equate that with
'progress', depends I guess on the operatively germain
notion of just what 'progress' means, as a term...as an
idea, or, most ghastly of all, as a political sociological
or hostoric 'fact'.
Or who says, and for whom, what is or is not 'progress'?
Some folks ( like me) when obliged to use 'sealed-beams' (as
my 1946 Chevrolet One-Ton Truck came with) , simply,
tediously, resignedly, un-crimped the lense form the outer
rim of the reflector, preserved the then lesser cheap little
gasket for reuse, un-soldered the bad bulb from the
center back of the reflector, and, soldered in a new bulb of
the right type, and recrimped the lense back in.
What a pain in the ass. I did this oweing to how I had an
'early' set of
sealed beams, whose lenses had a neat 'bulls-eye' pattern in
them...something of their transitional phase of 'style' unto
NO style at all...and was sure as hell NOT going to use any
ugly assed
replacement of a 'cast entire' 'new' one, with them ugly
"lugs" cast in
the lense, and having to it a totally boreing nothing of a
pattern for themselves.
I would rather have had sensible headlights, where all I had
TO do, was renew the "Bulb"...if or when I felt I wanted
to...or needed to for 'Light'...
When Engineers and Designers became merely lackies and
whores, I lost respect for them AND for their 'work'...
Where were their responsibilities in all this?
What were their responsibilities in all this?
And, to whom?
...sigh...
So...we used to just have to replace the Bulb if it went
'out', then, we were/are coerced to replace the reflector,
the lense and the bulb...as-a-unit.
How was this a compliment to the intelligence of anyone?
What does 'this' arangement celebrate?
Whatr vdoes it 'say'? What does it tell us?
In what ways it is a testimony of, or to, the ethics (or
ethetics) OF Design and Engineering? Their genious? The
palpable inspires of their culminiating experience's
wisdoms?
A 'little' thing maybe...amid endless 'little' things...amid
bigger things..or big things...and...
Too, lenses and reflectors of Headlamps were previously of
many many sizes ( ( and sometimes shapes other-than-round,
but that was seldom) , and allways of somewhat different
pattern. This is interesting...it is fun. You see someone
elses Headlamp Lense pattern and think, "Hmmm...nice
pattern..." or, "Hmmm...kinda so-so..."... then with
'sealed-beams' became only of some very few ( two?) sizes,
and no 'pattern' worth noteing EVER...where before, the size
of any given Car was what the designers OF that Car had
elected, or, earlier, what the owner had elected...when
Headlamps were in their infancies...
What IS anything?
The Automobile had been something with a remarkable
'positive' integrity...
Then...it became something integrated merely to accomidate
banality.
An artifactual whore TO it's banalifying masters.
A testiment TO banality, to satisfy the cravings for
banality, in a marketplace educated to crave it in ever
'new' forms and disguises...
To me, that is all a kind of 'hell'...
I like choices, I do not like being coerced to do silly,
wasteful things while being told it is "better for me" to do
them...
I like the differences IN things, proprietary differences of
things, I like being able to respect things...to respect
their differences..
I like that experience...
I do not like being 'had'.
Or handed something I know is deferential TO...something I
do not respect.
> You could
> align the light by rotating the lamp in the holder or
> the holder in the insert behind it.
Yes, then, in the early 'fiftys, they made sealed beams even
more stupid, by casting them entire of glass, and by casting
little 'lugs' into, or onto the (previously
smooth convex Glass of their previously, silly crimped-in
lense) or, by making
them cast-entire of glass as a unit, instead of being
built-up as they had been for a decade-and-a-half or
so...so that an alignment devise would register on the outer
lense, registering against those nasty little cast in lugs,
as an aide to adjusting them. Yeeesh, from bad to worse and
then worse some more...
> Now there are a
> multitude of lights, and I need 3 different emergency
> headlights in my garage to be sure if one is out I can
> replace it. And I need to check the manual each time
> I do, as lamp alighment is different on each. And
> tools? One took an allen wrench, one a tiny phillips
> driver and the third I haven't had to replace yet, so
> I don't even know exactly how it goes.
Get an early 'thirties Car...you will love absolutely every
aspect of it in every way, every detail, every component,
everything everywhere on it in every way. You can lay under
it for hours, looking 'up'...you can open the hood, and
stand there leaning on a fender, for hours, and
almost weep is is SO damned respectable.
Hell, get anything 1934 or before...and you will never go
back.
No matter how sometimes, some Cars, some years, may have had
some details that an honest man can say, "Well, they maybe
coulda done a mite better on THAT part, but oh well..."
Plus, it will look good, on any road, any time, any where,
for ever...and to all people, anywhere in the world...
In a Hundred years, if cared for, it will be the same as it
is now, everything will work, everything will be solid and
functional.
Grases may thicken from a long enough sit...but...
In a hundred years, there will be MANY thousands of times
more A and T model Fords for that matter, up-and-running, or
road worthy for their tasks anyway, than anything made now
or almost anything made in the last 40 years. Which is not
your, or our, or my
point here, but just a fun thought...
I admire that...
I admire nothing ( "0", nada zilch) about any modern car.
Or, at best, I can find some detail to admirfe in a larger
utterly disprespectable whole.
I think they all look best burning in some backround scens
in Beruit or something...or 'here', what do I care?
I allways think,"Good riddance!"
Tires might be hard to get by then...but oh
well...in-a-hundred-years I mean...but maybe not for a Ford
"A" or "T" or like sized Car, but for many of the others...
I am presently a 7:50-17 man, myself...
Not too many of that size made anymore for me to choose
from...'bias' of course...6 ply...or 8...
You know too, that that period, of the Automobile, and it's
first ohhhh...three decades.
Will never be again.
No where in all the untold Billions of eons of time had it
ever been...
No where in all the Billions of endelss eons of what will
be, will it ever be again.
That..."there"..'then'...was the transient blossoms of a
mysterious 'Tree' of sorts...
A Tree of confluence and phase...of human genious and poise
and...
Of something...
Anyway...
>
> -- Steve S
Thanks for the fun,
Yer pal,
Phil
el ve
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