We started this Phavorite Photo series a short while ago at Python Pete’s suggestion, and while going through a few of my favorites recently the photo you see above popped out. That’s my good buddies Orlando and Velma on their CSC RX3 headed up to Dante’s View, a natural overook that provides what has to be the best view of Death Valley (the view is shown in the photo below). We were on the Destinations Deal tour, and Orlando and Velma bought their RX3 motorcycle specifically to go with us on this ride. The Destinations Deal was a grand ride, and Orlando and Velma are great traveling companions.
I grabbed that photo of Orlando and Velma with my little Nikon D3300, its kit 18-55mm lens, and a polarizer. The D3300 was a superb traveling SLR. The photo needed a little tweaking in PhotoShop to bring it up (they almost all always do). A bit of cropping, a correction in levels, another correction in curves, eliminating an unsightly sign that was in the background, and just a little bit of vibrance and saturation enhancement. Here’s what the original looked like:
I was particularly impressed with Orlando’s RX3 motorcycle. This was the second time I led a CSC tour with folks riding two up on an RX3. Orlando had no difficulty hanging with the rest of us (we were all riding solo), and surprisingly, his bike returned the same fuel economy. There’s a lot to be said for small bikes. I’ve said some of it before.
I have more than a few favorite photos. You’ll see more here on the ExhaustNotes blog.
Something we’ll do in each one of these Phavorite Photos blogs is show our prior favorites. Just click on the photo to get to each earlier blog. There’s only one so far; there will be more.
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A watch is a personal and emotional purchase, much like a motorcycle or a rifle. By definition, whatever you choose is perfect and the best; what anyone else chooses is not and is somehow indicative of a deep-seated character flaw. I get that.
Having said that, I never got the attraction of an Omega wristwatch. I know some folks love them and if you wear an Omega, more power to you. It’s just not me, which is why I found the attractive young lady pushing the latest Omega at me amusing.
Omega, you see, never misses a marketing opportunity, and their latest product placement achievement is the new Bond movie, No Time To Die. In it, 007 wears a titanium Omega Seamaster. The high end watch store in Palo Alto had a couple of the titanium Bond Omegas in stock, and the young sales lady was attempting what could only be described as a hard sell. She was new to these shores, I think, and evidently convinced that if James Bond wore a titanium Omega, every man in America would want one as well.
“Bond wears,” she kept repeating, as if that was all it would take to get me to plunk down $9800 for an Omega (it would actually take a lot more, like maybe a $9700 discount). Before I realized it, she had unbuckled my Casio Marlin (the best deal in a dive watch ever and one I wear frequently), and she had the titanium Bond on my wrist. She would have made a good pickpocket.
“Bond wears,” she said again.
I wondered if she realized Bond is a fictional character.
The titanium Seamaster was light, almost like a plastic watch. I could barely detect its presence. I didn’t care for the look of the mesh bracelet, but damn, that thing was a feather.
“NATO Bond,” she said, pushing another titanium Bond Seamaster at me, this one with a cloth NATO band. NATO watchbands…that’s another fad I never fell for. They look cheap. I was in the US Army and the only special watchbands I ever saw were the velcro bands paratroopers wear (they tear away if your watch gets caught on the door when exiting an aircraft…you lose your watch but you get to keep your arm, which isn’t a bad deal if you think about it). I’m pretty sure guys in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t actually wear NATO bands, but what do I know?
I like the look of a dive watch and I own a couple of them. My tastes run toward high quality and low cost, so my personal favorites are the Casio Marlin (a watch I’ve written about before) and a Seiko Batman I bought at Costco a few years ago. The Marlin was $39, it keeps superb time, it looks good, and it works well (it’s the watch I wore when I rode through Colombia). The Marlin did just fine in the Andes’ torrential rains. I’ve never tried the Marlin in the deep blue sea, though. I’m not a diver and I really don’t know how well it would work as a dive watch. But I’m not a fictional British secret agent, either, so unlike Daniel Craig I don’t need the titanium Bond watch. If I need external inspiration, I’ll take it elsewhere. Bill Gates wears a Casio Marlin and even though he doesn’t have a blog or a motorcycle, he’s real and he seems to have done okay. But I don’t need to emulate other people. I just wear watches I find appealing.
