Headlight Grills...again

@Jim Gilbert - Madison, Mississippi, can you provide more information about how to contact the maker and order?

For a long time, I have been thinking of trying to vacuum form something for the inside but haven't gotten around to it. I have the needed equipment but have never used it.

@Jim Gilbert - Madison, Mississippi

My son's college room-mate recently re-located to Huntsville, AL where they got 4" of snow yesterday, so feel free to blame HIM for all of the cold and snow down there.

Those grills and lenses look very factory so I'm glad that you found a good solution.

Awesome look!

Prescott Phillips

prescott4thewin@gmail.com

@Gordon Nichols posted:

@Jim Gilbert - Madison, Mississippi

My son's college room-mate recently re-located to Huntsville, AL where they got 4" of snow yesterday, so feel free to blame HIM for all of the cold and snow down there.

Those grills and lenses look very factory so I'm glad that you found a good solution.

Awesome look!

Gordon, it do sometimes snow in the Deep South...not too much. Huntsville is a little too far North to qualify as the Deep South. It's been hot December and we're expecting 70 degrees Sunday. Not the normal for sure.

Is your friend a rocket scientist?

Still only an inch of the white stuff on the ground here in southern Ontario Canada and plus temps today and tomorrow. At least it covered the muddy conditions for now. We've had the mildest Fall and early Winter that I can remember.

@Jim Gilbert - Madison, Mississippi

"Is your friend a rocket scientist?"

I'm not sure.  He started out on Apache Helicopters at Sikorsky, then used to work for Lockheed in/near San Diego for a good many years and liked it a lot but wouldn't talk much about what he was working on and I accepted that.  He recently either got a huge promotion and/or changed jobs and moved to Huntsville, bought what looks like a Planter's house and a Porsche something-Turbo so I guess life is good.

BTW, my late mother in law was a rocket scientist for Pratt and Whitney Rocket Systems in West Palm Beach, Fl.  She gained her engineering degree (Masters in Physics) during WW II.  Those rocket jockeys are a very interesting bunch.  

Jim.

I have those headlight grills on my car, without any headlight lens for protection.  Been that way since 2016, with no issues of wet, rust, etc. in the headlight body.  I think they look good, and they do keep out midsize boulders.  Pebbles, not so much.

@Gordon Nichols posted:

@Jim Gilbert - Madison, Mississippi

Those rocket jockeys are a very interesting bunch.  

In the late 1970's  the government suspended work on the Yellow Creek Nuclear Plant, after pissing away $1.5 billion, near the small NE Mississippi town of Iuka. Fast forward to 1992...I was on that same site where NASA was building a facility to reload the solid fuel boosters for the Space Shuttle. Some smart guy came to the conclusion that the boosters could be moved on the Tombigby  Waterway rather than flying the shells to Morton Thiokol, in Utah, for reloading. My job was to schedule the project for a mechanical contractor.

There was only hotel in Iuka at the time so I lived in a small B&B that was used by engineers from Huntsville. I spent several hours, one evening, talking with a mathematician who worked with NASA on the trajectory for the 1969 moon shot. Very interesting man. Easy to talk to. Auburn grad. Them rocket scientist is a smart bunch of folks.

We finished our part of the project and the government shut it down again. Another $1.5 billion gone.

I visited the folks at Huntsville a couple of times.  Once was for an interesting project where they were trying to capture about 2 Terabytes of real-time data from sensors all over a rocket engine on a test stand during a ten minute test fire.  The data was all synched and collected by some mini-super-computers (IIRC, a bank of Sun Spark parallel servers) and we had to work out how many storage device I/O channels the servers had to drive in parallel to capture all the sensor data and then how many internal I/O channels the storage systems needed to stream that much data, and at what rate, to match the servers, yadda, yadda.  

Turns out it was a LOT and we got involved because our storage I/O was the fastest in the biz back then.  Think 20 storage systems, each the size of a double-wide kitchen fridge, each slamming 64 internal I/O channels across 492 disk drives, all running at Warp 10, all times 20 systems.

It worked so well and was so rock solid (and scalable) that some of the satellite recon people heard of it and we worked with them on the same type of system, but the data was streamed from a satellite during a pass-by.  
Pretty cool stuff back then, and probably much cooler stuff happening these days.

It’s pretty much all digital now Gordon.  ‘Low’ speed systems are mostly PC based systems, the software is the trick especially for high channel count systems where synching data is critical (like during a rocket engine hot fire test).   There are several companies making high speed digital data acquisition systems with mind boggling sampling and capture rates.

