Parts Gathering Continues

I just found the coolest dash for the Hardtail Project. It's a repop 1937 dash with a Do-All Gauge salvaged from machine tools being scrapped by the Air Force. I may skip running a speedo just to have this one....

Girding For Winter

Made some more progress in my mini workshop/tool room in the barn. I still have the larger bays but this room will have room for the Bridgeport, the South Bend, a seven foot workbench and my handi-lift or a motor stand for bike projects or a car engine rebuild. Over time, I partitioned off the room and insulated it in the walls and ceiling. I got the heater fired for the first time Saturday I have had tunes out here but always draped over shit and in the way. Picked up an ultra-chic shelf at goodwill for a buck and got the tunage up out of the way. I THINK it will be a nice place to work, but I have confirmed that it's a great place to drink beer and listen to music... :?

Disposable Society

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part. Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford

Turn It Off

@MarkDePue: The news channels have mastered the art of cramming one hour's news in an 8 hour cycle. ~Jim Koval

Realms Beyond Reason

"I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there." ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Loneliness

"It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways, jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First, the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV." ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Paradox

"Nothing personal in it." Here is a paradox. On the one hand, to be a good mechanic seems to require a personal commitment: I am a mechanic. On the other hand, what it means to be a good mechanic is that you have a keen sense that you answer to something that is the opposite of personal or idiosyncratic; something universal. In Pirsig's story, there is an underlying fact: a sheared off pin has blocked an oil gallery, resulting in oil starvation to the head and excessive heat, causing the seizures. This is the Truth, and it is the same for everyone. But finding this truth requires a certain disposition in the individual: attentiveness, enlivened by a sense of responsibility to the motorcycle. He has to internalize the well working of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. The Truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators." ~Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft