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Idle essays

Update: Cool vintage carving set

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A little Web-cruising reveals that the carving set that I was lucky enough to find at last weekend’s estate sale must have been made before 1950.

After I cleaned the knife’s blade, a maker’s mark became visible:

Universal
L F & C

“L F & C” stands for Landers, Frary, & Clark, once a prominent manufacturer of household appliances and hardware. Founded in 1862, Landers, Frary, & Clark discontinued its cutlery division in 1950, giving us a terminus ad quem. So that would make the set at least 59 years old.

The handles are probably celluloid. Apparently the company made some products with Bakelite embellishments, but I can’t find any specific statement that L F & C used it for knife handles. On the other hand, this set, whose ferrule (the little ring at the top of the handle) is identical to the ones on mine, is said to have celluloid handles. On the third hand, the writer of this sales pitch incorrectly says the blade and fork tangs are made of stainless steel. They are not: as you can see at a glance, they’re wonderful carbon steel.

This knife enthusiast decribes celluloid as likely to decompose as it ages and remarks that one way to recognize celluloid is that the blade tends to rust. While there are a couple of rust spots on the estate-sale steel, they look like places where drops of water were accidentally left on it; the other pieces show no signs of rust. The blade is pitted in a couple of places along the top edge, so it could have shown some rust and been scoured clean. None of the handles show any sign of decomposition. Yet.

This guy is claiming a similar handle is “bone,” but like our seller who can’t tell the difference between carbon and stainless steel, his claim is dubious. A close look at the photo at this site shows straight, even stripes, very faint ivory-on-ivory, similar to those on the estate-sale treasure:

old knife
Click for a closer view

Another knife enthusiast mentions in passing that Landers, Frary, & Clark used bone on kitchen forks. IMHO, these lines are way too straight to be natural. When seen on end, at the tip of the set’s handles, the lines show an even herringbone grain. Anything’s possible, I suppose…but I’ll bet nothing that precise is natural.

We’re told that the way to distinguish celluloid from the more desirable Bakelite is by warming it under hot water and sniffing it. Bakelite supposedly smells like formaldehyde or an old-fashioned Bandaid, whereas celluose smells like vinegar or camphor. This test results in “none of the above.” It might have a slight Bandaid odor, but it’s so slight as to be most likely imaginary. Lucite, which was fashioned in colors including the ivory-like tint on our set, has no odor but is said to be lightweight; these handles are not. This outfit shows a close-up of a knife and steel set with celluloid handles, which also seems to show those straight lines.

So, I’m guessing the set’s handles are celluloid. Think I’ll take them out of the glass-fronted buffet where they’re now displayed, since corrosive outgassing would wreck the wooden shelves in there. And they’d probably better be used and enjoyed before they start to fall apart.

Update: Soda ash frolic

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The great swimming pool soda ash crisis has resolved itself. Along about 5:30 the evening before Bob the Wonderful Leslie’s Pool Guy was slated to show up, I realized that bumping the filter’s backwash valve every 30 minutes or hour had drained off a fair amount of diatomaceous earth, so I added another four pounds.

This stabilized the pressure at 15 psi, and by the tag end of dusk the last of the clouds in the water dissipated, having been kicked up when I broomed another couple of soda ash dunes that were resting on the bottom of the pool. Come dawn, the pressure was holding steady, so I planned to wait  until about 8:00 a.m. and then call off Bob the WLPG, who was supposed to surface between eight and noon.

But he showed up at 7:30.

His face wreathed with the “no one could invent the stuff I hear on this job” look, he heard the story through and then said, “You dumped twenty pounds of soda ash in the water?”

“Yes.”

“He told you to dump twenty pounds of soda ash in the water?”

“Yes.”

Eyeballs water. Inspects filter. Peers into water again.

“Well, what’s happened is the soda ash has finally dissolved. When you add much more than about two pounds, it coats the grids. But because it doesn’t last as long as DE, eventually it breaks down. That’s what’s happened.”

He said it should run just fine, and indeed it has. The water is now sterling clear once again (except for a bit of storm debris). The pH has risen back to the normal level. And the water no longer tastes strangely sour.