I asked the young sales lady where she was from and she said Cupertino. No, originally, I asked. “China,” she said. I asked where and she told me (it was a city in Hebei Province), I told her I had been there, and we chatted about the ride Gresh and I did across China. She told me I had been to more places in China than she had. I wore a Timex on that ride, I told her, like Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the Chinese guys called me Dàshū, which means “big uncle,” so it sort of fit). She laughed, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t know what I was talking about. Sometimes that makes for the best conversations.
That photo above could also be in our Phavorite Photos series. It’s the motorcycles on one of our Baja rides (all CSC RX3s) parked outside our rooms at the Don Gus Hotel in Guerrero Negro. That photo has always been one of my favorites.
Not fancy, not expensive, and comfortable: That’s how I would describe the Don Gus Hotel in Guerrero Negro (incidentally, that’s also a pretty good good description of the RX3). The Don Gus is on the main drag on the left as you come into town, and it’s nearly directly across the street from the more well-known Malarimmo’s. The Don Gus has a nice bar and the food is great.
Malarimmo’s usually fills up quickly when the California gray whales are in nearby Scammon’s Lagoon (that would be from January through March). There are at least a half-dozen hotels in Guerrero Negro, and the Don Gus is the one I’d go for if Malarimmo’s is booked up. The Don Gus is less expensive than Malarimmo’s and the restaurant maybe isn’t as fancy, but it’s a good place to stay and you won’t be disappointed. If you want a whale watching tour and Malarrimo’s is full, let the folks at the Don Gus know the night before and they’ll hook you up with another tour company. They’ve done so for me many times, and I’ve found that once you are out on the water who you tour with doesn’t make a difference. They are all great.
Looking at these photos….man, I have got to get my knees in the breeze and point my Enfield south. I am missing Baja big time. Gresh, you up for Tony’s fish tacos?
When you ride in Baja, make sure you insure with our favorite: BajaBound!
Here at ExhaustNotes.us we take the time to give you real world, long term results in our product tests. Anyone can test a thing for a few months or a year but does that really give you an idea how the product will be working in 5 years? How about 10 years? How about 50 years?
I bought this Sears Craftsman air compressor back in the 1970s. I forget the exact year but I remember it cost a fortune. I think I got it on sale for around 200 dollars and it was the most expensive tool I had ever bought up to that time. It must have cost several week’s wages. It used to have a beige plastic cover over the motor and pump but that oxidized and turned to dust after 20 years or so.
The Sears compressor came complete with a spray gun. It was kind of a rinky-dink gun so I bought a Binks 18. I wanted to be a car painter and to paint cars you had to have a Binks Model 18. The Model 18 was pro-level equipment and I figured that if I had one I could paint like a pro. The 18 also cost a fortune in 1970 money and it weighs a ton. The Sears gun is quite a bit lighter. Weight matters when you’re leaning over a hood or roof trying to hold the hose out of the way and not drip sweat onto the car.
I found out too late that much like camera gear being the least important part of photography, the spray gun is the least important part of painting. I learned surface prep, dust control and a steady hand count for much more. One day I tried the Sears gun just for fun and it laid down a wide, even pattern; it was better than the Binks 18. The damn thing worked great and was easier to clean.
The years had not been kind to the pressure gauges on the Sears compressor. The old dials lost their clear lenses at some point and the faces rusted and turned black. It was sacrilege but I replaced them with a set from Harbor Freight. The old gauges had a cool Sears logo on them but time waits for no manifold.
I rewired the original 40-year-old compressor motor to run off 240 volts rather than 120 volts. It starts better with less droop on my off-grid shed. In the past I tried to run the compressor with a square-wave inverter and it started smoking. It seems to have recovered from that trauma and the motor only gets warm running on my new inverter.
One problem that cropped up several years ago was the easy-start pressure relief valve leaking all the time making the compressor cycle on and off more frequently. I dismantled the valve and cleaned it out. It seems to be okay now with just one quick puff of air escaping when the tank reaches pressure. I’ve set the max pressure to 80 psi just to give the old girl a little rest in her dotage. I don’t need 100 psi for anything and I’m not in a rush to get things done.
When I bought the compressor new I hated the cheap, plastic wheels. I was sure they would not last long and planned to go with some steel, ball-bearing replacements. That never happened because the wheels never broke. This rig has been hauled around boat yards, over gravel and rocks, and loaded into and out of trucks. The thing must have 20 miles on it by now.
