A brilliant defence of working with the hands
Posted on May 29, 2009
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There’s a little bit of work signing up to the New York Times free subscriber stuff (it’s not so bad - it is a interesting newspaper) but I’m sure the thinking shed person will find the Crawford story fascinating. He’s an academic who is interested in repairing old motorbikes and was troubled by the difference between his semi-amateur repair of motorbikes and the high-level desk-based white collar work he did in order to make a quid. The long and short of it is that he now runs a kind of gourmet bike repair business in Virginia but still does a bit of office work for some lobby group on nearby Washington.
I have never read quite such a good explanation of the dodgy moral framework in which a lot of modern office “brain work” takes place: that the work culture talks big on rational decisions but actually does things that are not quite rational or are sometimes downright dishonest or unethical - yet are somehow acceptable. He contrasts this very nicely with the pleasant problem solving and satisfaction that goes with repairing bikes and, by inference, other trade-related work.
It’s worth checking out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html
Rain
Posted on May 15, 2009
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There was rain forecast on the television last night. Oh that’s good, everyone says, but there’s an edge of doubt in how they say it.
Three days a week I work in Renmark in
Despite this change, there is a great beauty about the place in the time before dawn, when I go for my daily walk.
I walk through arrow-straight rows of oranges and vines, laid out in flat precise grids and dotted with modest houses. Each house, apart from its 10 or 20 acres of fruit trees, is surrounded by its own protective clump of palms, gums and ornamentals to stave of the heat of a baking summer. These homes were established in the twenties and thirties, the products of unbounded optimism and of ‘the blockies’ – fruit block owners who got up at 4am and worked very hard all day.
In the still air of the deep violet dawn in the east, there’s a sense of momentous occasion to the place; it’s as though it’s all a film set and an orchestra is playing some inspiring overture. The rich red sand and dark green trees are slowly and softly set aglow by horizontal golden light in the rising dawn. You can almost hear the violins sawing away.
In this pleasant setting every morning I try to take a different route through the grid of roads spreading out from the town. This morning, the air is chilly but not unpleasant: the rain has, once more, failed to materialise.
There is no-one else around.
As I approach one house, close to the road, I see a man is sitting on an armchair on his verandah.
He would not expect anyone walking along the road at this time of morning and has not seen me. He is in his fifties, scrawny, very suntanned and wearing a bleached Drizabone raincoat over his shorts. His posture on the armchair is not comfortable: he is sitting on the edge of chair, looking down at the ground, with his hands clasped together between his open legs.
He is completely lost in his thoughts and I stare at him, feeling a sort of embarrassment for intruding. Perhaps he really had expected it to rain when he got up and put on his raincoat as some gesture of optimism.
Then my clumsy steps passing him by alert him to my presence and he glances up.
He has the look of a haunted and troubled man and for a moment I feel I am witness to some grievous personal tragedy. Maybe it involves the family or the banks or the bills piling up or the fact that the fruit block his father carved out of the scrub may soon return to that state and after a lifetime of hard work he, the son, will have failed. I don’t know.
He gives a brief nod of acknowledgment and I do the same. The blockie gets up and goes inside, slamming the screen door behind him.
Walking back to my comfortable desk work on the computer for that day, I suddenly realise perhaps I disturbed him praying.
Praying that his hopes won’t curdle, that the farm won’t go for a pathetic song at auction.
For just a bit of rain that won’t make him feel like a fool for putting on his raincoat.
he experience has stayed with me because it was the briefest glimpse into some unknown region. Perhaps it was what climate change might mean at the personal level. Or the fate of farmers and people on the land throughout history. Or of just someone else’s life.
For connoisseurs of fine corrugated iron
Posted on May 3, 2009
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Almost immediately after it was invented sometime in the early 1820s by Henry Robinson Palmer, a British engineer and naval design, it rapidly became a popular lightweight building material (although the early corro was very thick - sometimes up to ten times its usual thickness nowadays - which gives a clue of the age of any really old corro you might find.
It’s hard to credit but there are still a few snobs around who sneer at it for being ‘too industrial”. Get a life, I say - or else you try lifting 2 square metres of roof tiles in one go and see what you think then… Corrugated iron is fabulously efficient, strong and effective building material that we here at the Institute like to celebrate.
So it was with great pleasure that I recently met Wayne Rabone, one of Australia’s small number of corrugated iron collectors, Wayne, a demolition contractor who lives in Kaniva in Western Victoria, has easily the biggest collection I’ve ever seen. Being a demolition contractor must have a few advantages in this line of collecting.
Wayne reckons there are about 10 other people around who collect pretty seriously.
