Abramisms Part 1.

Abramisms Part One : Questions, Questions.

"Do you know what you're doing?"

"How ya doing me old tater?"

"Am I keeping you up?"

"Do you like working here?"

"How ya doing me old fruit?"

"How ya doing me old flower?"

"Is everything under control?"

"Are you feeling sweepy?"

"You do know what you're doing don't you? {pause} don't you??"

Uncle Larry.

There was a short period in 1995 that the Menasco stress office could be compared directly to the Marie Celeste. It was adrift and deserted in a dishevelled but seaworthy condition, under partial sail, with nobody on board, and her lifeboat missing.

Ok, it wasn't that bad.

Mark Clemente had jumped ship for the calmer waters of DeHavilland and another of the capable analysts, Mong Lim Shim (often referred to as Long Thin Shim) was off representing Menasco somewhere else. The chap that I had inherited the Fokker 100 work from, Steve Harding, was also off to DeHavilland and it was sort of odd that the bulk of the work was being undertaken by myself, Larry Abram and Gerry Kouverianos and a job shopper from Boeing, Gary.

It did, at times, feel like some engineering buddy movie, with often what felt like an efficient symbiosis between the "three musketeers" with Gerry and Larry playing good cop, bad cop dealing with me, to keep me hard at work, but also to keep my spirits high.

It leads me to introduce something that is fundamental to the "feel" of the Menasco Design office at that time, with a direct focus on the Stress group. The boss, Lancashire lad Larry Abram would provide comic relief at most times for most of us, although truth be told, often the tension he was alleviating had been caused by his good self in the first place.

In time, myself and new additions to the Stress Office in the years that followed, would collate the punchlines of these comic relief moments, magical statements that perhaps you would have had to be there to truly appreciate, but for those that do remember, we collected them using one common noun.

Abramisms.

Tubular

It is interesting to me that in 1993 I had been very much energized by the release of Tubular Bells II on CD but completely missed the release of the album Songs of Distant Earth the following year. It interests me because a common point of musical reference for myself, and another chap who was working in the Menasco stress office, Mark Clemente, was the genius of Mike Oldfield.

It was released in November of 1994, but I realise from my diary that I had sat down for a few long chats with Mark during his last week at Menasco in the December and perhaps at that busy time, neither of us knew of the existence of the new album.

The pace of work at Menasco was frenetic, and as I mentioned, the drawing release schedule for the V-22 had basically worn everyone out, so the upcoming Christmas holiday was a very welcome thing, and for Mark Clemente, and a bunch of others in the design office, 1995 would be a transitional year as they migrated to DeHavilland to work on the proposal for the DHC-8 400 series.

If I flash forward a few years, to 1998, I was again stoked to learn of a new album from Mike Oldfield which of course was Tubular Bells III, however, during those extremely busy years, where I too would be gainfully employed at Menasco on the 400 series MLG, I had missed a second significant Mike Oldfield album release entitled Voyager.

It was not until a year or so after that, that Mark and myself were once again working together and during one of our musical chats he informed me of those two albums and it was an amazing feeling of emotion for me, especially with the magnificent album Songs of Distant Earth, that I had finally discovered my "lost years" of Mike Oldfield.

A Ticking Box

I've just read an entire month of my diary for the August of 1994 and I obviously had difficulty at the time coming to terms with the fact that I had to work rather hard to gather my jobshopper dollars at the landing gear emporium.

Yet, the diary is full of light and they were indeed happy times regardless of the workload, and it was apparent that in quite an uncontrolled way, things were predominantly under control.

I had finished two different types of spectrum reduction programs, one for the FractuREsearch damage tolerance program from Mister Broek and the other for quick spreadsheet fatigue checks of various fibres on the periphery of sections. At the time the Menasco fatigue program was limited to a single fibre, so my spreadsheet could accelerate the identification of the critical zone and we could hone in.

If my stress concentration factors were correct...

I say things were predominantly under control as the design office were having some major issues with the drawing schedule for the upcoming CDR and it seemed that in the great scheme of things, a drawing of a washer carried the same weight in the schedule as a major structural component. It was a game of numbers for them, and with the strength, fatigue and damage tolerance analysis, it was a game of numbers for me.

