Starrett No. 132 Level - Scary good.

Hey, "makers"! Have you got a level, or do you just use a free app in your phone to tell you if the shelf you made out of a cardboard sonotube that you're selling on Etsy for fifteen hundred dollars is level and straight?

I love Adam Savage and everything he does. BUT, I'm pretty sure I've heard him use the word "makerspace" in a non-ironic way. I attribute that to the fact that he's had a career in television, and he's in California, surrounded by posers and useless wankers that need to inflate themselves with made-up terminology to replace perfectly serviceable words that are too "boring", and don't promote their personal brand effectively enough.

If I were to invite my dad over to check out my "makerspace" (back when he was alive - not the only currently available version of my dad, which would be Zombie Dad), he would be able to figure out what I meant, but he would also frown and ask me where I'd gotten that bit of silliness to describe my workshop.

I suspect that you either know the brand Starrett, or you use the word "maker" with sincerity, but not both. Starrett has been around forever, and their stuff is The Shit. So will your pants be, if you price their stuff...

Oof! I didn't know you could spend nearly eight hundred dollars on a level that wasn't encrusted in Swarovsky crystals, sitting in a drawer of Paris Hilton's makerspace.

I have some Starrett tools that were my dad's. They are in a drawer in his mahogany tool box from when he went to DeVry, on a layer of green felt (The tools are on a layer of green felt. My dad did not attend DeVry on a layer of green felt.) Some of the tools, I even know what they're for! Depth gauges, levels, scales (that's a ruler), shims, and calipers. The rest are abstruse counters of engineering arcana that await the day when I surmise the intricacies of their functionality and thereby earn the right to use them. Until then, I am not worthy of their flawless, jewel-like smoothness and unexpected weight. Wait for me, my pretties, until such a time as I deserve thee.

Zombie dad, I regret that I failed to extract all knowledge from you in life, and that these Starrett artifacts remain a tantalizing mystery. My stupid brain is not worthy of being eaten. Until such a time as I unravel the secrets of the Starretts, I will make do with Craftsman, Husky, and possibly Irwin.

Anyoldhoo, the guy in this Starrett ad is kind of scary. See his eyes? Those are all pupil. No, he hasn't been to the eye doctor. He just seems to understand that Starrett is The Shit, and he's going to level the crap out of everything with his Starrett model 132.

What else could Starrett man be used for? Oh, ever so many things, if only some heroic pixelmonger would liberate you from the pages of Popular Mechanics February 1959 and set you free to explore the Ultranet of 2016. Such a hero will rise among us this day.

Run free, scarily enthusiastic man. Go tell the Ultranet how great something is. Go now. Run. Before I change my mind. You're welcome!

Click for 1000 px PNG.

Click for 1000 px JPG.

Philco Televisions - High deaf gifts?

It's nuts how much television you can get for five hundred dollars. To the unfortunate troglodytes of 1957, twenty-four inches of grayscale was dizzyingly exciting. Know what, though? I'll bet their TVs sounded better than the built-in speakers of our TVs.

Here are two reasons your TV probably doesn't sound as good as these Philcos.

Reason number A) Unless your a pharaoh or a sultan or something, your TV's cabinet is probably made of ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene). It's my favorite plastic. Yeah. I know. Who has a list of favorite plastics? Dorks, that's who. But ABS is great. It's damn strong, but you can easily trim it with a knife. It comes in brilliant colors. It tolerates thermal softening and reshaping without weird results. Also, it doesn't easily discolor over time and isn't very susceptible to sun bleaching. Legos are made of ABS for chrissakes, so shut up.

However, there isn't really any plastic that makes a good acoustic resonator. That hasn't stopped people from making everything from radios to drum kits out of plastic - mostly because it's so easy and great to make it look cool. Know what resonates very nicely with sound? Wood. Even plywood can sound great with a speaker mounted to it. Go rent a plastic cello and see how that sounds.

Yes, there are companies making carbon fiber cellos and stuff, but CFs freaky stiff properties can be manipulated to great effect in an acoustic instrument. Plus, it's a composite material, and not technically "just plastic".

Yes, you can get a tabletop radio made of plastic that sounds amazing, but the manufacturer has engineered into it special subwoofers and labyrinth channels to coerce decent sound out of a plastic radio. With wood, just give it a strong-ish speaker and screw it in nice and tight and you're done. Wood is acoustically wonderful.

Thing B) Almost all TV speakers today are an afterthought. They're only included to tick the box on the product manager's clipboard. "Yep! It's got speakers!" Yes, it will make sound at useable volume, but televisions are all about the picture. You're pretty much expected to buy, at least, a sound bar or use a component surround sound system with your TV.

Then there's the fact that TVs can be so thin nowadays. There's hardly any room for a decent speaker in there anyway. You think they're going to design a hefty cabinet just to make room for nice speakers when they can have a sexy thin cabinet to show off their anorexically thin LCD tech? Pull the other one.Your TVs picture is way better than your TVs sound.

Because all non-portable TVs were made from wood back then (the one that woman is carrying probably wa smetal and plastic), the sound quality was probably pretty great. Plus, nobody assumed you would be hooking up your TV to an external system. That was crazy talk, daddy-o.

