Planning Another Move

It is only in the last month that Pennie and I have decided to move to Virginia to be closer to our son Ted and his family. Ted's wife Brianna, her son Aiden and their three children, Cassian, Reagan and Owen Finley. We have an option on a home in Tazewell, VA which is only 5 minutes from the family. An older home (1915) with a seperate apartment over the garage. The home needs some work !!!! and the first place for us to live will be the small apartment while we do sme maintenance on the large home. The heating system is oil fired hot water with radiators in most rooms. The first thing noted on our tour was a broken pipe that went upstairs. Maybe a frozen pipe that reveals that the system was not drained before a severe frost. The address of the near 1 acre proerty is 131 Jeffersonville Street in Tazewell, the property goes far up the hill, and is heavily wooded behind the house. The front has some very mature trees and a large yard, one tree is a Chestnut which is a survivor of a blight which destroyed most Chestnuts in the east some decades ago. We will be moving early in November when the sale of our Tyler home is completed. There are contingency clauses in both the sales and it may take a few more weeks to finalize all the paperwork.

Cars I Have Owned

These are all the cars I've owned since I was 16 years old.

This was my first car, a 1947 Desoto convert.  Dad bought it for me when I was 16 for $75.00, I drove it into the ground in 2 years and had to pay $5.00 to have it towed away to be crushed

The 1963 Ford Falcon Futura 260 V8 convert, it was half mine and half my girlfriends till we parted ways in 1968.  Paid $950, it was T-boned by an old lady and scrapped.

The 1967 Cougar V-8, bought used in 1970 for $1850, sold it  in 1973 for $850. with a bad heater

The used 1971 BMW 2002 Ti was the greatest .  It had 2 sidedraft Weber carbs.  Could go 140 mph but it ate a valve during a bad shift, repairs cost $1700.  The car only cost me $2600.

My new 1976 SAAB 99EMS 4 speed, it was unusual, the ignition key was on the console between the seats, it was a great ride but after 200K miles, in California, I had to have a new SAAB

The 1966 Dodge Coronet 440 that I bought, for $800.  from a little old lady(REALLY) in Santa Barbara, CA.  When we first got to S.B. without a car I needed it for a few months.  Sold it to a Canadian friend who drove it back to Toronto, got it across the border but couldn't drive it.

My new  1986 SAAB 900 was not a turbo and OK until son Ted reached 16 and totalled it in Sequioa N.P. while on a camping trip with friends

A used 1972 Mercedes Benz 250 Coupe, bought it at a car auction for $3500., a beautiful looking car but the engine had a warped head, dark green with a tan leather interior

A 5 cylinder AUDI that only lasted until daughter Kathryn was learning to drive

Needed a car in 1997 and this 1982 SAAB 900 Turbo was OK until the turbo started burning up all my oil, engines don't run on foamy oil.

After the last SAAB died we went without a car for a year till we could save and make a smart decision on what to buy, which provided us with this

Our faithful 2000 Saturn SW2 wagon, drove across the country several times and  fit in our little garage in Chatham.  Bought new in Santa Maria in 2000 for $18K.  In March 2018 in became my daughter Kathryn's first car.   Still had only 160K miles.

My 2008 Ford F-150XL 5.4L.  Got it in 2009. It was a great ride for crossing the country listening to books on CD, and towed my plane on a trailer from CA to OK.  As of March 27/18 it was used as a trade-in for the next vehicle

Our newer 2014 Volkswagen Tiguan SUV,  just the right size, our only vehicle, easy to get in & out.

Another Tiguan, this one a 2018 model, bought in Tyler, TX to replace the earlier model which had to be sold to get me to the U.S.

3D Printing a Titanium Part Created By Artificial Intelligence

 

I uploaded this on 03/11/2023 to show how far we have come in additive manufacturing intricate parts.  The fact that AI was used in design was new.  More to come!

The Remarkable ATMOS Clock and it's travels

 

My fathers retirement gift from Polysar Ltd.

This is the short history of the significant gift that was given my father Geaorge W. Vandenbroek after his retirement from 25 years work in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada at the company called POLYMER and later renamed POLYSAR.  He started there shortly after we came to Canada in 1951 and he considered himself very lucky to have been hired as he spoke very little English at the time.  Our family was living at the time in a very poor farmhouse on the rural line in Wyoming, Ontario which has become Confederation Line.  We rented the house, which had no plumbing, no gas and no electricity.  I remember my mother having to walk down to the creek to bring back a bucket of water to boil for cooking.  In our first winter in Canada I was 7 years old and I helped my father saw firewood with a bow saw to heat the home.  He also cut extra to sell and told me he earned 25 cents an hour to do so.  After he got the job at Polymer he could ride with another employee the 15 miles to Sarnia for his work.  Within another few months he had saved enough to buy a 1938 Pontiac car and drove himself.  We moved to the town of Wyoming that fall and after several more years we bought our first house, for $4500.  in Petrolia.

My father worked for 25 years as a stationary engineer at the latex division of Polymer where he was responsible, with several others, for monitoring the instrumentation that controlled the many stages of latex production in the plant.  He proudly showed me through the plant one day when I was about 18 years old and I have a photo of him in front of a busy rack of controls which was his station.  He worked the 3 shifts of that job for 25 years and was presented with the ATMOS clock at his retirement in 1976 at age 65.