I added a water trap and filter to the compressor, the kind with the auto drain valve. That valve saw a lot of use in humid Florida but out west in New Mexico it has yet to dump water. The hose was looking bad after 50 years so I replaced it with a snazzy red one because red is the fastest color.
The quick release air chucks were showing their age so I screwed new ones into place in a strictly prophylactic move. I like to keep my gear in top shape, you know?
The recent service I’ve given the compressor (tighten belt, clean air filter, change oil) should be good for another 10 years at the pace I work now. I give the old Sears compressor high marks, 5 stars even. The Craftsman spray gun is a good piece of gear also; I’ve painted a few cars with it. Too bad Sears no longer sells this model and hasn’t for a long, long time. Is Sears even in business? That’s one of the big problems with an ExhaustNotes.us long term review: by the time we’re done testing the product the product no longer exists nor does the company that sold it. No matter, watch for our big 20-rotary-phone comparo test in a future ExhaustNotes.us.
I had a tough time choosing a title for this blog. I went with what you see above because it reminds me of one of my favorite Dad jokes…you know, the one about how you tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator. If you don’t see it for a while, it’s a crocodile. If you see it later, well, then it’s a gator. The other choice might have been the old United Negro College Fund pitch: A Mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste. But if I went with that one I might be called a racist, which seems to be the default response these days anytime anyone disagrees with me about anything.
Gresh likes hearing my war stories. Not combat stories, but stories about the defense industry. I never thought they were all that interesting, but Gresh is easily entertained and he’s a good traveling buddy, so I indulge him on occasion. Real war stories…you know how you can tell them from fairy tales? A fairy tale starts out with “once upon a time.” A war story starts out with “this is no shit, you guys…”
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So, this is a “no shit” story. It sounds incredible, but it’s all true. I was an engineer at Aerojet Ordnance, and I made my bones analyzing cluster bomb failures. They tell me I’m pretty good at it (I wrote a book about failure analysis, I still teach industry and gubmint guys how to analyze complex systems failures, and I sometimes work as an expert witness in this area). It pays the rent and then some.
So this deal was on the Gator mine system, which was a real camel (you know, a horse designed by a committee). The Gator mine system was a Tri-Service program (three services…the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force). It was officially known as the CBU-89/B cluster munition (CBU stands for Cluster Bomb Unit). The way it worked is instead of having to go out and place the mines manually, an airplane could fly in and drop a couple of these things, the bombs would open on the way down and dispense their mines (each cluster bomb contained 94 mines), the mines would arm, and voila, you had a minefield. Just like that.
It sounds cool, but the Gator was a 20-year-old turkey that couldn’t pass the first article test (you had to build two complete systems and the Air Force would drop them…if the mines worked at a satisfactory level, you could start production). The UNCF slogan notwithstanding, the folks who had tried to take this Tri-Service camel and build it to the government’s design wasted a lot of mines. In 20 years, several defense contractors had taken Gator production contracts, and every one of them failed the first article flight test. When my boss’s boss decided we would bid it at Aerojet, I knew two things: We, too, would fail the first article flight test, and it would end up in my lap. I was right on both counts. We built the flight test units per the government design and just like every one else, we failed with a disappointing 50% mine function rate. And I got the call to investigate why.
So, let’s back up a couple of centuries. You know, we in the US get a lot of credit for pioneering mass production. Rightly so, I think, but most folks are ignorant about what made it possible. Nope, it wasn’t Henry Ford and his Model T assembly line. It was something far more subtle, and that’s the concept of parts interchangeability. Until parts interchangeability came along (which happened about a hundred years before old Henry did his thing), you couldn’t mass produce anything. And to make parts interchangeable, you had to have two numbers for every part dimension: The nominal dimension, and a tolerance around that dimension. When we say we have a 19-inch wheel, for example, that’s the nominal dimension. There’s also a ± tolerance (that’s read plus or minus) associated with that 19-inch dimension. If the wheel diameter tolerance was ±0.005 inches, the wheel might be anywhere from 18.995 to 19.005 inches. Some tolerances are a simple ± number, others are a + something and a – something if the tolerance band is not uniform (like you see in the drawing below). But everything has a tolerance because you can’t always make parts exactly to the nominal dimension.