Couple hours later, the phone rings. It’s Biker Phil. He’s calling to apologize! (Can you believe that? I was astonished.) He said he wanted to hurry the process along and shouldn’t have advised me to apply the entire twenty pounds at once.

Personally, I’m skeptical that this is Phil’s doing. He struck me as a pretty smart guy who’s anxious to do his job right. Clearly Leslie’s needs to train its sales staff more carefully.

WhatEVer. Thank goodness the pool is now running right again, without having cost any more than the $50 for the soda ash. It sure is welcome in the muggy, hot last six weeks or so of summer!

Estate-saling in a tropical storm

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La Maya and a cousin of La Bethulia’s dropped by early this morning to pick me up on the way to an estate sale in the fancy part of a far-flung arm of the galaxy. The house was located in the elegant suburbs of far, far, far north Scottsdale.

Actually, it dwelt in a small patch of tract houses surrounded by large, expensive late-model houses on acre-plus lots. The tract itself consisted of modestly sized structures—maybe 1,600 to 2,000 square feet—on typical tiny tract lots, what we dinosaurs would call “patio homes” but today’s mammals think of as full-sized family houses. Its saving grace was that its tiny backyard looked out over a vast swath of undisturbed open space, giving it a view across only lightly raped Sonoran desert all the way to the mountains that ring the Valley. Very pretty. Maybe even pretty enough to justify the $600,000 asking price for three tiny bedrooms, a single living area dominated by a wall of ungainly niches built to house a hulking television and an array of large speakers, and not a single wall anywhere broad enough to hold a decent bookcase.

At any rate, the owner had a flair for decorating. We got there a little late to grab the nicest things, but we did see a nice array of lovely Asian pottery and ceramics, many beautiful clothes (once incredibly expensive but all, alas, in the smaller petite sizes), and some very nice artwork. But Gini, the sale proprietor, kept slipping new things onto the countertops as buyers cleared the merchandise, and so, stepping into the kitchen at just the right moment, I scored this nice old carving set:

The blades are carbon steel, a feature much coveted in the Aptosaurus family. M’hijito loves the carbon-steel knives I passed to him after SDXB nabbed them in a yard sale and gave them to me. Tho’ they’re softer than stainless and can’t be left to corrode in a puddle of water on the drainboard, they sharpen easily and take a beautiful edge.

See those little decorative collars at the top end of the handles? Those are marked “sterling.” There’s no maker’s mark on the blade or fork, but the sterling silver deco touch suggests they’re good pieces, like everything else the woman owned. I think the handles may be bone or possibly horn, not plastic. And the blade has been sharpened many times.* The pieces have a little corrosion, as if they were put away and forgotten at some point. I’ll bet the owner inherited it, or else acquired it early in her marriage and kept it all her adult life.

Meanwhile… The tail end of Hurricane Jimena has been drifting north across the Chihuahan and Sonoran deserts, and now it has ambled into the Valley. On the way home we passed through a sharp storm cell, the lightning copious and the rain ferocious. About the time we hit the freeway it really started to fire-hose. People were pulling off onto the shoulder, but La Maya managed to make it to an offramp several miles north of our neighborhood. This put us in the middle of an electrical storm. At one point a lightning bolt struck just a few yards from us. Its C-R-R-A-C-K and BOOM shook La Maya’s sturdy RAV-4 and all three of us yelped at once!

But we outran it a little south of Thunderbird, where the North Mountains blocked the blustery clouds’ passage long enough for us to run ahead of the rain and lightning until we reached our part of town. We were mighty glad to see the rain, and just as glad to get off the road and inside a building!

It caught up with us as I was running from the car to the front door. Just had time to power down and unplug the Mac (which I had stupidly left sleeping despite the encroaching storm) and heat some breakfast before the lightning threatened to fry the local power lines. Now the noise and heavy downpour have come and gone, and we have a lovely steady rain, temperatures in the balmiest of mid-seventies. Lovely!

Next week will be very busy. I’ve fallen behind in my plan to stockpile posts, and so today’s post is today’s post. But have many things to share and so will carve out as much time as I can find this weekend to write and schedule the next few days’ entries. If I miss a day or two, it’s not because I’ve forgotten you but because this fall’s expected flood of work is starting to rise.