Ooo! I just had a brilliant idea!
1 - Source two really old, beat-up cellos somehow. School rummage sale or SomebodysList.com?
2 - Take the guts and electronics out of a pair of nice, but possibly beaten up 12" three-way floor speakers.
3 - Make the cellos into your new speaker cabinets.

I am a genius. You're welcome!

So, let's see what you could expect to pay for these bad looking, good sounding TVs, back in '57.

Let's see. Inflation Calculator says that $279.95 amounts to $2,361.45 in modern day FutureBucks. And that's the starting price for Philco's "Wrap Around Sound" models. Oof! Philco's regular TVs started at $179.95 (or equivalent $1,523.09). Ladies and gentlemen, we are truly spoilt.

Hey! That lady carrying the TV looks familiar! Sure enough, she's basically the same piece of art Philco used in that other ad we posted in August '14. See?

She's obviously a heavily referenced painting of a photograph. They just did a new version with different clothes and slight changes to her face, and added the bow on the TV. It's interesting to look at two different rendering sof the same photo reference. It makes you wonder if the model looked exactly like either painting, or if they were taking creative licence with her face in both cases. I wonder if the model got an extra check for the re-use. Only joking. I don't wonder that at all. Of course she was paid just for the one photo shoot. Random models don't get royalties.

In any case, we posted her as a Graphic Gift back in '14, and of course we must provide her Christmas version now, just for the sake of completion, right? Gotta catch em all! She's a PNG.  She's got a present for you. She's 1600 pixels tall of pure woman, and she's all yours. You're welcome!

Click for full ad.

Click for 1600px left page.

Click for 1600px right page.

Evinrude Star Flite - The yacht of the boat engine world.

I know mostly jack about boats. My interest in ever owning a boat can be measured on the same scale. Boat ownership in my mind is just an inevitable very long swim in street clothes, postponed by various amounts of time. I do, however, give a damn about industrial design. So hey, look at that cool outboard motor!

Outboard motors today - and have for as long as I can remember - look like inflated rectangles or marshmallows. This ad for the Evinrude Star Flite is the first example I've seen of an outboard that looks as if it was handed off to a designer at some point.

Sure, all the styling added to the motor's case is fairly standard overdone 1950s fare. All crazy fins and pointless bric-a-brac. But on an outboard motor, I can live with silly festoonery. Boats are for weekends and holidays. You'll probably never have to park your boat at a funeral, where it's "I am an airplane!" styling would seem inappropriately out of place or juvenile. A vehicle should have wheels or wings, but not both (...apart from foldable landing gear, obviously. Shut up).

For the technically apathetic, here's the big deal with a V-anything engine. You already know that any engine gets more powerful when you add more pistons, right? The easiest way to do that is to just put the pistons in a line. But, eventually you wind up with a very long and skinny engine that doesn't fit nicely into any normal car shape. This is the same reason a carton of eggs is not arranged in a long row of twelve. The shape becomes awkward and doesn't fit anywhere. Just like the eggs, if you take the pistons and put them in two rows, you get a more compact engine. The "vee" part just means that the pistons are angled so that they can all turn a single drive shaft underneath, which goes round and round and makes your car go, or whatever. Evinrude made a four cylinder engine with two rows of two. More power in a small space is more better no matter what you want your engine to do.

Unless you're Steve Jobs, of course. If Steve made engines, every successive generation would have a little less power in a lot less space. "Enjoying your 120 horsepower Honda? Well, here's your new one with 90 Hp, but look how thin it is! Be careful not to slam the hood or the engine will break. The valve cover is made of glass. Also, the engine dies if you sit in it the wrong way, so just don't sit that way, idiot.You control the car with one large pedal, instead of two or three. This is simpler. Push the pedal once to go, and twice to stop. Push it three times to turn left and four times to turn right. This frees up your hands to dick around with your iPhone in traffic. Simple!"

Here's Ben Affleck and Katie Holmes posing with their Evinrude Star Flite. Ben is composing a song on his harmonica about boating. Katie is wearing those old kind of sunglasses that make you look cross-eyed. The sunglasses are also configured in a "vee", just like the Evinrude. This doesn't give them more power, but it does allow her to look directly at the Evinrudewhile simultaneously looking off into the sky at Xenu. She'll need the power of the Star Flite to stay away from him... and Tom Cruise.

Timken Bearings - Roll your own... jokes.

Any medium shows you who it thinks it's audience is by the ads it runs. The Saturday Evening Post was a big deal in 1949. It was read by the wife as well as the husband. It had fluffy romance stories and ads for industrial products like Timken roller bearings.

Roller bearings (you know: with cylindrical rollers) can take much heavier loads than ordinary ball (spherical) bearings, due to the larger contact surface between the rollers and the races. The bearings in this ad are tapered rollers, which, when paired in mirror configurations (see the very bottom picture) improve on cylindrical rollers by offering longer life through reduced wear.
Before Timken's patent of the tapered roller bearing, railway cars were carried by wheels mounted on a broom handle stuck through beef hearts. The smell was awful and the beef hearts needed to be replaced every hundred yards.