Where companies get sloppy is they do a lousy job assigning tolerances to nominal dimensions, and they do an even worse job analyzing the effects of the tolerances when parts are built at the tolerance extremes. Analyzing these effects is called tolerance analysis. Surprisingly, most engineering schools don’t teach it, and perhaps not so surprisingly, most companies don’t do it. All this has been a very good thing for me, because I get to make a lot of money analyzing the failures this kind of engineering negligence causes. In fact, the cover photo on my failure analysis book is an x-ray of an aircraft emergency egress system that failed because of negligent tolerancing (which killed two Navy pilots when their aircraft caught fire).
I don’t think people consciously think about this and decide they don’t need to do tolerance analysis. I think they don’t do it because it is expensive and in many cases their engineers do not have the necessary skills. At least, they don’t do it initially. In production, when they have failures some companies are smart enough to return to the tolerancing issue. That’s when they do the tolerance analysis they should have done during the design phase, and they find they have tolerance accumulations that can cause a problem.
Anyway, back to the Gator mine system. The Gator system had a dispenser (a canister) designed by the Air Force, the mines were designed by the Army, and the system had an interface kit designed by the Navy. Why they did it this way, I have no idea. It was about as dumb an approach for a development program as I have ever seen. Your tax dollars at work, I guess.
The Navy’s Gator interface kit positioned the mines within the dispenser and sent an electronic pulse from the dispenser to the mines when it was time to start the mine arming sequence. This signal went from coils in the interface kit to matching coils in each mine (there was no direct connection; the electric pulse passed from the interface kit coils to the mine coils). You can see these coils in the photo below (they are the copper things).
In our first article flight test at Eglin Air Force Base, only about 50% of the mines worked. That was weird, because when we tested the mines one at a time, they always worked. I had a pretty good feeling that the mines weren’t getting the arming signal. The Army liked that concept a lot (they had design responsibility for the mines), but the Air Force and the Navy were eyeing me the way a chicken might view Colonel Sanders.
I started asking questions about the tolerancing in the Navy’s part of the design, because I thought if the coils were not centered directly adjacent to the matching coils in each mine, the arming signal wouldn’t make it to the mine. The Navy, you see, had the responsibility for the stuffing that held the mines in place and for the coils that brought the arming signal to the mines.
At a big meeting with the engineering high rollers from all three services, I floated this idea of coil misalignment due to tolerance accumulation. The Navy guy basically went berserk and told me it could never happen. His reaction was so extreme I knew I had to be on to something (in a Shakespearian methinks the lady doth protest too much sort of way). At this point, both the Army and Air Force guys were smiling. The Navy guy was staring daggers at me. You could almost see smoke coming out his ears. He was a worm, I was the hook, and we were going fishing. And we both knew it.
I asked the Navy engineer directly how much misalignment would prevent signal transmission, he kept telling me it couldn’t happen, and I kept pressing for a number: How much coil misalignment would it take? Finally, the Navy dude told me there would have to be at least a quarter of an inch misalignment between the Navy coils and those in the mine. I don’t think he really knew, but he was throwing out a number to make it look like he did. At that point, I was pretty sure I had him. I looked at my engineering design manager and he left the room. Why? To do a tolerance analysis, of course. Ten minutes later he was back with the numbers that showed the Navy’s interface kit tolerances could allow way more than a quarter inch of misalignment.
When I shared that with the guys in our Tri-Service camel committee, the Navy guy visibly deflated. His 20-year secret was out. The Army and the Air Force loved it (they both hated the Navy, and they really hated the Navy engineer).
We tightened the tolerances in our production and built two more cluster bombs. I was at the load plant to oversee the load, assemble, and pack operation, and when we flight tested my two cluster bombs with live drops from an F-16 we had a 100% mine function rate (which had never been achieved before). That allowed us to go into production and we made a ton of money on the Gator program. I’m guessing that Navy weasel still hates me.
It’s hard to believe this kind of stuff goes on, but it does. I’ve got lots of stories with similar tolerance-induced recurring failures, and maybe I’ll share another one or two here at some point. Ask me about the Apache main rotor blade failures sometime…that’s another good one.
