If You Fix Things, You Are My Brother: The 240Z

The 240z was an interesting car. Nissans were still called Datsuns back then, and along with Toyotas and Hondas, the badges were making inroads into the American market. American cars had gotten elephantine. Little Japanese cars got good gas mileage, were more fun to drive (a floor shift beats three on the tree anyday), and were cheap to buy. But it took a lot for American buyers to get over their aversion to Japanese cars. Some of it was patriotism. But mostly, it was simply inertia. People need a big nudge to change their long-held opinions.

The 240z was just that kind of nudge. It came out in 1969, and it changed American attitudes towards Japanese cars overall. Lots of people started driving pokey B210s and Honda Civics because the 240z made Japanese cars finally seem cool. The car looked like an Asian Jag, or any number of other European long-hood roadsters.

It’s not surprising to see someone restoring a 240z. It’s basically always been the kind of car worth a makeover. Fifty years on, it still seems as cool as it ever was, or even moreso. What is surprising to me is to see how good this panel beater is at his job. He lives in a land beyond meticulous.

More or less the first job I ever had was doing the needful in a body shop. We did quick and dirty repairs, using much more bondo than ingenuity. We sprayed paint like vandals. The fellow that ran it, whose lungs are probably long since an exhibit in some Don’t Do That Museum, made most of his money by pinstriping cars. He left work to me he probably shouldn’t have. If you’re currently driving a Vista Cruiser and the rear fixed windows fall into the rotted fenders when you go over a speed bump, I apologize unreservedly.  So I know bad well enough to know good when I see it.

I watched a bunch of related videos for this restoration. They’re delightfully free of sleeve tattoos and thrash metal soundtracks. There are lots of people banging on old cars on YouTube. This fellow stands out.

The Future of Software

Here’s how cars were made in 1960:

Here’s how they’re made now:

The only real work for humans in the modern factory involves judgment. They inspect what the machines have done to make sure it’s correct. Later on in the process, some people crawl around in the passenger compartment to install the electronics and the trouble lights I’ll be looking at when I buy the car second hand in fifteen years or so. It’s not automated, but it sure is mechanized to a fare-thee-well. Again, they are relying more on judgment and experience than a strong back.

It’s 1960 in software. People who push a little javascript around on a virtual desktop, in a fit of self-importance, call themselves engineers, and they think they’re immune to the same forces that made all those thousands of blue-collar workers superfluous in the space of a single lifetime. Open AI or LLMs, or whatever you want to call almost-thinking-bots are going to perform all the IT drudge work going forward. This is not conjecture on my part. This website uses seven plugins I installed that I coded using AI. They all work better than the human-coded plugins they replaced.

The only thing that will be really valuable for computer coding is going to be judgment. And if you’re wearing wool socks and sandals, a man bun, and a neckbeard, I’m afraid you’ve already demonstrated exactly how valuable your judgment is going to be going forward.

Kids These Days

Lots of ink spilled about kids these days. They’re either imbeciles who will never pay off their student loans, or they’re geniuses making mid six-figures at a FAANG outfit. Never anything in between.

But there’s a great deal of world between sullenly serving coffee and coding AI apps. I dislike the way the term “engineer” and “architect” has been purloined for computer programmers. I always preferred “code monkeys,” but no one ever listens to me. Anyway, the world needs many more practical, real-world engineers than we’ve got. It appears that Johns Hopkins University is producing some:

The challenge before Johns Hopkins University engineering students: Take a leaf blower, but make it quiet. Make it work as powerfully as ever, but do not allow it to emit the ear-piercing caterwaul that has gotten leaf blowers banned in some communities and cursed in many others.

Shocking their sponsors, their advisers, and even themselves a little, the students did it.

This isn’t one of those things that you read about that instantly disappears, either. It’s ready for prime time:

The design wowed Stanley Black & Decker officials, who can’t wait to start manufacturing and selling the new tools.

“It’s not just some cool theoretical thing that will sit on a shelf and never be heard from again—this is ready to be mass manufactured,” said Nate Greene, senior product manager at Stanley Black & Decker, who graduated from Johns Hopkins in 2017 with an engineering degree. “This is a really rare and dramatic level of success.”

The student team expects their solution could be adapted to quiet other similarly loud appliances like vacuums and hairdryers.

Good work kids. You’re sure to all find good-paying jobs when you graduate. And good paying jobs aren’t as good as being a Instagram influencer, of course, but somehow I think you’ll muddle through.

In a Surprise to Exactly Nobody, This Is From Switzerland

So, the Swiss want to repave a busy road. As you might expect, they go about it in a very Swiss way.

I’ve had to supervise the paving of a few short stretches of road, and lots of parking lots, so maybe I can tell you what’s going on in the video.

First, they’re scarifying the road. This is done by a big machine with lots of nasty teeth that can handle grinding away at little rocks suspended in emulsion all day. They’re removing what is called (in the US) the wearing layer of pavement. What’s underneath is sometimes referred to as scratch pavement here. I have no idea what the Swiss call theirs.

All the stuff they grind up will be recycled into more pavement. The grinding wheels on the machine are circular, so it leaves a bit of a curved ramp at the end of the run. A worker uses a handheld abrasive wheel to cut a slot at the same depth as the scratch pavement level, and then a guy with a jackhammer (pneumatic) cuts out the remainder to make a square place to butt the new pavement into the existing stuff.

Then a guy heats the edge of the old pavement with a propane torch, followed by a guy spraying emulsion. Asphalt emulsion is the goo that holds asphalt together, and acts as a kind of glue between old and new. Then they feed in a more substantial joint tape that’s also hit with a torch as it pays out.

Then they do something that’s sort of old-fashioned. They spray a heavy coat of emulsion over the whole surface, and then put what looks like recycled pavement over it. That serves as the sub-base, or scratch pavement. Roads used to be paved that way fairly often in the US. Just watch Cool Hand Luke to see it done by hand.

Then comes the actual pavement machine. It has wings that fold out to accept bituminous asphalt from a series of trucks, ferried by neat little front-end dumpers. That stuff (hot-mix asphalt) comes very hot indeed from the plant, between 300 and 400 degrees F. If you’ve ever seen a paving crew at work, you’ll often see them strap squares of plywood on their boots to keep the soles from melting when you walk on the fresh pavement. In the US, many dump trucks that carry pavement have heating elements in them to keep the temperatures up during delivery. Cold asphalt doesn’t spread or roll very well.

There’s some extra torch and shovel work at the join to the existing pavement. Then rollers roam over the hot pavement to compact and smooth the surface. A worker runs a gas-powered plate compactor over the edges to avoid having the rollers straddle the seam and risk breaking the existing edge.

And of course the most Swissiest thing about this very Swiss thing is that they built an articulating bridge on wheels that regular traffic can travel over unimpeded while the men work in safety underneath, and the bridge creeps down the roadway as the work is completed.

Sometimes, when I look out my car window, I don’t know where I live exactly, anymore. But it sure as hell ain’t Switzerland.