The first illustration offers many ponderables. The customer in the hat looks like he's under duress, haggling for a price with one of Iowa's slick, devious farmers. "Three cents a bushel? I was really hoping to pay two cents. I'm a senator and I work hard for my money. You couldn't come down at all, could you?"

And who's the kid in the background with the green "X" on his shirt? Clearly, he's the Village Prurient, forever branded with the Viridian X for his unholy relationship with his own mother, who happens to be a cow. Incest! Sickening.

Lastly, there's the creepy little boy on the left, staring directly at us, as if he can see through time and knows what we're doing. "I can see you, snarky future people, and I know what you do with our pictures. I want my iPad, you son of a bitches!" Shudder.


The boy in the bottom picture seems really agitated at the sight of the train. Either he knows something about tapered roller bearings or he thinks the train is guilty of something. Since he's a corn-fed hayseed, we'll assume it's the latter.

Joke # - "Paw! That's the dragon that done ate our chickens! He's gittin' away! Throw some 'maters at 'im, quick!" "No, son. Dragons breathe fire. Stay back!"

Joke #2 - "Father, the horse with a thousand legs runs free. Why do we live imprisoned behind this impenetrable fence? I long to run free with my thousand legs, also."

Joke #3 - "Look, son! The Great Yellow Sun Serpent has come again. It must be pleased with our offering of a maiden tied to it's metal road. We have truly earned this harvest's bounty of 'maters."

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.  -mgmt.]

Jokes ahoy! From Craig...

Joke A: Lookee, Paw, that hobo is equipped with Timken's latest roller-bearing-equipped stink-producing device!

Joke II: 1949: A young Karl Rove invents the "Pull my finger" gag.

BART BA Subway - Now arriving at future.

Postcard at antique stores can be just stupid expensive. I have five bucks on me, but I'm not handing it over in exchange for an old postcard. This one was 25¢, and good thing, because I may have paid as much as $2 if they pushed me (where "they" is the paper sign on the shoebox in which they were cleverly displayed.). Behold, the subway of the future!

Man, that's a cool looking train. It has two things I look for in public service / institutional engineering: molded white plastic, asymmetry, and geometric angles. I know that's three, but I threw in an extra thing I look for because you have an honest face.

I had to look up what "BART BA" stands for. It's an acronym for "Bay Area Rapid Transit" and the extra "BA" may have been a typo, or maybe it's a bonus at no extra charge because the logo guy thought you have an honest face, or maybe because it was 1978 and most of California wasn't thinking too straight because everyone was hopped up on herpes medication. The picture shows the Lake Merritt train station in Oakland, which is home to a lake that combines salt and fresh water. I didn't know there were and lakes like that, but I don't spend lots of time thinking about lakes in that way. If I did think about it, I'd guess that if one combined salt and fresh water, you'd have a slightly more diluted batch of salt water. I dunno. Maybe the density of one or the other makes one float on the other. Who cares? I should cut that part out before I post this. It's really off-topic. I'll leave a note for the editorial staff.

Okay, the train. It has that futuristic look that  people in the seventies liked. The TV show Space 1999 had it. Curvy biomorphic chairs are set against chunky geometric walls. It's the aesthetic of a clean, simplified future designed by Abba and made from vaccuformed white PVC. It's the future in which you can still smell the recently-removed shrink wrap. For further examples see Star Wars (The first three movies. The only ones worth watching.).

The train driver's window is off to one side because... err, I'm not sure why, but it probably has something to do with it being a train, and the driver only has to make the thing stop and go. He's not steering it like a car. Asymmetry implies the idea of function taking precedence over form. Engineering over style. This is a kind of purity and elegance whose polar opposite can be found in the ornamental styles of everything from classical Greece to early American colonial design.People instinctively like things lined up in a row, and centered with each other. Going against this fundamental desire implies that "it doesn't need to be centered, so it won't be." I think that mentally, this slight dissonance is intriguing and satisfies in the same way that spicy food is really good despite a light tingle of pain.

The Nissan Cube takes the whole industrial asymmetry thing and does it backwards. The rear window on the Cube is asymmetrical, but that's only the glass. If you look at the corner where the glass wraps around, you can see the drivers' side c-pillar behind the glass, whereas the passenger side c-pillar is visible on the outside. This is interesting because asymmetry implies function over form, but the Nissan would have been easier to manufacture with a more conventional balanced look.The asymmetrical glass is a styling choice that hides the actual symmetry of the structure. I'd rather they made the car truly asymmetrical, with an unobstructed corner window, but that would have sent costs up and made it hard to meet safety requirements.

Throw in some bold, simple graphics on the train and some big planes of orange and white in the train station and you're ready to rattle off into the bell-bottomed, blow-dried future where Dabney Coleman waits for his train down to L.A. to catch a table read for North Dallas Forty. Personally, the movie I remember him for is WarGames from 1984, where he plays Dr. McKittrick, but that film probably wasn't in pre-pro until 1979. Wait. Maybe Coleman was riding this train into the future to make the WarGames table read? That's what I'd do.