That Seiko watch you see on the right, known informally as “The Panda” in watch collector circles, is perhaps the best watch I’ve ever owned. I bought it at the Kunsan AFB Base Exchange when I was a young Army dude in 1975 for the princely sum of $76, which was a bit of a stretch for me. Oh, I had the bucks. The Army didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t have expenses, either, so $76 was eminently doable. In fact, I bought Seiko stainless steel chronographs from the Base Exchange for my Dad and my grandfather, too. Their watches were only $67, but the Panda had the day and the date on the face, and three timing features: Seconds on the main watch face, minutes on the lower subdial, and hours on the upper subdial. It was a beautiful thing and it was all mechanical. I wore it for about 10 years, and then when Ebay started to get popular I auctioned it away. I was quite pleased with the results. The watch that originally set me back $76 went for just north of $200 on Ebay 30 years ago. Today, though, that same watch brings around $2000. I sold too soon. Go figure.
Anyway, being the watch junkie that I am, I was more than a little intrigued by a very similar watch now being offered by Breitling. It is also an all mechanical watch Breitling calls the “Premier.”
I’d call it a Panda, and I’d sure like to own one. But the Breitling MSRP is a lofty $8500. They are just over $6,000 on Amazon, but that’s still way above my pay grade.
In poking around on the Internet looking at the Breitlings, I learned that they offer several versions of their Premier. One is a model that pays tribute to the Norton motorcycle, which has different colors, old school numbers on the face, and a band that, frankly, looks cheap to me. The colors don’t really work for me, either, but maybe that’s because I want my Panda to look like a panda. If I wanted a Norton motorcycle, I’d buy a Norton.
Seiko is back on the Panda wagon, too, as is Citizen and perhaps others with modern versions of this classic watch design. Their prices are way more reasonable, too, being in the $200 to $300 range. But the new Seiko and Citizen Pandas are solar-powered quartz watches.
There’s nothing wrong with electric watches (in fact, their accuracy is astounding), but I’m a mechanical guy. I own a few solar watches and several battery-powered watches. I like them all. But there’s a certain cachet (a fancy word for cool) associated with a mechanical watch, even if you give up a little accuracy. I would like to wear that Breitling just to pretend I’m still a yuppie, but it’s not gonna happen.
I’ve typed a lot of words and rearranged them in a zillion different ways but I’ve never coined a phrase. Those days are over now and you heard it here first: The Sportster LC. It’s all mine and don’t forget who came up with it because I may never do another.
Harley’s quantum leap forward takes the Sportster from 1950s technology all the way into the 1990s and beyond. The new Sportster features fuel injection, liquid cooling, a claimed 120 horsepower and a passing resemblance to Sportsters of old. That’s all good stuff, man.
I’ve always liked Sportsters. Until the V-Rod came along they were the most advanced American-built Harleys you could buy and with the addition of electronic ignition they were the most reliable Harleys to boot. I owned a Sportster and loved how it looked parked, which it did a lot because the old 1968 XLH shook itself to pieces every 200 miles. Nevertheless it was an easy motorcycle to fix and my old Sporty never left me stranded.
The Sportster LC is a completely new model that has been the worst kept secret since the Pan American, which uses the same engine. With a bore of 4.13 inches and a shortish stroke of only 2.85 inches the new two-cylinder Sportster displaces 76.4 cubic inches in total, or ½ a bushel. We never converted to metric in the USA. Each head contains two cams pushing on four valves. With a 12:1 compression ratio you’ll be running high-test unless you’re under 50 years old in which case you’ll be stuck using premium. Harley’s combustion chambers have forced owners to buy high-test for years so nothing has changed except the power output. None of these design features is new thinking: it’s a well-trod path to modern performance numbers.
Harley claims 120 horsepower; that’s probably measured at the wrist pin so I expect 105-108-ish at the wheel, plenty for street riding. The Sportster LC puts out a claimed 94 ft-lbs of torque so taking off from a stoplight should be drama free. A claimed wet weight of 502 pounds is positively sprightly and undercuts the base model Pan American by 32 pounds. 32 pounds is a lot of weight. I’ve ridden 500-pound motorcycles in the dirt and it’s the absolute limit I would consider safe. The LC should be fun on graded county roads.
Styling on the LC is squashed and compact, almost like the bike fell into a car crusher but was retrieved before becoming a cube. There are no air gaps and the big, fat tires on both ends give the LC an overstuffed living room couch look. I’m not sold on the looks but it’s passable even if it seems to copy the Indian Scout. There are only so many ways to configure a crushed V-twin so the plagiarism is probably unintended. I like the upswept pipes, they give the LC a flat-track racer vibe and that’s a good vibe to have.