* BTW, here’s an interesting article on sharpening fine blades, the most thorough explanation I’ve ever see this side of my Daddy’s workbench.

Storm image: FIR002, flagstaffotos.com.au Lightning strike, January 2007
Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
Please note that this image is not in the public domain and must be used and acknowledged accordingly.

How bad public policy and other people’s foolishness cost you and me

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Am I the only so-o-o-cialist in the world who is annoyed at the way my homeowner’s insurance floats ever upward to cover the cost of homes that people deliberately build in harm’s way? Does anyone else wonder why local governments issue building permits in disaster-prone areas and why state and federal governments do nothing to discourage or prevent people from moving into areas where lives and property are put at risk? Is there really any justification for having you and me pay when houses built in the way of floods, tornadoes, and fires are reduced to piles of ash or sodden sludge?

In 2004, disaster-related economic costs in this country exceeded $145 billion, up from the $3.9 billion annual cost in the 1950s. The problem is not so much storms and fires allegedly related to global warming but the fact that too many people are building in risky areas. In Canada, where an expanding population is moving into forest fire-prone areas, citizens saw their homowner’s premiums rise 4.3 percent in 2001 over the previous year, a rise of 9.4 percent from 1997.

New Orleans was known to be at risk of disastrous hurricane damage for years before Katrina struck. Yet people were allowed to continue living and building in districts that scientists and government agencies recognized would flood—and flood catastrophically—when a major hurricane hit the city. Little was done to rebuild the eroded marshes and barrier islands that, before human intervention, protected the site where the city stands. Many parts of the coastal Southeast are prone to powerful storms and major flooding; the Midwest is notorious for its tornadoes, yet people are permitted to live in flimsy mobile homes throughout these regions.

And then we have California: what possesses humanity to build its homes in canyons whose ecology is evolved to thrive in brushfire?

Yes. Chaparral actually needs fire to germinate. Nature has designed plants that grow along the West Coast to function like torches. They’re bombs waiting to explode. This is something that has been widely known for years. But how do we respond? We let people build deep in a fire zone, and then we underwrite their short-sightedness.

When an insurer pays to rebuild a house incinerated in one of these fires, the  operative word is we. The insurance company raises everyone’s rates to help cover its losses. This year the losses in California are likely to be huge. Topanga Canyon alone houses over 5,400 people. It is an area of extreme fire hazard and today is among many populated areas in the path of the vast wildfire presently consuming a large swath of Southern California, where more than 12,000 homes are at risk.

Why should firefighters lose their lives and every homeowner in the country see their insurance costs soar because foolish people insist on living in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains, areas where wildfires and mudslides are part of the local environment’s natural cycle? Instead of relying on insurance companies to cover untoward and foolish risk and then screaming when the companies refuse to insure homes in disaster-prone regions—or raise premiums out of sight—we should be passing laws that prohibit people from deliberately building  structures whose likely destruction will hit everyone’s pocketbooks.

Now, I yearn to get out of the city’s anthill as much as anyone else, and if I had enough money to build a manse in the Santa Monica hills, I’d be sorely tempted. But maybe if people who crave and can afford a pleasant, quiet environment were forced to stay in the city with the rest of us peons, we’d all have more livable cities! If, instead of running away from poorly planned, blight-ridden urban areas, wealthy homeowners lived in their cities, the money and political influence they would bring to the urb would fuel renovation, improvement, effective crime control, enforcement of noise abatement laws, better schools, walkable shopping districts, decent public transport, and green space.

And the rest of us would have lower homeowner’s insurance premiums.

Image: David S. Roberts, The Harris Fire on Mt. San Miguel
One homeowner died in this fire; his teenaged son suffered burns, as did four firefighters who attempted to rescue them. Four migrant workers also are thought to have died in the Harris fire. Nine hundred thousand people were evacuated, and a power emergency was declared after several major transmission lines, including the 500,000-volt power line from Arizona to San Diego, were damaged.

The glories of an honest mechanic

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Allah be praised! That 90,000-mile megaservice that was supposed to lighten my bank account to the tune of $1,200? Chuck the Mechanic par Extraordinaire charged me $221.

Whence this generosity, you ask.