When I was a younger lad, I worked in the same group with a rather brilliant engineer who lead a small team to develop the first PC based data acquisition and control system used in support of rocket engine testing.  Well at least it was a first for Rocketdyne.  Just about all segments of the software was home grown - this stuff was not commercially available then.  We loosely called the software package SDAS.  Our software (and commercial computing hardware) continued to evolve, eventually the system was used at all of our test stands at SSFL and at the three stands at Stennis Space Center (NSTL back then) that Rocketdyne operated.

Eventually our group got smaller and it became too difficult to support the need for continual updates.  At SSC, NASA reversed engineered our SDAS software (because my director refused my suggestion of giving NASA limited use of our source code) and now use it by the name of NDAS, and pushed us out.  

Yeah the systems are pretty incredible, but not much to look at.

As long as we’re trading rocket stories:  

The sound company I worked for in the 80’s was hired to provide uplink and local sound reinforcement services for NASA-Select TV for the recertification tests for the SEBs after the Challenger disaster. In the course of going up there 4-5 times, we got to hang out with rocket scientists and learn all sorts of cool stuff.
They reload the boosters on a giant rotisserie. They spray the fuel as a thin slurry, going in and out as the booster spins, leaving a thin layer to dry each pass. The core of the booster is hollow. When the match is lit, the entire surface of the hole burns from tip to tail, burning outwards towards the shell until the fuel is expended.

McLaren was the first F1 team to use carbon fiber tubs in their cars. At the time, the only autoclave in the world that was big enough to fit a tub was the one at Moton-Thiokol. It’s where they cured the sections of the SRBs, which were made in another rotisserie that wrapped a single strand of CF thread that had been dipped in resin around a mould, just like a fishing reel wraps fishing line around the bobbin.

eta: I thought I could find a video of that winding machine, but every “Morton Thiokol SRB” related search I did just turns up Challenged disaster stuff.

@Jon T

You guys didn't happen to use Data General computers for that DAC system did you?  Some of our stuff (DG) found its way into high bandwidth data acquisition back in the 1970's - 1990, although some of the Sun Spark stuff was really fast, too.  The two guys who designed the Nova - Nova 3 now live about two miles apart in Naples, FL and show up on some FB alumni pages now and then.  We had systems used all over the Rocket industry and a lot of them in CT and MRI scanners for decades.  

@Gordon Nichols DG and Nova both sound real familiar.  I will check with my old colleague, he and I are still working as part time curmudgeons.

I got to DG just after the Nova systems.  My stuff was the C130/S130 and those after like the S/250, M600 and then the 32-bit systems of the MV series.  There was a technical side of the business, supported by variations of the CPUs and focused on performance for uses like oil (seismic) exploration, medical imaging and advanced SONAR interpretation.  And, of course, as network management systems for the Telcos.

And I, too, feel like a Dinosaur thinking about the "Good Old Days".   My current Laptop has about 10X the performance of the last super-mini I worked on.....  

I ordered a set of the things to go behind my headlight grilles. I had a choice between clear and yellow.

@dlearl476 posted:

As long as we’re trading rocket stories:  

The sound company I worked for in the 80’s was hired to provide uplink and local sound reinforcement services for NASA-Select TV for the recertification tests for the SEBs after the Challenger disaster. In the course of going up there 4-5 times, we got to hang out with rocket scientists and learn all sorts of cool stuff.
They reload the boosters on a giant rotisserie. They spray the fuel as a thin slurry, going in and out as the booster spins, leaving a thin layer to dry each pass. The core of the booster is hollow. When the match is lit, the entire surface of the hole burns from tip to tail, burning outwards towards the shell until the fuel is expended.

McLaren was the first F1 team to use carbon fiber tubs in their cars. At the time, the only autoclave in the world that was big enough to fit a tub was the one at Moton-Thiokol. It’s where they cured the sections of the SRBs, which were made in another rotisserie that wrapped a single strand of CF thread that had been dipped in resin around a mould, just like a fishing reel wraps fishing line around the bobbin.

eta: I thought I could find a video of that winding machine, but every “Morton Thiokol SRB” related search I did just turns up Challenged disaster stuff.

Pardon my old timers disease, I apparently confused two stories. The McLaren tub was made by another Utah aerospace company, Hercules.

I ran across this very interesting video that turns out the designer was a local boy made good, too.

https://youtu.be/5Mz9nAzsLXU

Same facility (Hercules/Thiokol etc) but the name and ownership has changed many times over the years.

@Michael McKelvey posted:

I ordered a set of the things to go behind my headlight grilles. I had a choice between clear and yellow.

Michael, I started this rocket science stuff...me bad! Glad you found Prescott.