Brian Rodgers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Okally Dokally.
Thank you for your concern.
Twenty years ago part of my job at the local movie theatre was keeping all the machines in operation. This included maintaining an old natural gas boiler down in the dark nasty basement. This old dinosaur had been converted from coal to oil and then to natural gas during its roughly one hundred years in operation. The boiler system was a monstrosity. Feeding this beast was a four inch gas line. I was instructed by the theatre manager(my girlfriend) to flip the switch on and run. Yeah it was scary. Upon closer inspection, which I do with most machines, time permitting, I found several safety devices on the boiler. Im a natural born mechanic, not one to take everything apart, I enjoy understanding how things work using the book method. What became clear to me upon my first fact finding trip down in the dungeon, was that most of the safety devices had been bypassed. About the only circumstance which would shut this beast down was the pilot light blowing out or the water jacket bursting. The slaves as my lady called the ushers and projectionists were given good advice to run after lighting this thing.<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->
I had a regular job during the week. I was fresh out of college and working at my new profession at Computerland de Santa Fe, but the theatre was mostly night work so whenever I had the time I would go over each piece of antique equipment down at the theatre. The boiler was not nearly as intricate as the 35mm carbon arc projectors, but I felt right at home in the cellar. The boiler did have a massive brick firewall all around it and was sitting down in sort of a moat as well. I would like to have seen that boiler during the coal fired days. A hopper filled the firebox from a bin which was filled first from the alley. Thats the type of automation I like to see, Old World style mechanics. I put all of the safety relays and systems back on line by the time Winter kicked in. I shudder to think of the roughly 750 people sitting above that boiler watching a movie before I gave it the once-over twice. The only system I would leave to the experts is the gas controls, although I have a basic understanding of these devices as well. Plumbing and heating companies are the only way to go when it comes to gas heaters, especially when the feed-pipe is four inches in diameter. When the switch was flipped and the relays kicked open the gas valves, that boiler would roar.
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But anyway, I hope you dont mind that my way of thinking nowadays is to write it down. Writing helps me focus on what I want to think about. I have found that like-minded people enjoy hearing how things work from an expert mechanics point of view. Sorry I dont mean to sound arrogant. But people that truly understand machines are few and far between. I have spent my life as an outsider more interested in machines than the people around me. Now that I have matured a bit (Im over fifty) I am putting most of my attention and energy into family and friends. So, yeah boilers are right up my alley as are pretty much any machines.
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The thrust of my research here has been to find a way to use small diameter trees. These are choking the forests in the Southwest United States and creating a wildfire problem. Arizona and New Mexico have been in the news these last few years as hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land have burned. I dont know if you heard it on the news several years ago the US Forest Service with the help of the Park Service burned the town of Los Alamos damn near to the ground. Yeah the birth place of the atom bomb is just over the Sangre de Christo Mountains. I always feel comforted that there is a 10,000 foot high mountain range separating our ranch from Los Alamos National Labs. The USFS was practicing a policy known as a controlled burn when the blaze got out of hand and burned half the homes in the town of Los Alamos, NM and thousands of acres besides.
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For me, since I am not much of a humanitarian, the loss of homes is less important than the loss of forestland. I especially dislike that yuppies feel the need to build their expensive homes in the forest. Nobody was hurt in the Los Alamos controlled burn by the way. Most people that live in what is now called the forest interface were warned to thin the tress around homes. Of course they dont want to do this because they think it would defeat their main purpose of living in the forest. I live in the forest I should add. Our family has lived here for thirty plus years during which we have actively manicured our roughly one hundred and fifty acres of forest land.
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One of the really scary results of the wildfires in the Southwest US is a recent policy of designating basins above reservoirs as water-shed areas. I have taken several tours of these nearby monstrosities. Apparently, the principal idea is that the trees get in the way of the limited rainfall running off into the reservoirs. Combine that fact with all the yuppies losing their condos in wildfires because of un-maintained forests and we apparently are right back where we were when the big logging companies were clear-cutting huge tracts of forests in the southwestern US fifty years ago. The only difference is the new practice is to eliminate all impact on the forest floor by heavy equipment. Of course the forest floor is not a forest floor anymore. Now it is a barren hillside with no grass, just rocks and debris left there to rot. Can you believe that? The USFS wont let anyone take the felled trees because they might tear up the surface and they dont want the resultant silt in the reservoir! It is freaking me out. What we now have is hyper-wildfire conditions with all that fuel on the ground!
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Our private forest can withstand most wildfire conditions, but I dont know what will happen if that nearby water-shed gets going. So you can see that I have a legitimate concern in using waste wood products. Even if we need to carefully pick up each and every log from the hyper-sensitive water-shed and burn it to heat homes. We can and should do it. This is a renewable resource that is being disrespected and wasted throughout the southwest. Yes, I would like to see the environmentalists and mushroom guys do something about breaking the waste wood down, but in the meantime if we dont burn this wood in heat stoves it is going to burn right where it is.
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Sincerely,
Brian Rodgers
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