Tell us something we don’t know.

[orezok]

When I was 16 (1963), we moved from PA to TX so that I could go to college with resident tuition which was about $100 back then. We were basically poor and made the trip in a ‘39 Plymouth pulling a home built trailer. When we got there and unloaded the trailer we found a 5 gal bucket of bent nails that was one of Dad’s prized possessions. Didn’t buy nails for many years.

 

[ultrarunner]

Not a single job I've held is one where I applied.

As a kid neighbors would hire me to do yard work... later I was spending so much time at an autoparts house the owner offered to have me stock shelves and keep a tab before I was old enough to have a driver's license.

The Hospital was the same way... they were in a bind with their generator and someone said call this guy.

Strange how that works.

I had applied for several government jobs and not one came to fruition... Building Inspector, Low Income Housing Inspector, Law Enforcement, Air Quality Inspector, etc...

Chief of police said my timing was bad... too many men on the force which was similar to what other Bay Area Agencies said as they were desperately seeking women and minorities so workforce mirrored the community...

 

[orezok]

I read an article recently (sorry I didn’t save it) that salvagers are are recovering steel from WW2 sunken ships. Apparently most steel made after the war contains a minute amount of radioactive material from nuclear fallout. In some specialized applications the radioactivity interferes with the item function.

The unfortunate part is that many of the ships contain remains of fallen military and they are destroyed in the process of salvage.

It is illegal, but the metal is highly valued and is worth $$$.

 

[WinterDeere]

A friend lives in a cabin on the family farm. Built in mid 1600s according to him. It has a loft accessible by walking up (I don't know proper term) "logs" sticking out of the back wall, no railing. Step tops are flat (hewn?).
It's near Concord, Va.

It'd be interesting if he could really nail that down with some legitimate paperwork, or other evidence, as that would be crazy-old for anything in the USA. Think about it, the first permanent settlement (Jamestown) didn't begin until 1607, and really took a good ten years until you could call that a "village", eg. 1615. In general, the houses built back that far were not of a quality that would still be standing today, as most were self-built shacks and cabins, or post and beam set on dirt, not the proper masonry construction that started appearing as more of the building trades appeared in the USA ca.1700.

I think there were only three other incorporated towns in all of Virginia, by the mid-1600's, Hopewell, Hampton, and of course Williamsburg. But as is almost always the case with these old towns, the oldest building in Williamsburg today only dates back to 1695. All of the buildings built in the first 60 years of that settlement are long gone, being crappy home-spun cabins yielding to rot, fire, and progress.

Until the early 1990's, my aunt and uncle owned the oldest heritage farm in the country, continuously operated by my family for 301 years. The oldest part of the house is a log cabin, parts of which still exist inside the interior walls of the larger brick and stone additions that followed, in a style of "adding on" that might only be common to PA. Even that one only dates back to 1692.

The area where my house sits now was first occupied by a copper mine, starting in the mid-1600's, but the oldest houses still standing today dates to only 1730. Other than a few foundation or fireplace remnants, everything built in the area prior to that was too temporary to remain 300 years later.

On the "something we don't know" theme, most people look at these old houses and think the quality of old construction was generally better than stuff built today. But we have a skewed view of old construction, as the few still standing today are the exceptional cases more often owned by wealthier families, not representative of the poor hovels in which the masses were living.

 

[Fuddyduddy1952]

Guy living there is in his 80s now. The family farm goes back many generations. He was my high school physics teacher.
You're right...mid 1600s would be incredible.
Next time I talk to him I'll find out more about it.

 

[Grumpycat]

My father worked construction in the off season.
He would drag home piles of used lumber.
It was my job on weekends to pull the nails and straighten them and sort them by size.
He built barns and a house without ever going to the hardware store for nails.

About 1974 Dad had a small dump truck bring a load of what he called, "rail road doors". Were mostly 1x6 or 1x8 rough oak. Hundreds of nails. Is my understanding these were not really doors but wood used to seal doors shut when the car was full of grain.

Spent many hours pulling nails and sorting the lumber.

That summer we built a 12x12 shed behind the house. Used the lumber and nails. Mixed the concrete floor in a portable mixer. About the only thing we bought was the concrete bags, gravel, and translucent fiberglass panels we used for the roof.

Had opportunity to learn the shed is still standing and in use 40 years later.

 

[orezok]

When I was a kid of 8 or 10. my father got a load of used brick. His plan was to build a 24 x 24 garage with brick veneer. I spent many a day using an old one lung compressor that you used a rope to start and didn't have a muffler. We had an old Cleco chipping hammer to knock the old mortar off the bricks. Here's the result of my labors.

Ahh, the good old days.

 

[stuckmotor]

I read an article recently (sorry I didn’t save it) that salvagers are are recovering steel from WW2 sunken ships. Apparently most steel made after the war contains a minute amount of radioactive material from nuclear fallout. In some specialized applications the radioactivity interferes with the item function.

The unfortunate part is that many of the ships contain remains of fallen military and they are destroyed in the process of salvage.

It is illegal, but the metal is highly valued and is worth $$$.

Your first paragraph is familiar. I must have read that, too.

 

[ponytug]

Your first paragraph is familiar. I must have read that, too.

FWIW: recent reports

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/30/asia/malaysia-world-war-ii-shipwreck-looting-intl-hnk/index.html

https://news.usni.org/2023/05/25/u-k-royal-navy-distressed-and-concerned-by-illegal-chinese-salvage-of-wwii-wrecks

Apparently, dredging for scrap metal. Copper, bronze, and big items like propellers.

It has been going on for awhile.

Lead as the ultimate element for radiation decay from uranium does have naturally occurring traces of radioactive due to impurities. There is an old story of some lead ballast in a Roman shipwreck that carefully removed and was specially refined to make shielding for an important physics experiment that needed ultra high purity lead with extremely low levels of radiation (natural), due to the decay within the lead after it was original melted.

Roman lead will shield CUORE experiment – CERN Courier

Twenty years ago, an amateur scuba diver swimming off the coast of Oristano in Sardinia found a navis oneraria magna – a 36-m Roman ship dating back more than 2000 years, to between 80 and 50 BC – whose cargo consisted of a 1000 lead forms.

cerncourier.com

All the best,

Peter

 

[Creamer]

It is a little easier to incorporate the wood construction of a log cabin into a modern home versus the sod walls from the prairies where I grew up.

As for building techniques being better or worse than today's world I think today's building techniques are much better and will stand much longer as they eliminate many structural damage issues and required maintenance that the older techniques required. The problem is obsolescence - it is so much easier to build a new house than remodel old ones to incorporate the new technologies. I say that even though I live in a house that was built in the 1850's (that is accurate as records are from back then) beofre electricity, central heat and AC, steel roofs, etc. It has been moved to a new basement and foundation and totally updated many times but it is a labor of love - and incremental funds verus one time expenditures - more than economic sense to still have it.