2014-09-29 01:56:04-0400
Dust and Shavings
The weather was beautiful, but I brushed the pine cones off of the car hood and set off on the 10 hour trip to visit my father's old buddy Richard "Rivet" O'Day. O'Day wrote me a few weeks ago to say he'd found some memorabilia of my father's in the back of an old filing cabinet in his garage, and a few other things he thought I'd like to see. I felt like I needed a break from Amy anyway, so I gassed up - I always carry a few extra gallons in the trunk - and off I went.
Driving through the night is the best way to get to the middle of the desert.
I got into Rivet's at about 10AM, and I was hungry. He lived in an adobe-like dwelling with pair of Army surplus quonset huts and a few tin shacks in the back. There was a working oil rig there too - repurposed to pump water. Rivet was a clever guy with tools. He borrowed a lot of them from work and had quite a collection of precise milling and drilling machines, toolmaking equipment, tiny welding torches, and testing equipment. He was a bit of a fanatic - all his kitchen cabinets have brass labels on them describing the contents, engraved using the classic engineer's Leroy typeface.
We shared breakfast burritos, served on turned anodized aluminum plates, which he had made out of recycled travel cases used by some missile salesmen in the early 60s.
The design of his house cleverly kept the dust and sand out, which was good, since it was downwind of some former nuclear test sites. Solar cells, recycled from some failed government project or other, and a geothermal system he had drilled himself, kept the house pretty cool. "Your car will be happier in the garage," he said, and pushed open the door and a second door, which helped keep the inside cool. I drove in while he switched on the lights.
The garage was filled with finished and unfinished projects. I'd visited here years ago, but now I could really see how densely this room was populated with all kinds of machines. I remembered the smell of oil, acetone, and metal dust. He had presses and wire-making tools. He had a small crucible with a centrifuge in it. He has a few barrels of scrap metal shavings. A few tires were dissolving in vats and the reprocessed rubber was dripping into some glass jars. Nothing was wasted.
It wasn't all antique either, he had a well organized cabinet of computer parts and breadboards, logic scopes, and a few not very out of date computers.
Over a desk on the other side of the room, where some kind of tachometer was installed, was a 1952 pinup calendar. Miss November has just dropped a wrench. Miss November was my mom.
"I'm still working on a few things," said Rivet, "That's how I found your fathers's stuff. Here you go," and he handed me a wooden box. Inside were a hat and coveralls, which I remembered seeing him wear in an old photograph. A box of index cards, a screwdriver set, some papers that looked like contracts or discharge papers.
"That's a nice car you have," he said looking back at my restored Luxia Panther. It looks like a typical car at inspection time, but the whole body is customizable, and I like to replace pieces of it with different styles and colors. Its unique propulsion design lets me cut in up to four separate engines when I need the power. "Just like your dad. He loved cars almost as much as I do. Come back here for a second." He walked to the back of the hut and let me out the back door to the other quonset hut. As we left, the lights went out automatically.
The other hut had four doors to get through. It was clearly more insulated and the last door was especially heavy. Inside, several vehicles were seen covered with drop cloths. Hanging on the walls were a lot of drive belts, bent metal tubes, glass blobs on shelves, and old cans of various oils.
"This one's 'The Shaker'," Rivet explained as he took off the cloth from the closest machine. "It has no wheels, it vibrates the bottom to move around, The top moves in the exact opposite direction, so you never feel it. It has a side effect of tamping down a pretty usable road!" I could see it also had a kind of weed-whacker device underneath to help clear a path.
Another cloth came off. "Stilts," said Rivet. Telescoping legs with a magnetic connection between them could assist your running by growing longer the faster you ran. "You don't want to trip while you're in this thing," said Rivet, rubbing his chin, which I noticed was just a bit asymmetrical.
"Look up," he said and pointed to a kite with sails that could unfurl for more power, "He made this when it was tough to get gas for the motorboat. He also used it with roller skates."
"And back here is something I always think about and I'm hoping you'll take it off my hands, since you like cars."
Under the closest tarp was a pretty snazzy looking '58 Buick Estate Wagon. "Solid," I said as I banged on the hood. It was a kind of a dull bang. Peering through the window, I could see that it had a few extra controls on the floor. The back of the wagon was filled with something squat and cylindrical. "This thing is still ahead of its time," said Rivet, walking over to a cabinet to get its key.