If you are of a similar mind or have a piece of iron that might interest him, his contact details are:
Wayne Rabone, 5 David St., Kaniva Vic 3419
Ph 03 5392 2442, Mobile: 0408 922442
Also my good friend Don Morrison makes steel bodied guitars out of old flattened corrugated iron sheets and is always on the look out for nice old logos and so on. We’ve been working on doing an old fashioned Donmo logo to spray on some new iron but am having trouble finding the right ink (it’s not a paint by the way) that can penetratev the zinc/steel. The stuff that they were using 100 years ago must have been pretty amazing. Anybody got any suggestons?
Mark Thomson
The gothic shed…
Posted on April 26, 2009
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In fact it’s the Masonic lodge at Cue in central Western Australia. Built almost entirely out of corrugated iron in 1899 in this once thriving gold mining centre, it sits on the edge of town looking a bit like the house from the movie Psycho.
IBYS Research Director Mark Thomson visited the ‘Queen of the Murchison’, as Cue is known, recently and found it a fairly seriously corrugated town. Cue is surrounded by enormous modern ore dumps which are slowly taking over the old, nearly vanished ghost towns established in the 1890s when the WA goldfields were a frenzy of activity. One of the most surprising aspects of this area is how these old towns have virtually vanished off the face of the earth, whole towns with stores, businesses, railway lines and houses are now, only 100 years later, almost invisible but for broken glass, rusting tins and the occasional car part or cement slab. It says something disturbing about the impermanence of human life in the desert.
For it’s part, the Cue Masonic Lodge is being slowly restored (possibly by the National Trust as againt the National Rust, which surrounds the town in the form of old cans and tins and of course the handy corrugated building product. Those of us possessing gold detectors might like to hang around the caravan park and natter with the grey nomads as they share bullshit stories about great finds. Don’t believe anything you hear.
Institute’s Forum now open
Posted on April 11, 2009
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Show and Tell Sheds: the place to post your own shed stories and photos
Resourcefulness: share your thoughts about resilience, resourcefulness and general handiness
Ideas: inventions, thoughts, ideas - float them here!
Any Questions? Got a shed problem? Need some help? Ask your question here and see if anybody has the answer
Shed Buy, Sell and Swap: a good place to look for things you need, or offer things you don’t need any more
Everything else: general chatter
Forum Housekeeping: the rules of engagement, dedicated to keeping the Forum friendly
Start by entering a username and password, and then you’ll be registered as a member of the Forum. You’ll need to use the same login every time you go to the Forum. We look forward to sharing some lively discussions, debates, creative ideas and inventions, as well as seeing your own shed stories and photos. So don’t hold back, start writing.
Hooting, smoking and whistling at Murray Bridge
Posted on April 6, 2009
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We heard that a few times over this last weekend when the Institute took the Random Excuse Generator to the 12th National Historical Machinery Rally on the banks of the Murray River at Murray Bridge in South Australia. We thought it was pretty funny coming from somebody who might have spent eight or nine thousand hours repairing an old tractor they’d pulled out of a swamp!
The biennial rally is the biggest rally of old traction engines, farm equipment and historical working vehicles in Australia, bringing together most of the restorers’ clubs and associations in one place. It’s an immense event covering numerous acres, full of hooting, smoking, whistling machinery, most of it beautifully restored or at some point on the way there.
It also attracts a very pleasant, chatty bunch of people who have a really good time together. They’re very accomplished shed dwellers with an amazing range of skills between them and a fair willingness to share them. So it was a good place for the Institute to take Hoke’s Random Excuse Generator on a rare outing and show people some of our products along with a few pieces of our remarkable Hoke’s Tool Co. collection.
The Random Excuse Generator got a big workout - IBYS Technical Director Dr Chris Block was obliged to make numerous running repairs as the REG seems to have acquired the ability to make excuses for itself (there’s clearly a feedback issue here).
Over the weekend we signed up a number of new Institute members, added a lot of people to the email address list, took orders for t-shirts (because we sold out over the weekend) and held a draw for a valuable Hoke’s Tool Co. Trivia Drive. T-shirts and Certificates of Membership will be in the mail in the next few days. The lucky winner of the Trivia Drive was John Becke of Yanco in New South Wales. John was exhibiting a 1952 Norman generator set at the show, and is a member of the Riverina Vintage Machinery Club.
For us it was all worthwhile, seeing the slow smiles come over people’s faces when they realised what we were up to. We met lots of terrific people that we would like to participate in our online activities and put their sheds - which would be some of the most interesting to be found anywhere - up on our site. Stay in touch and thanks to all those people we met over the weekend who made it such a good experience.
Mark Thomson
Advanced Research Director
IBYS Membership
Posted on March 1, 2009
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- A dandy, important-looking (and highly framable) Certificate of Associate Membership from the Institute.
