How this Geezer did it in the beginning

[Paul B]

You should have been an engineer Paul!

That would not work because you have to go to college to be an engineer and you will learn to build things the same way that everyone else who is an engineer builds them.
That is the problem. You are not taught to think outside the box, you are taught to fit everything in the box so you can pass the tests.

Why do something when you can hire someone?"

I have never hired anyone for anything including my house, car or boat.
I do have to hire a dentist once in a while and if I could see in there, I may do that myself :lol2:
I was in construction and I built my dormer. Unfortunately, when I removed the top floor of my house, it snowed 12", but I managed to get it done.
Before being an electrician I was a mechanic for GM. I would rather not let anyone touch my car and no one ever has. I will re build the engine if I have to as I have done many times.
If you hire someone you may get the job done like it says in the book to do it but you won't get that extra thing that will make the job last longer or make it easier to do the next time.
For instance if I repair something on my car, I may put in the new part with stainless steel screws. They only cost a few cents but will make the job much easier to do the next time.
If I run cables, water pipes, internet, phone wires or anything else in my house I always install a string along with it. The next time I need to run something there I just attach it to the string and pull in a new whatever along with a new string. There are so many ways to do things and so many ways to do it easier and better.
There are parts on my boat that I laughed at when I saw how badly they were engineered. I just love doing it better, cheaper and easier.
Another example, on many boats there is a hydrallic pump that operates the trim tabs that stabilize the boat. These pumps are attached to an iron bracket that sits in the bilge. Virtually all of them are built out of iron. Now if you were designing something that was in an in-accessable place and sitting in "salt" water, what is the material that you would definately stay away from? Iron. But thats what they are made out of. Someone went to engineering school for that and they have always been made of that. Mine was so badly corroded that I vacuumed it out. I built new ones out of 1/2" thick plexiglass that will last forever and are cheap.
This stuff just amazes me how badly things are purposely designed.:hmm3:

Of course I do my own painting also for my own Grand Daughter and I make my own mobiles for over her crib :wavehand:

I have to build and I always have. In Viet Nam whenever we were in one place long enough I built one of these from bamboo. This structure had two purposes. One was for sun and rain, I "borrowed" the rubber roof from the Air Force, they had everything, we had mud and a machetti.
The other purpose was for a blast wall. When the "other guys" would fire RPGs at us, they would blow up on this bamboo which was a few feet in front of my sandbags behind it so the bamboo would get the full blast and the sandbags just got scrapnel.
It looked cool also.
This was in the middle of the jungle in the mountains on the Cambodian border.

 

[Paul B]

I can't help it. In this picture you can see the magazine on my M-16 holds 30 rounds. Everybody elses held 18 rounds. I built it from parts of crashed helocopters, tape and wire.
The artillery canisters banged in the ground behind me held my pet duck, Duc Duc

Here is that place from a helocopter, not much to work with except bamboo.
The nearest Home Depot is about 30,000 miles away as is the nearest road.

 

[BigKahuna]

Wow, that's some impressive confidence in one's DIY skills right there. It's one thing to trust your DIY skills on your livestock in this hobby but it's in an entirely different league to trust your life to a DIY mag on your M16 in the field, especially at a time the weapon was still a work in progress Bravo!

 

[Reeferz412]

That would not work because you have to go to college to be an engineer and you will learn to build things the same way that everyone else who is an engineer builds them.
That is the problem. You are not taught to think outside the box, you are taught to fit everything in the box so you can pass the tests.

I do not fully agree with this. My father is a computer science engineer and he has tore down and rebuilt billing systems for companies such as Office Depot and Verizon. He was taught to program just like every other engineer, but his experience from Accounting to Auditing made him a visionary. Plus he too rebuilt cars and restored his prized mustang before he sold it. Engineers yearn to learn, find flaws and make them better, and always inquire. My father also worked for GTE phone company, Hughes Aircraft (installed tank GPS and computers and configured them), CSC, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers so his engineering skills and yearn to learn more than just computer programming has taken him all over the spectrum. I feel as if I should bring my dad to read your thread, he would have a kick!

 

[Paul B]

but it's in an entirely different league to trust your life to a DIY mag on your M16 in the field, especially at a time the weapon was still a work in progress

The thing never failed me.
I always wondered why they built that weapon to only have 18 rounds, especially when the AK 47 used by our adversaries carried 22 rounds if I remember. The M 16 is a wonderful piece of machinery. You could swish it in a river to clean and it rarely mis fired. The only peroblem with it was that it got to hot to hold and you had to sometimes wrap an empty sand bag around it to hold it. Of course sometimes you didn't have an empty sandbag.
I don't know how the Army runs now but many times we had to fare for ourselves. Notice my
"Bulletproof" T Shirt that I am wearing. That was the extent of our "armor".
Those trees behind me is the Cambodian border.

That Bamboo blast wall saved my life a few times as did that 30 round magazine. We also had a big problem with Jungle rot because many guys never took off their shoes or socks. I always boiled them using helocopter fuel or C4. It is easy to DIY here with Home Depot but in a jungle with no tools but a machette, it is a little tougher.
I remember making a rat trap out of an ammo can that would continousely catch and drown rats. Rats were a big nuisence, they were all over the place. Especially when you were in the "bathroom" which was basically a hole. The rats would climb up on your boots so we would take apart M 16 rounds and remove half of the powder, then stick the shell in soap. Then you could shoot the rats with the soap without much chance of killing one of your buddies. You just had to remember to change out that magazine full of soap bullets and put real ones in.
To drink the water you had to put it in the shade for a while or it was too hot and it would burn your mouth. When we were on an LZ the water used to be collected in a lake and sent to us by chopper in big rubber blivets that were made of tire tube material. The water tasted like hot melted rubber.
Today I am not fussy about eating or drinking. I can eat or drink anything and I never use ice.
We ate C rations most of the time and heated it with C4.
I think growing up without a Father and being in a war made me a much better or at least creative person although I would rather have my Dad.
I also think it made me not worry about much.

My father is a computer science engineer and he has tore down and rebuilt billing systems for companies such as Office Depot and Verizon.

Your Father sounds like a very smart and creative man, I like creative people. And I am glad you chose to include him in my thread.
My Dad died sudenly when I was 10 but I am told he never let anyone do any work for him either.
I helped to built the New York Playboy Club and I was the General Foreman for Penthouse Magazine's office. not very creative, but a lot of fun. :lol2:

 

[Paul B]

OK, sorry, got side tracked again. My wife just had this conversation with me at dinner, I get side tracked often. What was this thread about again?
Oh yeah, how some old geezer did it in the beginning.
I may as well post about the "Clorox" as I mentioned it a few times.
By the way, I didn't invent this, it was Robert Straughn, the Father of Salt water fish keeping.
As I said in the beginning there was no ASW or at least it was not that common so I used water from the East River in Manhattan. Not a great choice. It was sometimes full of, among other things, shopping carts, Oldsmobiles, dead cats, and shoes, sometimes still connected to gangsters.
So I would treat it with bleach. I think it is a tablespoon of "Regular" Clorox to 5 gallons of water. Let it sit for a day or two then add chlorine remover.
The resulting water is great as long as you first remove the Oldsmobiles and gangsters.
My entire tank was treated with Clorox a few times when it was taken over by paracites, algae or a not quite dead gangster.:hmm2:
That water is still in my tank. Clorox, or chlorine bleach is a gas and it evaporates leaving just water behind.
I remember after using it once the surface of the water was covered in fat bristleworms. But they had a nice fresh scent.
Speaking of Fresh Scent, I used Fresh Scent Clorox once and killed all of my animals in a matter of seconds, don't use that.
As I said, you may not want to do anything I do. :wavehand:
I still use Clorox if I collect water in the Long Island Sound when there is a red tide which there is often. The only time I had a problem with it is when I used that Fresh Scent stuff.
This is just another old school procedure that will disappear when all of us Geezers are gone, then you will be stuck with ASW and Prisipro, whatever that is.

Manhattan's Easr River, not even a river but a saltwater estuary.
I wonder how many moorish Idols and acropora live in here?

 

[Paul B]

Ok I just read some of my posts from the beginning of this thread and noticed that all of the last pictures were already on here as is much of what I am posting. I know I have been running this thread too long when I am repeating myself.
So please tell me when I do that. It aint easy. :headwallblue:
You can even yell at me. (I have the sound turned way down) :lol2:

I just like this picture. Of my wife, not me

 

[Micki]

Love your stories Paul! So amazing what you did during your time in Nam. Makes me appreciate my freedom even more!

 

[Paul B]

Micki, I was kind of lucky there because I had some rank and I didn't really have anyone in charge of me. I was attached to a field artillery battery so we moved a lot and my commanding officer was someplace on a large firebase and I never met the guy.
I just did my thing which was to get the communications up (no cell phones, Skype, computers cans with a string etc.)
We used radio's and they had a limited range and were very staticky.
After I got the stuff running I did whatever.
Of course I stayed in our tiny perimeter because we always had "friends" all around us.
When we would get hit which was every few days, I would crawl out and splice the commo wire to the guns so they could aim the guns.
Anyway, I did have time to fly a lot and I went around and traded stuff. Sometimes we got ice cream, (hot and melted but ice cream just the same)
The ice cream, when we got it was shipped on sorties with ammo. It came under a chopper on a huge canvas that was covered in dirt and bugs. The dirt and bugs floated so you just pushed that aside and scooped out some hot ice cream. It was that or hot, rubbery water. We also got all the soda's with cyclamates in them that the Govt. took off the market because it gave you cancer. Every week, on monday we took a large malaria pill that gave you diareah then every day we took a little white malaria pill. We found out years later that the little pill was experimental and they wanted to see how many guys got cancer from it. The Governmant can by pass any regulations. But I didn't get malaria, or ich.:wavehand:

Almost everything came on one of these. There may have been some ice cream in there.
I also crashed in this one, but it wasn't that big a deal.