It looked OK for being neglected for a few years. There were a few dead mice under the rear bumper. There was a strange sand-blasted look to the trim.
"Did Hess ever tell you about this car?" asked Rivet.
The weather was beautiful, but I brushed the pine cones off of the car hood and set off on the 10 hour trip to visit my father's old buddy Richard "Rivet" O'Day. O'Day wrote me a few weeks ago to say he'd found some memorabilia of my father's in the back of an old filing cabinet in his garage, and a few other things he thought I'd like to see. I felt like I needed a break from Amy anyway, so I gassed up - I always carry a few extra gallons in the trunk - and off I went.
Driving through the night is the best way to get to the middle of the desert.
I got into Rivet's at about 10AM, and I was hungry. He lived in an adobe-like dwelling with pair of Army surplus quonset huts and a few tin shacks in the back. There was a working oil rig there too - repurposed to pump water. Rivet was a clever guy with tools. He borrowed a lot of them from work and had quite a collection of precise milling and drilling machines, toolmaking equipment, tiny welding torches, and testing equipment. He was a bit of a fanatic - all his kitchen cabinets have brass labels on them describing the contents, engraved using the classic engineer's Leroy typeface.
We shared breakfast burritos, served on turned anodized aluminum plates, which he had made out of recycled travel cases used by some missile salesmen in the early 60s.
The design of his house cleverly kept the dust and sand out, which was good, since it was downwind of some former nuclear test sites. Solar cells, recycled from some failed government project or other, and a geothermal system he had drilled himself, kept the house pretty cool. "Your car will be happier in the garage," he said, and pushed open the door and a second door, which helped keep the inside cool. I drove in while he switched on the lights.
The garage was filled with finished and unfinished projects. I'd visited here years ago, but now I could really see how densely this room was populated with all kinds of machines. I remembered the smell of oil, acetone, and metal dust. He had presses and wire-making tools. He had a small crucible with a centrifuge in it. He has a few barrels of scrap metal shavings. A few tires were dissolving in vats and the reprocessed rubber was dripping into some glass jars. Nothing was wasted.
It wasn't all antique either, he had a well organized cabinet of computer parts and breadboards, logic scopes, and a few not very out of date computers.
Over a desk on the other side of the room, where some kind of tachometer was installed, was a 1952 pinup calendar. Miss November has just dropped a wrench. Miss November was my mom.
"I'm still working on a few things," said Rivet, "That's how I found your fathers's stuff. Here you go," and he handed me a wooden box. Inside were a hat and coveralls, which I remembered seeing him wear in an old photograph. A box of index cards, a screwdriver set, some papers that looked like contracts or discharge papers.
"That's a nice car you have," he said looking back at my restored Luxia Panther. It looks like a typical car at inspection time, but the whole body is customizable, and I like to replace pieces of it with different styles and colors. Its unique propulsion design lets me cut in up to four separate engines when I need the power. "Just like your dad. He loved cars almost as much as I do. Come back here for a second." He walked to the back of the hut and let me out the back door to the other quonset hut. As we left, the lights went out automatically.
The other hut had four doors to get through. It was clearly more insulated and the last door was especially heavy. Inside, several vehicles were seen covered with drop cloths. Hanging on the walls were a lot of drive belts, bent metal tubes, glass blobs on shelves, and old cans of various oils.
"This one's 'The Shaker'," Rivet explained as he took off the cloth from the closest machine. "It has no wheels, it vibrates the bottom to move around, The top moves in the exact opposite direction, so you never feel it. It has a side effect of tamping down a pretty usable road!" I could see it also had a kind of weed-whacker device underneath to help clear a path.
Another cloth came off. "Stilts," said Rivet. Telescoping legs with a magnetic connection between them could assist your running by growing longer the faster you ran. "You don't want to trip while you're in this thing," said Rivet, rubbing his chin, which I noticed was just a bit asymmetrical.
"Look up," he said and pointed to a kite with sails that could unfurl for more power, "He made this when it was tough to get gas for the motorboat. He also used it with roller skates."
"And back here is something I always think about and I'm hoping you'll take it off my hands, since you like cars."
Under the closest tarp was a pretty snazzy looking '58 Buick Estate Wagon. "Solid," I said as I banged on the hood. It was a kind of a dull bang. Peering through the window, I could see that it had a few extra controls on the floor. The back of the wagon was filled with something squat and cylindrical. "This thing is still ahead of its time," said Rivet, walking over to a cabinet to get its key.