Things get a little nasty on the left side of the LC. Without the big upswept exhaust covering the mess all the complexity of a modern motorcycle is exposed. Let’s face it: The thing looks like a commercial air conditioning system from the left side. Still, I wouldn’t let the LC’s looks stop me from buying one assuming I would ever spend $15,000 on a damn motorcycle.
The looks won’t stop me from buying one but the seat-to-foot peg layout might. I can’t stand forward controls. I get that with the ultra low seat there would be no way to fold your legs tight enough for a more normal foot peg placement. Maybe Harley will come out with a Sportster LC Sport with more suspension, a higher seat and controls situated in such a way that you can ride the bike.
The LC comes with Bluetooth connectivity, cornering rider safety enhancements, ABS, traction control, selectable riding modes and cruise control. All stuff I hate except for cruise control. You may like dick-dogging with that electronic chaff but I’d rather ride a motorcycle than play digital commander. Hopefully pulling a few fuses and a warning light or two will disarm all that junk.
With only one disc stopping 120 horsepower and 650 pounds of bike and lightweight rider I sense the front brake may not be up to the modern standards of the engine and electronics package. I hope I’m wrong. Big fat tires usually make for a ponderous ride, but again, I hope I’m wrong. I seem to be doing a lot of hoping I’m wrong with this Harley Davidson.
What’s it like to ride? How would I know? I never get invited to Harley press junkets so you’ll have to get to one of H-D’s test ride events to find that out. My impression of the bike is that it’s a big improvement over the old Sportster but without the old Sporty’s provenance the LC has a long way to go before it reaches the beloved status the 1957 and up models achieved.
I guess what I liked about the old model was the tactile feel of sitting atop explosions propelling you down the highway. You never forgot you were riding a motorcycle. The Sportster didn’t become a legend by accident. Years of competition, countless race victories, heroic rides, and a fairly solid bottom end crank assembly and gearbox has made the Sportster a motorcycle everyone wants to buy used. I still want a XR1200R Sportster bad and have since I first saw one. Only time will tell if the new Sportster LC will be able to burrow into my heart the same bad-like way.
Here’s a quick look at some new 185-grain powder-coated semi-wadcutter bullets I received from my good buddy Jim Gardner. I loaded 50 with 5.0 grains of Bullseye in mixed brass to get a feel for how they shot. They did great!
This was a quick look with zero load development; I just used the load that had worked well for me with cast-and-lubed 185-grain semi-wadcutter bullets. The distance was 50 feet.
The two targets on the left were just to get a feel where the load shot, and then I put the remaining 40 rounds through the silhouette target. Interestingly, there was no leading and no blue paint residue in the barrel. I like these Gardner bullets!
More Tales of the Gun, including our favorite loads, are right here!
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Another favorite watch and one I highly recommend: The Citizen Nighthawk GMT watch. I bought mine maybe 25 years ago when this model was first offered as an exclusive through Macy’s. Today you can find them for sale through many different outlets (sometimes below $300). One of the best spots is Amazon.
At 43mm it’s a big watch, but unlike a lot of big watches, it wears well on my wrist and doesn’t seem to want to roll around. The Nighthawk has a lot of features, some of which I use on a regular basis and others that I use infrequently. I like them whether I use them or not. Watches are grown-up boy’s toys, and this one answers the mail for me. There’s the standard date display at 3:00, there’s the slide rule (explained in an earlier blog on my first-gen Citizen Blue Angels watch), there’s the GMT feature (more on that in a second), there’s the Eco-Drive engine, and there’s a lume to this thing that just doesn’t quit.
That photo above? I shot it with my iPhone in the dark a night or two ago, and other than cropping, it’s not been tweaked in PhotoShop. The lume really is that bright and legible at night. You can’t read by it, but you almost can. It’s the brightest lume I’ve ever seen on a watch. It’s so bright I sometimes wonder what it might be doing to me. Wearing this watch might be the equivalent of living in Chernobyl for a month.
The GMT feature (GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time) is one that allows you to simultanously see the time in two time zones. This is one I use when I’m traveling (especially overseas). Unlike other GMT watches, the Citizen’s approach is to offer another hand and a dial printed on the watch face. It’s that half-circle deal you see with red and white lettering on the inner left half of the dial. The way this works is when you are in, say, China, you unscrew the watch stem, click it halfway out, and advance the hour hand so it shows the time in China (it’s usually a 13-hour difference). To see the time back home, you use the that inner half-moon dial and the home watch hand. The home watch hand is the small hand (with a red aircraft on one end and a white aircraft on the other end), and it continues to show the time back in California. You read the p.m. time on the red scale with the red airplane, and the a.m. time on the white scale scale with the white airplane. It’s all very clever.
