Your Today in Pictures...

[Graham Ritchie]

Being made redundant is a terrible feeling, its only happened to me three times due to the places closing down. The thing is you have no say in the matter and that uncertainty as to how to pay the bills and hopefully find another job is a huge concern.

I was glad to hit the 65 mark three years ago, that meant I qualified for my old age pension. .

The hardest redundancy to go through was the Mt Cook one, that dragged out for months until the hanger door finally shut for good.

When I came to New Zealand in 1973 I boarded with a family who were really great people, they invited me along to join them on fishing trips etc I learned a lot. Jump forward 38 odd years, when I worked at the cinema. I asked young Chris have you ever done any fishing?...no was his reply...right then, so in a way I was paying back to how I was treated when I arrived here, so took him, his mum and younger brother fishing one cold winters day, something none of them had done, so it was nice to give something back

[Steve Klare]

It usually begins when your boss walks up to you and asks "You have a moment?".

-then you find out you have a lot more moments than you ever suspected!

[Lee Mannering]

A nice letter of praise tho Graham.

[Ali Hipperson]

Graham - funny you say what you told a young Chris - although I don't regret the slightly unusual career I chose for myself, I always tell people that when I come back again I will make sure I learn a trade. Although there is a lot that automation and even robotics can now do these days - they can't: wire a house; decorated it; plumb it; put a roof on it etc.... So even in these modern times it still seems that the old saying 'a trade is a job for life' still holds true!

Steve - I got back to the shores of Lake Ontario and to Niagara a couple of years ago for the first time since 1989. When my folks emigrated from England and Scotland respectively in 1954 they traveled by sea and disembarked at St John's Newfoundland.

Btw - how long ago did the US 'capture' and claim the Maid of The Mist for their side of the falls?? 😯

[Graham Ritchie]

Steve After Mt Cook I got a job working for Ansett doing the major stuff on the 146. Two years later they closed that part down "the base" and away I went again on the road to redundancy. One person in the hanger said to me you must be getting used to this? as we all new each others past.

With this one the CEO of Ansett along with his side kicks came into the hanger to tell everyone they were closing it down. He seemed to think that folk would take that announcement with a ok thanks for that, that's all I could think of at the time. Instead he encounter anger and found himself with his back against the wall, people did not hold back there feelings and I thought what an idiot, to come in here and tell people they were losing there jobs in such a way, he soon left quickly.

After the base closed I got a call from one of the managers, asking me would I like to come back, I replied you just made me redundant. He replied the "goal posts" have changed so I did go back as they had one more 146 needing the works. For those two months only a handful returned. We completed the work on time and I got payed off for a second time What surprised me in this case, was getting a extra one thousand dollars in my pay packet. I contacted the account people to say they have made a mistake. They replied that the extra money, was just something for coming back and helping out, oh! and a bottle of wine came my way as well

After that I remember saying, that if you need "another hand" do let me know, soon after though the company went under big time. For me it was "game over" for aviation due to my age, there was no way I would get another job, but I will say it was good while it lasted.

The last photo here for me summed up the end of 22 years in aviation.

This was the only photo I took of the place at the time, should have taken more.

[Graham Ritchie]

I remember Mike Rowe talking about trades a few years back, there is a lot of truth in what he says about the attitude towards trades, not just in the US as he talks about, but world wide as well. I came across this interview that is well worth listing to what he says.

[Graham Ritchie]

PS. Ansett did some really good and popular TV ads back then, so for anyone who likes "cats", here is the "Fluffy" one.

[Ali Hipperson]

Great videos Graham 🙂

[Graham Ritchie]

Thanks Ali "Fluffy" the cat was my favorite

[Lee Mannering]

That's all folks! Always reminds me of a local projectionist who was retiring with digital coming in. I dared him to project a 35mm Bugs Bunny cartoon which I top secretly supplied. The children loved it along with the modern feature. He in effect had a good sending off.
You gotta love reel film.

[Steve Klare]

Amphibious Update

So the saga of the Amphibious Jeep continues! I had pledged to finally get some paint on the thing before CineSea 22 and I kept my word.