It looked OK for being neglected for a few years. There were a few dead mice under the rear bumper. There was a strange sand-blasted look to the trim.
"Did Hess ever tell you about this car?" asked Rivet.
"He said he had built a car once when I was working on that Ford Fairlane in high school, but otherwise no."
"Well this is the car, then." he said, trying the key. A vigorous honk made us jump a little. "Electrical's working apparently. That's a good sign."
The door was a little stiff, but the lights came on. The dashboard lit up, and where the radio would have been was a small group of dials and switches.
"There was a problem we were working on that needed some extracurricular activity," explained Rivet. "Atoms for Peace was a dangerous failure. But we figured the main problem was that we were using atomic energy for unnatural purposes. Explosions happen when the chain reaction in not isolated in a vacuum or magnetic bubble. So we figured out what the tiniest mass could be that would sustain a reaction and then isolated it in a magnetic bubble in a vacuum. The trick was to machine permanent magnets in precise shapes that are the inverse of their 3d field structure. You have to make a lot of these shards and they are pretty small. The two geometries cancel out, leaving a magnetic bubble, with a little magnetic lens on one side. That's it in the back of the car." He pulled a release and the hood popped open and rolled back. "We replaced the V8 with these twin plasma turbines. A stream of ions spins the turbines over here, and are re-compressed on the other side.
We had to rebuild the gearbox because the speed was too high and we couldn't fine tune the plasma stream safely. So we invented this continuous ratio gear system based on hyperbolic conical gears carved in what we'd call a fractal pattern today. The rest of the car is pretty standard."
"So, are you telling my that you and my Dad built an atomic car in 1958?" I asked, picking my jaw up from the floor.
"1961. It was a used car. It was bought as the family car when you and your sister were born."
"But this is insane? How many patents did you take out?"
"We were using the government's patents for some of the milling and refining. The shape of the core is remarkable, and is a tribute to your father's love of origami."
"So this thing works?"
"Yes and no. It doesn't have a reverse gear in the usual sense. The gear design didn't allow for it, so we just put it in neutral and pushed it where it need to go. Also, we were afraid to take it up over 150MPH."
"150!!?"
"Even that was a little suspicious. But then we had to figure out how to slow it down without causing damage to the gearbox, since the turbines spin at a constant 50,000 RPM speed. Incidentally, the gyroscopic effect of those turbines makes for an extremely stable ride. You actually have to tilt them when cornering. There's an extra pantograph welded onto the steering linkage that does this," he continued, pointing to the metal scissors-like contraption.
"So this thing works?" I repeated.
"Let's see," said Rivet, settling into the driver's seat. "Hop in. Hey, look!"
Under the front passengers seat was a plastic rattle. "This belong to you?" he chuckled. Then he turned the key and a vibration started, slowly building into a whine.
"We scraped up enough U-238 to last 200 years. This system is very efficient because it's a closed system. When you shut it down, it really just recycles the alpha particles back in a loop. You can't really shut it off. In a sense, it's been running since 1961. Sometimes the lens gets out of alignment and you can hear the turbine go down from a slightly sharp "B" to something like a "G flat". When that happens, you have to refocus it, with this red knob here."
"OK, into neutral so we can back it out." I noticed that handles had thoughtfully been added to the trim. I grabbed one and pushed it back. For such a heavy vehicle, it was surprisingly easy to move. Rivet opened the back of the hut with an old TV remote.
"How can this be safe? I mean, in an accident, wouldn't there be some concern about, oh, ground zero on Route 66?"
"It's been in accidents. Not bad ones. There's a cage you can see right here and we put in seat belts taken from an old DC-3. There were no radiation leaks, you can check with the Geiger counter dial."
The dial was pointing to a green segment.
By this time we were out in the open. We pointed the car toward a distant box canyon. The fins and tail lights really put me in a space-age mood.
"OK, ready to roll!" said Rivet, adjusting the rearview mirror and pulling my door shut with a back scratcher. From the mirror hung two fuzzy mushrooms. "Your Mom made these," he said.
"Did she ever ride in this?"
"Oh yeah. She drove it in a friendly little race we had. A bunch of dragsters wanted to prove something. You'll see, the way the car accelerates is pretty unusual. It was kind of a surprise to them."
He stepped on the clutch and pulled back on a gear lever. The car inched forward, accelerating slowly. Very slowly.
"It takes about 30 seconds for the gear to build up to speed if you don't want to tear it apart."
Since the hood was off, I could see the twin turbine block starting to glow. Sand blowing onto the block was melting on contact. I wondered if this was a bad sign. Rivet seemed unconcerned.
I was pushed back in my seat as the car continuously accelerated.
Rivet eased back and we could see that we were cruising at 125 MPH.
"These tires are special too, they spread out for better grip at high speeds. Also, the rubber is like memory metal, it grows and shrinks when we want it to."
A puddle of molten glass was building up on the exposed engine block. Rivet saw this and turned on something like a windshield wiper that scraped the glass into a metal bucket on the side of the engine.
Rivet took the car on a wide turn to point back to the hut. The car heeled over to correct for the terrific speed. Gearing down the engine, he glided back to the quonset hut. He turned it off, and the turbines wound down.
He dangled the keys in front of me. In my mind, I was redesigning the gear system to add in the reverse my father had left out. I took them.
I took it out for a spin myself. It took some getting used to. There's also no way you can't feel like a space age rocket jockey knowing you are going that fast in a heavy car with fins on it. I felt like honking the horn. But when I pushed the horn button, I found out, what it really did was tilt the turbine up and immediately the car left the ground. Crazy with fear, I tried unhonking the horn, whatever that is. Something I did got me back down, and decided quickly I had had enough for the day.
I'm happy to say, the brakes were in great shape after all this time.
"Rivet, how am I going to get this thing out of here with no license plate and no trailer?"
"Now that you know about it, get that stuff together and come and get it."
"There's no way anyone will let this on the road!"
"Don't drive it on a road."
"Rivet, this technology - it could have completely powered civilization for the past 50 years!"
"There were already a lot of companies powering civilization for the last 50 years! They liked to talk about 'too cheap to meter,' but where's the profit in that?"
"Can't you just use it to run your house or something?"
"I've already got a little generator like this running the house. It has enough dust and shavings for 60 years or so."
"Maybe you can tell me how to convert it - I don't need to be driving a cruise missile down to the grocery store."
"I guess I could help with that. I'll draw up some plans for next time."
"That'd be great!"
I'm still waiting for those plans.
[repost: edited from sept 16 2012]
"Well this is the car, then." he said, trying the key. A vigorous honk made us jump a little. "Electrical's working apparently. That's a good sign."
The door was a little stiff, but the lights came on. The dashboard lit up, and where the radio would have been was a small group of dials and switches.
"There was a problem we were working on that needed some extracurricular activity," explained Rivet. "Atoms for Peace was a dangerous failure. But we figured the main problem was that we were using atomic energy for unnatural purposes. Explosions happen when the chain reaction in not isolated in a vacuum or magnetic bubble. So we figured out what the tiniest mass could be that would sustain a reaction and then isolated it in a magnetic bubble in a vacuum. The trick was to machine permanent magnets in precise shapes that are the inverse of their 3d field structure. You have to make a lot of these shards and they are pretty small. The two geometries cancel out, leaving a magnetic bubble, with a little magnetic lens on one side. That's it in the back of the car." He pulled a release and the hood popped open and rolled back. "We replaced the V8 with these twin plasma turbines. A stream of ions spins the turbines over here, and are re-compressed on the other side.
We had to rebuild the gearbox because the speed was too high and we couldn't fine tune the plasma stream safely. So we invented this continuous ratio gear system based on hyperbolic conical gears carved in what we'd call a fractal pattern today. The rest of the car is pretty standard."
"So, are you telling my that you and my Dad built an atomic car in 1958?" I asked, picking my jaw up from the floor.
"1961. It was a used car. It was bought as the family car when you and your sister were born."
"But this is insane? How many patents did you take out?"
"We were using the government's patents for some of the milling and refining. The shape of the core is remarkable, and is a tribute to your father's love of origami."
"So this thing works?"
"Yes and no. It doesn't have a reverse gear in the usual sense. The gear design didn't allow for it, so we just put it in neutral and pushed it where it need to go. Also, we were afraid to take it up over 150MPH."
"150!!?"