Well, he checked his records—he keeps computerized records of all his customer’s work—and discovered that I had insisted on changing the timing belt at 60,000 miles. Mike the Other Mechanic par Extraordinaire observed that there was no need to have changed it then: it should have lasted at least 90,000 miles and maybe more than that. He thinks the thing won’t need to be changed until the car reaches about 120,000 miles.

Think of that.

If I’d taken the car to the Toyota dealer, a) they wouldn’t have known the timing belt had been changed early; and b) even if they did, dollars to donuts they would have gone ahead with the full 90,000 whackaroo by way of extracting $1,350 (their price for the same routine service job) from my wallet. Really, Mike and Chuck could easily have gotten away without cluing me that there was no need to change the timing belt. I was resigned to having to pony up over a grand and had the money sitting on the altar waiting to be sacrificed to the gods of internal combustion. I would never have been the wiser.

Well! This leaves $1,000 in my post-Canning Day survival fund! Matter of fact, I probably can cover most or all of that $221 bill with this month’s paycheck, leaving the whole $1,200 in savings.

And that’s why honest mechanics never have to advertise.

Hallelujah!

Image: Cam drive of a Ford I4 DOHC engine
Dolda2000, public domain, Wikipedia Commons

Car upkeep!

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Gawdlmighty! The 90,000-mile service on my aging Toyota Sienna is gunna cost $1,200!

It’s enough to make a strong woman faint. Well, luckily I knew about this and set the money aside. But that doesn’t make me any happier about having to sink 12 C-notes into a nine-year-old vehicle.

For the money, Chuck the Mechanic Par Excellence proposes to do the regular 90,000-mile service, change the timing belt, and replace the water pump, it being an opportune moment to do that—while the front end of the motor is off, anyway. I happen to know, too, that he’ll lubricate the squeaking steering wheel, probably for not much, and that he’ll check the brake pads, rotate the tires, and change all the hoses.

Suspecting that Chuck’s estimate was a little high, I called a couple of Toyota dealers. One proposed to charge me $350 for the basic 90,000 service; another wanted $300 for the same thing, claiming it was a “special” markdown from the usual price of $360. Uh huh. Then it’s another $300 for the water pump plus another $300 for three seals that may or may not need to be changed plus $65 for “outside belts.” Plus $335 for the timing belt. If I’m not mistaken, that would be $1,300 to $1,350, depending on which stalwart Toyota dealer one chooses to do business with.

Makes Chuck’s fee look like a bargain. And I know he’s not going to cheat me. Past experience suggests that is not always a given with automobile dealerships.

{sigh} So I made an appointment for a week from Friday.

Well, it’s a heckuva lot cheaper than buying a new car. Normally, I’d trade in a vehicle at ten years. But now that I’m about to be canned, with no hope (or desire…) of getting another job, this car is going to have to run until it falls apart. Chuck thinks it will easily get 150,000 miles, which should carry it another six years. And it could, in theory, run to 180,000 miles, or another nine years. Barring an accident, of course.

A crash that results in the insurance company totaling it (which right now would probably be a fender-bender) will leave me up the creek, since I do not and will not ever have enough cash to buy another car. Nor will I ever again have enough cash flow to make car payments. Every penny in savings, including the $18,000 I had set aside for the next vehicle, now will have to be rolled into the funds intended to support me in my dotage. If I can get this car to run ten more years, it will be the last car I’ll ever own.

Really, in ten years I’ll only be 74, and so I may still be competent to drive. What’s $18,000 now will likely be $36,000 then…hmmm…  With no steady job, I’d have to set aside $3,600 a year to collect enough extra money to buy a car in 2019. {snark!} Now there’s a realistic goal!

😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆  😆

Oh well. Thirty-six hundred bucks would buy 180 twenty-dollar cab rides. That’s a trip to the grocery store about every two days.

Too bad we don’t have decent public transportation here. Thirty-six hundred bucks—just one  year of car savings—would buy 2,057 all-day bus or train tickets. That would be unlimited rides every single day for 5 years and 7 months! Alas, in these parts a single trip to the grocery store and home on the buses would consume a whole day. I could fill the entire remainder of my life with waiting at bus stops and then waiting for buses to get where I want to go.

Image: 2007-2009 Toyota Sienna, public domain