I debated going with Navy Gray or Air Force Blue (Mercury Canaveral Air Station Rescue Squad), but I was historically honest that neither of those ever really had an Amphibious Jeep and just kept it Olive Drab for the US Army.

I learned quite a bit in the process. You see, my great years of building models were in my teens. I actually built a pretty shabby version of this same model when I was 12. This second one is my attempt to do it again, but do it right this time. The thing is I haven’t really built any kind of model in at least a decade. I also doubt I’ve painted anything smaller than a garage door in years. I was shrewd enough to start on the bottom surface of the hull and then I found it looked pretty bad! The lesson learned was you don’t get a decent coat of paint with a cheap brush: a trip to the art store for a nice fine haired brush and the second coat looked much better. After that, I painted the rest of the hull and the deck.

This weekend was set for my amphibious mission to Wildwood, New Jersey. Doug Meltzer went in as my forward observer, and while I was still on the Garden State Parkway, 100 miles from the ops zone, he sent me his report: the news was not at all good!
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Something like every other year, the hotels in Wildwood drain their pools between the seasons and repaint the bottom. For the Shalimar, this was the year.

Now you might think this was the end of my mission, but being amphibious means we don’t suspend operations because of difficulties with terrain: we adapt and keep advancing forward! We reverted to land mode and our field of operation became the second-floor walkway!

-and so the quest continues: we will slowly add details and just maybe by CineSea 23, it’ll look just that much more like the pretty mediocre WWII vehicle it’s trying to be. (Never won a battle, sank in substantial quantities: neither a good Jeep nor a good boat!)
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By the way: this is kind of my warm-up for doing "CineSea 22 in Pictures". Watch for it in the 8mm section in coming days!
-I just drove 200 miles and...mostly unpacked the (non-amphibious) car, in my current condition, this was about all I could make happen!

[Brian Fretwell]

Seen by Tower Bridge in London in the 1970's is this DUKW the daddy of your model one?

[Graham Ritchie]

I have ben sorting out old Standard 8mm home movies of late for the photographic crowd at the heritage park. But to do this, I was forced to use a cement splicer, as I am a tape man for my Super8 films, but for Standard 8mm, tape is in short supply. However after giving this bottle a good shake and scraping both half of the film to be joined, the cement splice does seem to be holding up very well. To test it I applied quite a bit of pressure to pull it apart, but it passed the test, held well.

Now the film is all joined up I will carefully clean the film. The old Kodachrome images have very good color.

[Steve Klare]

Hi Brian,

DUKW really is in a lot of ways the Daddy of the amphibious jeep. It's kind of the story about how success can get you in trouble. The US Army had a couple of really successful development programs going. They had the GPW, the classic Army Jeep, and the DUKW, the conversion of the (also classic) Deuce and a Half truck into an amphibious vehicle.

Somebody asked a pretty obvious question: "Why not make an amphibious Jeep?" (GPA). If you take one of these and take the top deck off, you see something pretty close to the frame of a regular Army jeep with the same engine, suspension and steering gear.

-great idea, but the production vehicle came in 900 Lbs. over spec with very limited freeboard: they were not very seaworthy and not very cargo-capable either. In the context of WWII this did not make them very popular out in theater. (Great idea, badly executed!)

I almost made the same mistake myself: my original plan was to power it with two D-cells. I did a little simulation of how it would sit in the water at that weight and found myself with about an inch of hull between the water surface and the deck: it wouldn't take a lot to start taking on water. (If only they had Microsoft Excel in 1942...)

I changed to C cells and did much better. I was able to mount them very low for stability and as far astern as possible to dig the prop into the water and for something so badly streamlined to even plane a little and go straight(-ish) even without a rudder (maybe later...). It's certainly faster in the water with the lighter batteries: the motor voltage is the same, but it's dragging a lot less hull through the water.

I accidentally tested seaworthiness early on this month. We went to visit my son at college in Indiana and I brought the painted model to surprise him. The hotel had a pool and we sailed the Jeep while he he went for a swim. He created a great deal of surf and the thing just bobbed and tilted: as far as I saw the water never came close to washing over the deck.
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(-kind of liked it in the natural finish!)

[Chip Gelmini]

Tail light modification