"Even that was a little suspicious. But then we had to figure out how to slow it down without causing damage to the gearbox, since the turbines spin at a constant 50,000 RPM speed. Incidentally, the gyroscopic effect of those turbines makes for an extremely stable ride. You actually have to tilt them when cornering. There's an extra pantograph welded onto the steering linkage that does this," he continued, pointing to the metal scissors-like contraption.
"So this thing works?" I repeated.
"Let's see," said Rivet, settling into the driver's seat. "Hop in. Hey, look!"
Under the front passengers seat was a plastic rattle. "This belong to you?" he chuckled. Then he turned the key and a vibration started, slowly building into a whine.
"We scraped up enough U-238 to last 200 years. This system is very efficient because it's a closed system. When you shut it down, it really just recycles the alpha particles back in a loop. You can't really shut it off. In a sense, it's been running since 1961. Sometimes the lens gets out of alignment and you can hear the turbine go down from a slightly sharp "B" to something like a "G flat". When that happens, you have to refocus it, with this red knob here."
"OK, into neutral so we can back it out." I noticed that handles had thoughtfully been added to the trim. I grabbed one and pushed it back. For such a heavy vehicle, it was surprisingly easy to move. Rivet opened the back of the hut with an old TV remote.
"How can this be safe? I mean, in an accident, wouldn't there be some concern about, oh, ground zero on Route 66?"
"It's been in accidents. Not bad ones. There's a cage you can see right here and we put in seat belts taken from an old DC-3. There were no radiation leaks, you can check with the Geiger counter dial."
The dial was pointing to a green segment.
By this time we were out in the open. We pointed the car toward a distant box canyon. The fins and tail lights really put me in a space-age mood.
"OK, ready to roll!" said Rivet, adjusting the rearview mirror and pulling my door shut with a back scratcher. From the mirror hung two fuzzy mushrooms. "Your Mom made these," he said.
"Did she ever ride in this?"
"Oh yeah. She drove it in a friendly little race we had. A bunch of dragsters wanted to prove something. You'll see, the way the car accelerates is pretty unusual. It was kind of a surprise to them."
He stepped on the clutch and pulled back on a gear lever. The car inched forward, accelerating slowly. Very slowly.
"It takes about 30 seconds for the gear to build up to speed if you don't want to tear it apart."
Since the hood was off, I could see the twin turbine block starting to glow. Sand blowing onto the block was melting on contact. I wondered if this was a bad sign. Rivet seemed unconcerned.
I was pushed back in my seat as the car continuously accelerated.
Rivet eased back and we could see that we were cruising at 125 MPH.
"These tires are special too, they spread out for better grip at high speeds. Also, the rubber is like memory metal, it grows and shrinks when we want it to."
A puddle of molten glass was building up on the exposed engine block. Rivet saw this and turned on something like a windshield wiper that scraped the glass into a metal bucket on the side of the engine.
Rivet took the car on a wide turn to point back to the hut. The car heeled over to correct for the terrific speed. Gearing down the engine, he glided back to the quonset hut. He turned it off, and the turbines wound down.
He dangled the keys in front of me. In my mind, I was redesigning the gear system to add in the reverse my father had left out. I took them.
I took it out for a spin myself. It took some getting used to. There's also no way you can't feel like a space age rocket jockey knowing you are going that fast in a heavy car with fins on it. I felt like honking the horn. But when I pushed the horn button, I found out, what it really did was tilt the turbine up and immediately the car left the ground. Crazy with fear, I tried unhonking the horn, whatever that is. Something I did got me back down, and decided quickly I had had enough for the day.
I'm happy to say, the brakes were in great shape after all this time.
"Rivet, how am I going to get this thing out of here with no license plate and no trailer?"
"Now that you know about it, get that stuff together and come and get it."
"There's no way anyone will let this on the road!"
"Don't drive it on a road."
"Rivet, this technology - it could have completely powered civilization for the past 50 years!"
"There were already a lot of companies powering civilization for the last 50 years! They liked to talk about 'too cheap to meter,' but where's the profit in that?"
"Can't you just use it to run your house or something?"
"I've already got a little generator like this running the house. It has enough dust and shavings for 60 years or so."
"Maybe you can tell me how to convert it - I don't need to be driving a cruise missile down to the grocery store."
"I guess I could help with that. I'll draw up some plans for next time."
"That'd be great!"
I'm still waiting for those plans.
[repost: edited from sept 16 2012]
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