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.