Ladies and Gentlemen....The "Duke" has Arrived!

And boy, is it nice!

Duke came in a nice travel case:

And he's a very handsome fellow.

He must have to some strange foreign place, as the local custom caused him to be branded with a "cartouche".

Hes a very late model, with a serial number in the high 5 millions (57xxxxx). According to one of my books, that would place him in the second-to-the-last batch made by Springfield Armory.

I had hoped for a WWII model, but seeing as I'm a child of the Cold War, I guess its more fitting that I received a rifle from the Korean War era.

When I opened it up today, My buddy who runs the mail box store I use looked at it, held it, and just about drooled over it. I looked at the serial number and realized it was a very late one, probably from the post-war production runs.

He's Korean, and I told him there was a chance that this rifle had helped defend his homeland. He lovingly patted it, and said "Thank you, Mr. Garand".

The receiver is in excellent condition, with only very, very light pitting, which you can barely see.

The tag that came with it rates the barrel as "0+", and the chamber as "1+", which goes right along with it having a new barrel.

So now I have to get the books out and study them. I'll want to carefully inspect it, and properly lube it with grease. ALL the books I've read say to use grease, and NOT oil, and all he has right now is a light coating of oil.

The wood on him is just beautiful, and looks "furniture quality" to me as far as grain patter goes.

Which brings up a question........What do I use on the stock? Linseed oil? Tung Oil? Pledge? I don't remember if my Garand books go into the proper care of a new stock, and this one looks like brand new, bare wood to me.

Besides the travel case, he came with a COA, a very nice instruction manual, a plastic thing to put in the unloaded rifle to tell you the chamber is empty, a new canvas sling, and one clip.

To borrow a line from "Casablanca", I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
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"Duke" Is On His Way

WHOO-HOO!

I received the shipping notice from the CMP this afternoon.

Since they ship FedEx overnight, I'll pick him up tomorrow on my way home from work.

Then I'll spend some time learning how to field strip and clean him, and make plans to hit the range.

8 x 8 x 8 LED Cube

I WANT ONE!



And it's available as a kit from Jameco, a company I've bought many, many things from.

Meanwhile, at Long Beach Airport.....

A banner tower went down on takeoff.

Looks like he struck a power pole, sheared off a wing, and came down on an embankment of the 405 freeway.

He walked away.....

And he just barely cleared the freeway....

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Happy Independence Day!

I know you all remember what it took to get our country started, and may God be with us if we have to do it again.

And thank you to all who have served. It's a duty and an honor I wasn't allowed due to circumstances.


I'm goofing off.

ALL

DAY

LONG!


Well.....not really. The YF is recovering from minor surgery, so I'm doing laundry, swabbing out the head, and flying Mr. Kirby around today.

Be safe and sane out there.....
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Additional Proton-M Video

This is the video I first saw.

About 8~10 seconds after impact and fireball, the shockwave hits the cameraman.

Ours didn't get this bent out of shape. We went pretty much straight up, coasted after the engines shut down, and then plopped down into the water.

This sucker went BOOM in a really big way!


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Proton-M Launch Failure

Having been through something similar back in January, I feel for these guys.

Most people don't understand that while we've been launching liquid fueled rockets for over 70 years now, it's still not a 100% reliable process. Even with improved technologies like materials science, metallurgy, instrumentation, and a host of other things, sometimes rockets go BOOM.

Pretty complete coverage over at the "NasaSpaceFlight.com" website.

Boy Scout Merit Badge Class on the Battleship IOWA

Gonna be a busy day today. I'm helping with the Boy Scout "Radio Merit Badge" class today on the Iowa.

BTW.....we can't call the "U.S.S. Iowa" anymore (sob...sob...) as she's no longer an active ship of the U.S. Navy. We have to refer to the garnd old gal as the "Battleship Iowa".

A small technicality, but an important one none the less.

I'll be in the Comm Center helping the Scouts to get over any On-The-Air shyness (a.k.a. "Mic Fright"), and to make sure nobody does anything STOOOPID while transmitting.

In my experience, the Scouts are all fine young lads who take direction very well, but the FCC requires a "Qualified Control Operator" to be in physical control of the radio gear while unlicensed people use it.

If you know any Scouts, the Radio Merit Badge is one of the lesser-known badges, and a good one to have. I forget how many Merit Badges my son has, but his sash is pretty full.

Time to hit the shower, get dresses, gather up all my materials, and head on down to the Iowa.

See you all later.....

45th Anniversary of "Bullitt"

Gee....now I feel reeeeally old.....

Read about it here.

And enjoy the video......


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Field Day AAR

Well, we've had better Field Days, but nobody got hurt, the food was acceptable, the weather was great, and we all had a good time.

On the flip side, due to a solar event a few days previous, propagation was downright stinky on Saturday, making things pretty dull for the guys on HF ("Shortwave").

And try as we could, we just couldn't chase Murphy away this year.

My son forgot we use Friday as a set up day, and didn't take vacation, so I got nothing done at the site on my own station.

Then he upgraded the OS in his iPhone, which nuked his address book, and lost the GPS location of my house.

He got lost, had to call me, and got here 90 minutes late, putting us waaaay off schedule for this year.

Meanwhile, back at the site....

One guy had the lifting cable in his crank-up tower snap when the tower was about 24" up from the bottom, a very good time to have it break. The antenna doesn't drop too far, and nothing was damaged.

The antenna for that station wound up being about 15~18 feet above ground, which really put a dent in how well it worked.

The next station somehow managed to kill his radio, a Kenwood TS-2000 a normally reliable radio. We got him on a spare radio one of the other guys had, at which point he started wondering about his antenna working correctly.

Considering that this particular antenna gets mediocre reviews on eHam, we erected a telescopic mast, and hung a dipole on it.

And I had some really weird "Reverse Desense" problems that I never could overcome, but I think I know what it might be. I swapped out my filters and preamps (the most likely culprits) with no effect, so I just stuck to FO-29 for the weekend.

I "only" made 22 contacts, about half of what I normally do.

And my Azimuth rotor "broke" (I think) on the ride home. It now freewheels when it should be very hard to turn by hand, so I have to look in to what happened there. I transported the mount, rotors, and antennas fully assembled, and I think I shook something a wee bit too hard on the ride back home.

And I forgot my camera, BOTH days!

Only the guys running the CW station got through the whole weekend without a single problem.

Must have been all the garlic they hung around their trailer......

OUCH! I Killed My Optima Deep Cycle Battery

OOOPS!

Well, it's 7 years old, and I got a LOT of use out of it. I'd been charging it every few months to keep it from getting sulfated, and I just realized I hadn't had it out to use, or charge, in about a year.

It *might* come back if I get a different charger that will whack it with high-current pulses, but in my experience, while it might come back, you'll never get anywhere near full capacity out of it.

Lesson learned (actually, lesson remembered): CHARGE the damn thing on a regular basis!

I'll put it in the car, and exchange it for a new one on the way home from setting things up today.