Atomic Nerds

Farmgirl and FarmFam have been in the process of cleaning up and renovating the actual farm house this year. Part of this has been cleaning up the basement. In the process, they came up with a pair of ancient skates. Farmgirl made an offhand crack about them and my derby skating, and somewhere in the Good Idea* matrix of my brain, something said “No, don’t throw those out, let me take a look at them.”

Time passed, and I’d managed to forget they were in the for-Stingray pile at Blogorado. More time passed. Farmgirl got a case of the itchy-feet and came down to visit, and did in fact remember that there was a for-Stingray pile (mostly empty beer bottles that need refilling), and brought that, and the skates, along.

For once the Good Idea matrix of my brain was on to something. This is what showed up:

They’ve already had two coats of neatsfoot oil to start reversing the effects of, I’m told, 30 years minimum living in a basement without any attention aside from that of a packrat, but they look suspiciously similar to modern skate design.

On the right is one of my current workhorses, along with a spare truck and kingpin for reference. A brief aside into skate anatomy, the plate is… well, the plate. The metal bit to which all other bits are mounted. The truck is the bit that has the axles (detached with the black plastic caps protecting the threads below the two). Rotate the pictured spare so the lower cap is pointed up but otherwise in the same position and you can see how they fit, if you’re of the less spatially-thinking set. The forward tip is the pivot (mirrored on the rear but pointed the other way), and the kingpin goes through the bushings (black on the old skates, “orange” with a hefty dose of grime on mine) and the large hole in the truck to hold the whole assembly together. They’re both double-action trucks. I haven’t busted out the protractor yet, but they appear to fall in the more popular 10-15 degree range (45 being the other somewhat less popular but still common angle. If anybody is really that interested in this particular divergence, I can go into more detail later, but it’s sort of a hornet’s nest.) Also the axles are 7mm instead of the currently more popular 8mm (which is what LabRat and I roll).

Oriented to see the model, the make (inverted) is Sure-Grip. This is interesting because Sure-Grip is rivaled only by Riedell in terms of ubiquitousness in the modern derby world. The more things change, the more things stay the same, it seems. The plate is even today part of Sure-Grip’s lineup.

As it stands, they’re too narrow for my feet, but not outside the realm of stretchable. I think you all know where this is going.

The bushings are obviously shot. I could get some 7mm axle wheels, but in the interest of in-house sanity, I think the better bet will be to replace the trucks entirely (and the pivot cups, obviously) and go to 8. The kingpins will go as well, since the crank-it-down flathead screw model doesn’t leave a lot of room for adjustment, and the less said about the toestops the better. They have a similar flat-head crank-down mount leaving the stops very high, which is less than useful for tomahawk stops, which are a severely non-trivial part of a referee’s toolkit. Options there are to either go with a standard nut and washer setup, or drill and tap a couple holes for set screws. Having skated both ways, I’ll be adding the set screw. May also have to bore out the main hole itself, but we’ll see how things go.

All in all, thanks FarmFam! (Like I needed another time sink…bastards.)

(And to end-run the inevitable questions, yes the Trunk Monkey moniker is based on the commercial campaign. My general policy of making boy scouts look underprepared** has resulted in way more than a few “Does anybody have a [oddball thing nobody would ever think a derby practice would need]?” “Yeah, I do. Just a sec.” moments, ergo press the button, deploy the Trunk Monkey, fix any problem. My number, for those curious, is .30-06 because “a man with a .30-06 doesn’t panic.”)

*They’re not
**Which sadly is not foolproof, as I have found myself underprepared at times.

Recently, LabRat’s mother paid us a visit. This is not a happy occasion to put it mildly, but detailing this is not the purpose for which I blow the dust out of the keyboard today.

As part of the appeasement package, some of the art museums available in Santa Fe were tapped for afternoon visits. The fact that most were located near the damnable plaza, the tourist-packed heart of the oldest part of Santa Fe, and thus not well configured for the high vehicular traffic that tourist attractions draw deterred none but me, the driver of the ginormous pick-up.

The New Mexico Museum of Art was eventually selected as the top candidate, and thus we hauled the ponderousness of the truck and LabRat’s mother directly to the plaza to see The Art.

This did not go well. Allow me to present, with minimal commentary (until later), some of the pieces of art we encountered in this fraud of an institution. File names contain additional commentary, and those that are not terribly well in focus, I’m torn between calling art and just noting that the pieces were bad enough that focus would not really help anything.

Yes, that’s construction paper on cardboard.

I’m not positive these next two were actual exhibits, but given the rest of the museum I wanted to be sure to get a snapshot just in case I was standing in front of genius.

I don’t know, this one had a light shined specifically on it so I think it was an installation piece. *rimshot*

And finally, I present the best thing in the whole damn museum:

Now, to be fair there were two, maybe three pieces that were actually interesting and worth looking at. There was a decent Georgia O’Keefe repressionist piece. By contrast, there were roughly 15-20 of those bullshit “I sloshed my brush-water on loose-leaf” pretentious troll-pieces from Richard Tuttle. LabRat left insulted on behalf of the two good artists for having their actual work displayed next to such vapid drivel, while I was insulted the institution would willingly display so much that would be best used wadded up to light the fireplace and have the gall to charge money to look at it. Or go in the fireplace as actual fuel at Blogorado. I’m reasonably certain we destroyed thousands of dollars worth of art in the firepit there this year, but luckily it’s ok because my scrap pile must be worth millions. I’m sincerely tempted to select some random chunk of battered 2×4 with a nail sticking out of it, and attempt to deliver it as an addition the artist sent to the exhibit.

In fact, y’know what? Check this out:

I made that. Right now. Between typing the colon in “check this out:” and typing this line. I dare any one of you to find an expert who will say “Nope, that’s not part of this collection of pretentious bullshit.”

I’m not strictly sure photography was allowed. Frankly I don’t care. Being thrown out would very much have been an “Oh, don’t throw me in that briar patch!” situation. Forestalling my urge to redouble my efforts into researching a way to destroy all life on the planet from my back yard, most of the guest book broadly agreed that, in the words of art critic Hilton Kramer invoking the axiom “less is more,” “in Mr. Tuttle’s work, less is unmistakably less…One is tempted to say, where art is concerned, less has never been as less than this.” One can hope that the curator in Santa Fe is similarly fired as the curator responsible for the exhibit that prompted that critique.

Finally, on the long hike back to where I finally managed to find a spot near the plaza big enough to accommodate an extended-bed extended-cab pickup, something caught my eye:

I could swear I’ve seen that emu head somewhere….
(And paging the ministry of irony, the piece is titled “Money Is Too Important To Take Seriously” and they want $3,600 for it. I actually do like it, infinitely more than anything I saw in the actual museum, but…. seriously?)