 

[Micki]

Amazing... So you guys were given "experimental" drugs and yet there are drugs used in Europe for so many things for years and we can't get them here because the government doesn't know if they are "safe" for a dying person to use. Mind blowing. Oh, and I'm glad that "crash" wasn't that big of a deal. We wouldn't be having this conversation if it was... Thank you for all you did and for the others that did and continue to still do!!! God Bless America!

 

[mistacheese]

Were you a rotorwing pilot Paul? In training myself now. Thank you for our freedom.

 

[Paul B]

So you guys were given "experimental" drugs

The Army was different then, we also had no reporters in the field, no live action shots, no interviews or anything like that.
We called home when we got there, in a year.
The experimental drugs as far as I know didn't kill anyone, the Agent Orange was another story.
My Capt. there just died last year from Agent Orange as did my Luitenant and a couple of the guys that I know of. Their families have no recourse because the Government never admitted that the stuff would or did kill you.
It is what it is and I am grateful that we don't use that stuff any more. At least I don't think we do.
Times were different and servicemen were expendable. Don't forget, we were not treated as hero's or even patriotic Americans. Many people just wanted to forget about us because they disagreed with the war.
We didn't come home to parades, we came home quietly and went about our business and tried to forget all about it.
I landed in New Jersey from Nam in the middle of the night. It was a 24 hour flight, I was still dirty and they gave us baloney sandwiches for the three meals, no movie, just water. That was my last day in the Army. They gave me a 15 cent subway token and showed me the door. There are no subways in New Jersey and if my family did not pick me up I would have had to hitch hike the 100 or so miles to my house.

Anyway, last night I re arranged my tank around because a large frogspawn fell and was laying on a large hammer coral. I had no room to put it back so I just moved things around. I had to wear gloves because those two fireclowns are ferocious and I had to move a big bottle that was their home, they hate that, but they hate everything. :hmm2:
I like the way it looks now and I will taike a picture when I have time. I just got back from my boat and my friend is coming over so I can put freon in his car that I sold him 2 years ago. :beachbum:

 

[Paul B]

Were you a rotorwing pilot Paul? In training myself now.

No, not hardly. That one is a chnook or CH-47, they didn't invent rotowings for 35 years. I used to fly "in" them all the time but I would not know the first thing about flying one. I was on the ground mostly but I used to fly in one of these LOHs quite often.
I also crashed in this LOH but again, I was not a pilot and never flew the thing without the pilot, and the crash was not a big deal. I think I said that before in this thread so stop me when I repeat myself.
The only other thing I flew in a lot was a Huey. We mostly traveled in those but that had nothing to do with my job, well almost nothing.

 

[Paul B]

I should have named this thread, Side Track anywhere the wind takes me.
I got my friends air conditioner working and I ended up tuning up the thing also but he is a close friend.

 

[Mussin]

Good read for sure, I usually read everything you post.

 

[Micki]

How sad for you men to come home to nothing. You risked your lives and some have sacrificed their lives and still nothing... I was old enough to hear bits and pieces on the news but not old enough to really understand it. Nor was I old enough to know when it was over or how the servicemen were treated when they did come home. I think you're the first person I've really talked to that was there. I love hearing your stories the good the bad and the ugly.

As for the side tracking, I love it! Keep it up!

 

[Paul B]

Good read for sure, I usually read everything you post.

Thank you Mussin, but I wouldn't read al of this if I was you.

Micki, it was a long time ago and I am very happy now that our servicemen and women come home as heroe's that they are.

I love hearing your stories the good the bad and the ugly.

Some of them are ugly so I will keep them in the dark recesses of my mind. I don't really want to think of that anyway

I will try to get back to happier things and fish. :thumbsup:

 

[cheezischrist]

whats the worse species you ever mixed together?

 

[rogermccray]

I have said before but i will say it again, I really like this thread, more the side tracking than the fish tanks The fish tank stuff is good too...

Sent from my DROID2 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Micki]

Paul, when I said I love hearing the stories, the good the bad and the ugly, I was referring to your stories in general not ugly war stories. You have some ugly fish stories that are quite funny!