I've said before about the DTA presentation for the CDR being more of a theoretical or "paper" report to tick the box, as with the percentage of completed drawings requirement box, that the number crunchers at both ends were busy trying to satisfy each other so that they could report back to their superiors that everything was on track.

It was true though, that in the September of 1994, everything was predominantly on track for the program, it was the happiest of times because of one major thing.

Nothing had gone wrong yet.

File one away. Part Two.

It was around 7.30pm that night when I arrived home and John phoned me, there was a distinct shake in his voice and he really did sound quite distressed.

Apparently, this is what transpired after the morning jolly phone call :

The faceless person sitting in front of John, who had initially taken the phone call, and had known it was me, sat, watched and listened to the entire event and had immediately scurried back to the Chief of Stress at Dowty and reported what had transpired from his point of view.

The Chief of Stress had then arranged an "emergency" meeting for all the members of the stress office in the small meeting room, everyone filed in, wondering if they were being made redundant or something, and it began.

John described to me how horrible it was, that the Chief was literally red and shaking with anger, that he was telling everyone in the room (but directing it all squarely at John) that none of them should be talking to the competition about the secret things, and that from then on, there would be a closer watch of everyone (directed solely at John again) about infringements which could result in disciplinary action and possible dismissal.

Yet John's name was never mentioned in the meeting.

After the meeting, John had gone back to the Chief's desk and attempted to explain, but was fundamentally ignored, there was a sense that something was very broken.

In the evening, after the call from John, I called the Chief up and tried to explain, but even after all the time I had spent at Dowty working for him, five years or more, he would not listen to me either, and he terminated the conversation with the darkest of accusations.

I knew there was little use in talking to a man who had made his mind up, I just had to mentally file that one away for future reference regarding him...

...and his pet weasel.

File one away. Part One.

The revised fatigue spectrum for the V-22 Nose landing Gear EMD had arrived on my desk from Doug Rhoads at Boeing and there was some confusion about the format of the load columns. It was early August in 1994 and the CDR was scheduled for the 14th September, so there was a fair bit of work to do for that presentation.

I called Doug and we chatted about the data, and what one particular column meant. I believe it was to do with the steering angle of the nose landing gear, so an additional step was required so that loads were broken out into their relative components before analysis. The fatigue analysis program at Menasco was almost identical to the one that it predated at Dowty, the difference being that the key documentation for all of the Menasco programs was kept in one book, in one bookcase, whereas at Dowty, every analyst had a relatively updated version of a book numbered S-1201

Doug Rhoads told me he would fax me the columns description, which he did, and the resulting couple of pages that arrived on my desk from Monique, our girl Friday, were comically extracted from the Dowty document.

In addition, a laugh out loud moment, the name on the top of the page for the person who had last updated those pages, was John Oh, a good friend, golfing and drinking buddy, who was still working at Dowty.

At Menasco, we all had our own phone on our desks, unlike the single phone system at the other place, so I decided as a joke to phone John up and have some fun.

I called and someone answered on a communal phone, I asked to talk to John and he answered and was happy to hear my voice. The next minute or so was comedy gold as I asked him to grab his copy of S-1201 and skip to the pages I had on my desk.

The conversation went something like this :

DW : "John, is that your name on the top of those pages?"

JO : "Yes?"

DW : "Then how the fuck did I, someone who works at the competition, get a copy of them from an American company, I thought it was supposed to be secret, have you been involved in some sort of industrial espionage?"

JO "....??"

There was a pause and then John realised I was having a laugh, the conversation continued for a few minutes of shooting the shit, he wanted to know how I was getting on at the new place and would I be playing golf with them at the Winchester Golf Club on Friday.

The call ended, and that was that, a bright moment on a dull morning...

Blazingly fast online speeds.

Aside from a dying motor vehicle, I was still participating in a few of the best bulletin boards in my home town of Osahwa, which was nicknamed the motor city.

The host of the local board, Captain Aries, had convinced me that to continue in a meaningful way on his BBS I should upgrade my modem to the latest and greatest device, the US Robotics HST Dual Standard.

The actual price of the modem is lost in time, but I think it was somewhere around the $900 mark, and of course, the model was upgradeable so that it could communicate faster with other HST modems. The problem being that the online world was changing fast, and very soon, the proprietary ways of achieving blazingly fast download speeds would mean an evolution of the standards and my lump of a modem would be rendered obsolete. I would then need to find more money to continue in a meaningful way.