- The choice of a ‘Good Shed’, ’Shed Science’ or ’I tinker, therefore I am’ sticker for your shed or car.
- A space on the Institute of Backyard Studies website to display your own shed stories and up to three photographs. (The Editor reserves the right to edit stories and pictures as he deems necessary.)
- A 5% discount on the advertised price of all items in the Institute’s online Shop.
- Regular emails advising of the Institute’s new projects, publications and products.
- The option to receive email advice whenever new posts or comments are added to the site.
- Advice about upcoming events in your region at which the Institute will have a physical presence.
- Other good things as we think of them.
- And absolutely nothing involving goats.
Price: $20.00(AUD)
Superb!
Posted on February 3, 2009
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This superb shed, that of Institute of Backyard Studies Technical Director Dr Chris Block, is one of many featured in the Institute’s latest tribute to deep shed culture, the book Makers, Breakers and Fixers. Many a day or evening, Chris is to be found in this workshop working on some project of stunning complexity. It’s high, well-draughted structure that has huge doors for the dirty great ship he is going to build in there one day. In the meantime, preparations are well under way for the reconstruction of Henry Hoke’s apocryphal truck-mounted audio weapon “Hoke’s Quack of Doom” as shown below in hitherto secret photography of US Army tests during World War 2. Security considerations require that we should draw a discrete veil across further information about this invention until the time is ripe.
EXCITING REVELATIONS!
Posted on February 3, 2009
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Recent investigations by Institute staff at an undisclosed location have discovered the original shed of all-round smartypants Sir Isaac Newton, best known for his 3 Laws of Motion (you know the sort of thing - “once moving at a steady speed in a straight line and so on and so on”)
In a shock revelation, documents recovered at the site reveal a hitherto unknown aspect of late 17th century shed culture: that Sir Ike was on the turps - in fact a sort of India Pale Ale - a good deal of his illustrious career. Detailed forensic analysis of some of The Newt’s (as in ‘Pissed As’) vomit-covered notebooks is currently being undertaken. IBYS Deep Shed Research Director Mark Thomson told an only slightly packed news conference that there is every possibility that there were in fact two more Laws of Motion but as the great man was too shickered on the day, he forgot to tell anybody.
Mr Thomson invites speculation and conjecture from the shed community - deeply experienced as it is in engineering, beer and sheds- on the subject of these two possible new laws - what were they measuring or defining? Your contribution on the comment link is welcome.
The end of Robby’s or a blow to deep shed culture
Posted on August 20, 2008
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“You can’t get the parts…” the repair guy would say.
Not so fast: you might get the parts - or you could until Robby’s started to close down.
Horace ‘Robby’ Robinson’s shop in Long Street, Queenstown is a vast shambles of electrical components and assorted paraphernalia, its gloomy corridors catalogued with jars of diodes, triodes, transistors, switches, relays, valves, everything.
It is the lurking place of the electrical tinkerers who would never say die to that old radio or record player. They inhabit the half light of Robby’s corridors and byways, searching for elusive buried electrical treasure. These fixers and repairers are an almost secret club of electrical savants who know how all these things work – what a thermal overload relay does or how a three phase rectifier transformer can be fixed. Get them started and they’ll tell you about the glory that was ETSA or how they fixed a discarded Bang and Olufsen television from the hard rubbish with a $2 part (from Robby’s of course). They thrive within a filigree of useful contacts that can repair almost anything that has had a current running through it. Robby’s is – or rather was - one of the vital nodes in that spider web.
But Robby is 89 now and his eyesight is going. The vast stock of the shop, which over the last 50 years has been a car parts business, a hardware store and secondhand furniture shop, is being sold off in a series of sales by his children Lyn and Paul.
Apparently Robby never had any formal training in the electrical and electronic trades but he obviously knew a thing or two about auctions and bargains, picking up the remnants of disappearing industries and enterprises. Equipment from Woomera and the Weapons Research Establishment can still be found amongst the boxes and shelves, some of it made to measure or record some part of that great imperial endeavour that went on secretly in
At these Saturday morning closing sales, Lyn and Paul guard the entrance and reminisce with the regulars. Bargain hunters and repairers– most of whom seem to know each other - emerge from rummaging through dusty boxes and shelves with odd collections of electrical loot for which they can see a potential use. They leave satisfied but often express a sadness that such a place will no longer exist. In a few weeks time there will be a big final auction and the site will no doubt end up as yet another real estate development.
So does it matter that places like Robby’s vanish? It matters not just because we will have boring sterile suburbs but because it represents another unravelling of the rich and largely hidden social networks in which people find meaning, learn new things, share knowledge. Those networks make our cities livable and while the Internet replicates some of those networks, there is no substitute for the tangible experience and deep handiness that goes with places like Robby’s. We will be the poorer for its passing.