The ATMOS is a Swiss made clock from the company Jaeger le Coultre.  It is an historic piece of Swiss engineering that runs continuously without winding or battery power.  The energy that powers it is the day-to-day change of atmospheric pressure, however slight, that moves a bellows, made of metal, which  raises a small chain and in turn winds a spring which runs the clock.  A finely balanced wheel oscillates to govern the time.  It can be tuned so precisely that it maintains time within a second per month.  It has been running without maintenance for the past 46 years with only stops while it was being moved.  Moved it has been, from it's manufacture in Switzerland to Canada in 1976.  From Canada to Holland with dad when he returned to retire there.  Back to Canada in 1994 when he moved back to Canada.  When dad died I inherited the clock and it went with us to Santa Barbara California, then to Lompoc CA and further to Oklahoma in 2008 when I retired.  In 2011 it traveled back to Ontario, to Chatham for 10 years.  Finally it was brought to Tyler Texas by Ian Gare on his visit to Texas in 2022 to be placed on its mantle where it is now keeping great time.

Update on this date, MAY 27, 2026. The clock has now relocated once again, it travelled to Tazewell, Virginia in Dec. 2025 when we moved from Texas. It sits on the Baldwin piano in the living room at 131 Jeffersonville St. it's new home for the present.

A Time Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto

Regrets

I am starting a recollection of some of the opportunities that I encountered growing up and listing the few that I regret not taking advantage of.

REGRET#1-In 1962 while attending W.O.I.T. in Windsor, in my first year, we had an economics course in which each member in the class picked a stock, tracked it for a year, plotted graphs and wrote a paper on the means of investing in the stock market.

Our class was bussed to Detroit and we toured a brokerage, viewed the market floor and visited the Mercantile Exchange.  Then our duty was to pick a stock, follow it etc.  My pick was simple, the pages of the newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, were filled with stock quotes, every day.  If I wanted to look up and track one stock I wanted to find it fast.  Go to the last page, last line, last stock, XEROX.  Have no idea what it was but I started my investigation.  When I first looked at it it sold for $15.30/share and I used an imaginary number $3200. to "buy" 200 shares to track.

Now the stock purchase wasn't real but the $3200. was. It  that was the amount that my dad had put in a bank account for me to pay for my 3 years of room & board, books and fees for my post secondary education.

I followed that stock for a year, watched XEROX rise to $120+ and split 5X, it rose again to within $100 and split 3X before the term ended in 8 months.  I now "owned" 3,000 shares and it traded at $49.00 when I finished my economics course.  I got a good mark on my course and my worth was now $147,000  This gave me a personal view of how quickly one could amass wealth BUT unfortunately I was no richer than I had been, less actually.  I was finished with the course but continued to track XEROX for the next few years as the company grew exponentially.  By 1966 when I was working at STELCO the stock I was tracking would have netted me a million and a half dollars.  The reason I never actually invested in the stock market?  Life got in the way and I was living from paycheck to paycheck.  No mystery, many young people do the same, I wish I had been adventurous but how would I have explained to my father?

REGRET#2-While still at W.O.I.T.  my roommate and I saw a 1962 Mustang for sale in Windsor.  The 'older' lady was selling it for $1200 and it had very few miles.  Of course it was THE HOT CAR to drive in 1964 and we tried to reason ourselves into coming up with six hundred dollars each.  It did not come about, it would have been my second car, the first cost $75 and it was already a memory.

REGRET #3-just after getting my pilots license I started to build, from plans, a Rutan Vari Viggen, a single engine, pusher, canard type, two seater airplane.  I worked on it from 1776 until I moved to California in 1981.  It was not feasible to transport the semi-finished plane to the USA so I gave it to my brother-in-law in Wyoming, Ontario to finish.  Several years hence he trucked it to Toronto and donated it to my brother who had plans to continue construction.  It was too much of a project and he subsequently donated it to a dentist in Toronto who never finished it either.  Of the 800+ plans for this plane about 12 were finished and flew all over the world but today only 2 or 3 remain active.  Go to the EAA museum to see the first prototype hanging on the wall along with some other Rutan designs.  I say I regretted losing it but in actual fact it was extremely entertaining and instructive to have worked on it for five years. 

Regret #4- When I moved to California in 1981 I had a good job waiting at UCSB working in Nuclear Engineering for my boss from Canada.  After a few years I saw an ad in my aviation magazine for a position with Bert Rutan  at RAF that seemed to fit my credentials.  He already had Mike Melville from South Africa working for him, so I knew my citizenship was no problem.  I knew Mike from years ago when he was building his Vari Viggen.  He flew his for some years until he built a Long Eze;  later, in 1997 he became the first civilian astronaut when he flew Spaceship 1 to 397,000 feet above Mojave.  Had I worked at Scaled Composites I would have been on the inside of some extremely interesting developments in aviation.  These dropped dreams of years ago may have been just that but they kept me aware of how one lifetime can take a person to many varied careers.  I decided not to limit my career to only one position, to keep avenues open for adventure.

Meanwhile at SpaceX

 The goings on at Boca Chica keep SpaceX very busy but while they are planning and testing the next phase of space access they continue to launch the Falcon9 rockets both in Florida and California.  Many of the past 30+ launches have been to orbit the new Starlink internet satellites, 60 at a time.  So far there are about 1500 on orbit and thousands of customers are being served internet access all over the globe.  During this time they have also flown more than 10 cargo missions to the ISS, launched 4 sets of crewed Dragon capsules, the latest with 4 civilians for a 3 day orbit mission called Inspiration4.  Look it up.  Oh, they also launched about 12 satellites for various customers in the last 3 years.  If or when this company goes public, the line to buy stock will stretch long and I will be in it.