This process would of course continue for the rest of time.

Found On Road Dead

The Ford Mustang was a mere six years old but it was falling apart in more ways than one.

I should have seen the signs in the first few months, I think it was a cold April when I arrived at the Ford dealership for an oil change, slammed the car door and it broke.

I think before I detail the small dramas in 1994 of my trips to Menasco, Oakville in the thing, I should highlight (again) that previous financial stupidity of mine, an oversight that should never have happened and a very good lesson in life regarding the need to pay attention to details.

Rewind to January 1988.

I had choked at the salesman quoting 48 months at $297 and he "worked his magic" so that the monthly payment was $272, but in the excitement of expectation of that new car smell, I had overlooked that he had not done that by changing the interest rate, he had merely changed the term to 60 months.

In a flash, I was unaware that I would pay an extra $2064 in total, but I was certainly pleased that I was paying $25 less per month...

I would not really come to the realization of monthly payments 49 thru 60 until the January of 1992 and before that I had boasted to my workmates that I was about to pay off the car, then eat humble pie a month or so later when an envelope arrived with the extra 12 months popped through my letterbox.

So much for me being a financial genius...

Fast forward to June 1994.

The Ford Mustang, with around 147000 kilometres on the clock, sat dejectedly on the side of the 401 highway on my way home from Menasco, the engine silent from fuel starvation, the fuel pump dead and gone.

It was almost time to see the signs...

Interlude 3. Just a set of tools.

A visit to Graeme Wright's house and many portions of booze to ease the terrible pain of working for a living. A slight realization that one day, just one day, if we had a plan then we might escape it all....

Little did we know then that we would.

Interlude 2. The Tools of the Trade.

Another photo from that era, I think I took it for insurance purposes. All the kit I owned for doing my job at Menasco. It amazes me that within a year of taking this photo, I was using one device for everything I needed, and it is is not pictured here:

Interlude 1. The Bench

I still have the plans for this bench, provided to me by George Sonnenborg at Dowty, shortly before I left for Menasco in 1994, I borrowed Jim Collin's circular saw to complete it.

Total cost, which was mostly the lag bolts and the vice as I used all recycled wood, was fourty-two dollars.

I still have it to this day.

It's not Rocket Science

Life and work at Menasco was constantly busy, my inherited Fokker 100 issues, an avalanche of MRB work and a transition from the V22 Nose Landing Gear FSD to a fully redesigned EMD unit.

Douglas Rhoads of Boeing, an absolute crackerjack of an American character, had made my friends list of the time and we would speak about things we barely knew about, life, the universe and of course the evolving US Navy requirements for damage tolerance analysis. It was basically a philosophy of crack growth from an initial crack in the material and an assurance, or promise, that landing gear that had ballistic damage or an initial surface flaw from day one would still last a lifetime.

Whatever lifetime we had all dreamed up.

I would make an acquaintance, over the phone, with a chap called David Broek, and Menasco paid for his DTA package and some support, and in the following months, I really did need a lot of that support.

Gary Buss, a chap from the performance department, that group of people responsible for landing load predictions, fabricated a special hat for me during this time, a simple peaked hat with a battery operated propeller, and when the bosses were not looking, I would wear it with pride, because during my deliberations with Mister Broek, I truly believed that one day I would become a rocket scientist.

I could go on, and I often do, but the study of fatigue loads, their repetition within a spectrum, and the reasoning behind simplifying such a load history create such a fiction within the aerospace structural process that any faults in a subsequent analysis for damage tolerance could either mean absolutely everything, or nothing.

Yet, at a PDR (Preliminary Design Review) or a CDR (Critical Design Review) it was up to the analyst to justify every step in the process to the US Navy propeller heads, not only from the subcontractor or vendor, but also the prime analysts would stand up and vouch for elaborate benchmark processes of something that was, fundamentally mysterious and untestable.

The conversations with the expert, David Broek, as I wore my fancy cap, did little to reassure me that any of the work we would ever do could make our formal report worth any more than the paper that it was printed on.

Yet, it would be the future.

Mortgage Free

A photo of my good buddy Graeme Wright, who paid off his mortgage on the 20th August 1993 which is proudly announced on that shirt.

He never picked up the spade again and constantly encouraged me, and the lovely Karen, to do the same. In August 1994, we were on the flight path to do the same the following year.