Citizen has had this watch available in one form or another for a couple of decades now. Mine is the original version, and it’s the one I probably wear most often. The Eco-Drive feature works, and it works well with just about any kind of light. When I’m not wearing this watch, it sits on a shelf in my office, and the artificial light in there is enough to keep it percolating. I set the watch to the time.gov NIST site, and months later, it is still accurate to the second with the official US government time.
The most recent versions of this watch are a black-faced version with an OD green leather band, or an all black version with a black leather band. I saw the OD green version in a Macy’s up north this past week, and it’s a good looking piece.
Here’s the blacked out version.
Citizen’s had a lot of mileage with their Blue Angels themed watches, and that treatment has been applied to their GMT in stainless steel and leather band versions.
The two Blue Angels versions immediately above are not in current production, but they are still available. I like this watch so much I’m tempted to buy the Blue Angels version, too, but that would be excessive even for a watch guy like me.
In general, I prefer a steel band watch to a leather band. I like the look of the leather band better, but leather bands wear out or get dirty within a year or two. Then you can’t always find an exact replacement for the original leather band. I tend to wear a watch 24-7 (including in the shower), so a leather band is not the way I typically go with a watch.
Oh, one other advantage to these watches: I sometimes forget to take my Citizen Nighthawk off going through airport security, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t trigger the metal detector.
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About a mile west of New Mexico’s Spaceport is a newly paved road, A013. The road runs south from Armendaris Ranch in Engle to Interstate 25. A013 is about 40 miles long and while the paving is sort of new the road roughly follows The Camino Real, a route from Old Mexico to Santa Fe that has been in use since 1598. There are marked areas where you can hike along the very same ancient road the Spaniards retreated back to Mexico on during the Pueblo Revolt. A013 does not sound nearly as cool as The Camino Real. At 420 years old, The Royal Road deserves something better than A013.
Railroad tracks closely parallel the west side of A013 and in the narrow area between the railroad tracks and the highway hundreds of cars and people have gathered near the blocked entrance that leads to Spaceport. We’re all here to watch the very first space tourism rocket blast into the sky and it’s as close as we can get to the action. Who is the first space tourist on Virgin Galactic? Astronaut 001, Richard Branson.
Spaceport from our vantage point between the railroad tracks and barbed wire. Normally you can get much closer.
In a huge public relations mix up, none of the staff at ExhaustNotes were invited along for the ride into space. It’s like Virgin Galactic has been talking with Harley-Davidson or something. No matter, you know how we operate here at ExhaustNotes: We review anything, even things we know nothing about. There were plenty of other celebrity types in attendance like Elon Musk. Also some music industry, TV and TicToc stars I have never heard of. Lots of vindicated-feeling bigwigs from New Mexico’s government were in attendance as Spaceport has been a political football since Day One.
CT and I situated our Space Watch Compound along the fence line with our cooler full of iced tea and La Croix fizzy drinks, folding chairs, hats and a large, porous ground cloth. We were the most organized people in the scrum. The sky was early-morning New Mexican: A pale blue color that washes away into the bright sun leaving you hopelessly in love with the place. Last night a storm came through the area making everything seem to sparkle. Temperature in the Chihuahuan Desert was in the low 80s and it was still only 7:00 am.
We had fairly good cell phone coverage so CT pulled up the live feed. There were several sources all seeming to use the same video. Oddly, Steven Colbert hosted the launch coverage. I like Colbert okay but I wouldn’t have used him in this situation. It kind of made the event more like a joke instead of the historic, high technology, dangerous business that it actually is. The TicToc chick surprised me in that she did a pretty good job with the fluff pieces. Hell, what am I saying, all of it was fluff pieces.
The nearly two-generation gap between Musk and Branson was obvious when it came to social media. Even with all the advancements in video and audio technology Branson’s feed was poorly done. The video and audio looked pretty bad when you’re used to counting the screw heads holding the display panels to the command module in a SpaceX launch. Most of the stuff was 2 to 3 minutes delayed and unwatchable. The moon landing in 1969 had clearer shots and audio. I swear, my iPhone would have done better. If I had known it was going to be so bad I would have handed my phone to Branson before he went up. Maybe the recorded stuff came out better.
Heavy lifting appears to flex Eve’s wings on the way up.
None of that mattered once Eve lifted off the runway with Unity strapped firmly between its dual fuselages. A loud roar of cheers went up from all of us along the fence line. The big dually flew northwest towards Albuquerque and climbed to 45,000 feet. We could see the exact moment the Unity dropped and lit off its rocket engine. A white contrail of rocket exhaust went straight up and out of sight. On Virgin’s feed TicToc chick was saying they were going to release Unity in 2 minutes, 30 seconds.
More cheering followed Unity’s escape into space. People were shaking hands and whistling. We were glad the launch went well and nobody was bitching about rich people not using their money to feed the poor. Branson was the first billionaire in space and it had been a 17-year quest for him.
Pretty much nothing happened for a while. We expected the mother ship to come down and land but it stayed aloft. I’m guessing with only one runway at Spaceport you wouldn’t want anything landing until the powerless Unity glided back down to earth. The mother ship can go land somewhere else if need be.
Finally we caught sight of Unity coming home. It flew right over our cheap seats, circled east, then north and came in for a perfect landing, heading 340, Runway 1. The sounds of cars starting and cheering mixed with the dust from exiting spectators. I was thinking where are they going? The mother ship is still up there!
Where is it? I kept asking CT. It’s right there, she told me. I can’t see it. I guess my other eye needs a rebuild now. The mother ship spiraled down using the same counterclockwise pattern Unity used. She flew directly overhead, her barren space-socket exposed.
And then it was over. We looked around. There was only one other car still parked between the fence and the railroad. Billions of dollars and nearly two decades of work by thousands of people were on display today. It all worked perfectly. That stuff is amazing to me. Soon you’ll be able to buy your own ride into space for the price of a couple well-appointed diesel pickup trucks. $250,000 is not that much money nowadays.
Branson’s space plane may not go as high as the Space Station but I bet it uses 10% of the fuel a normal rocket launch does. Human beings are pretty impressive when they stop being jerks. Many people get angry at rich people for not saving the world with their money and then when a rich guy tries, like Gates, we suspect them of implanting tracking chips for a reason no one sane can articulate. The thing is, we are so clueless, so in the dark, we can’t guess the real world innovations that will come with space travel.
A man and his dog started packing up. He had one of those 10-foot sunshades. I asked him if he needed a hand folding it up. He said no that it was easy to do. The space show was over. The dust from all the spectator cars settled back to the Chihuahuan Desert. A guy named Kamaz, I think after the Russian Truck company, was giving a concert over at Spaceport for the VIPs. Maybe you’ll be able to find it on video.
I rewired the original 40-year-old compressor motor to run off 240 volts rather than 120 volts. It starts better with less droop on my off-grid shed. In the past I tried to run the compressor with a square-wave inverter and it started smoking. It seems to have recovered from that trauma and the motor only gets warm running on my new inverter.
That Seiko watch you see on the right, known informally as “The Panda” in watch collector circles, is perhaps the best watch I’ve ever owned. I bought it at the Kunsan AFB Base Exchange when I was a young Army dude in 1975 for the princely sum of $76, which was a bit of a stretch for me. Oh, I had the bucks. The Army didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t have expenses, either, so $76 was eminently doable. In fact, I bought Seiko stainless steel chronographs from the Base Exchange for my Dad and my grandfather, too. Their watches were only $67, but the Panda had the day and the date on the face, and three timing features: Seconds on the main watch face, minutes on the lower subdial, and hours on the upper subdial. It was a beautiful thing and it was all mechanical. I wore it for about 10 years, and then when Ebay started to get popular I auctioned it away. I was quite pleased with the results. The watch that originally set me back $76 went for just north of $200 on Ebay 30 years ago. Today, though, that same watch brings around $2000. I sold too soon. Go figure.
Things get a little nasty on the left side of the LC. Without the big upswept exhaust covering the mess all the complexity of a modern motorcycle is exposed. Let’s face it: The thing looks like a commercial air conditioning system from the left side. Still, I wouldn’t let the LC’s looks stop me from buying one assuming I would ever spend $15,000 on a damn motorcycle.
