Old Service Stations

[Eric]

1 minute ago, Huaco Kid said:

We'd take a small bucket of kerosene and splash it around the lift bays and scrub the floor with pushbrooms.

You probably can't do that any more.

I don’t know how many car parts I’ve washed in gasoline, when I was younger. OSHA would **** a brick wall if they caught you doing it now. 

[janice6]

1 minute ago, Eric said:

I don’t know how many car parts I’ve washed in gasoline, when I was younger. OSHA would **** a brick wall if they caught you doing it now. 

A few years back a friend of mine was cleaning aircraft engine heads using a power wire brush.  He had to quit and undergo treatment for Lead poisoning for a couple of years.  No OSHA at the airport machine shop.  

[Huaco Kid]

I'd be the Steeler and they'd be the Cowboys,  and we'd throw hail-marys in the parking lot all day.  (we never worked too hard there).

It went on the roof.  Ricky decided to grab the bathroom vent-pipe that was going up the outside wall, and walk up the wall while hand-over-handing up the pipe.

He made it to the very top before the little pipe-strap broke.

He held onto the top of the pipe the whole way while the pipe pivoted away from the wall.

...and crashed smash into the windshield of the owner's Dad's Cadillac,  which was amazingly parked in exactly the right spot.

He got cut up pretty bad.

[janice6]

When I started in Ham Radio as a young lad, I used Carbon Tetrachloride all the time as a contact cleaner, they sold it down town.

Now they say it's a terrible threat to life and limb.  It supposedly effects your brain and is a carcinogen.

If I hadn't use it I might be a super villain by now, instead of a pathetic villain.  

Oh, what might have been.

[janice6]

1 minute ago, Huaco Kid said:

I'd be the Steeler and they'd be the Cowboys,  and we'd throw hail-marys in the parking lot all day.  (we never worked too hard there).

It went on the roof.  Ricky decided to grab the bathroom vent-pipe that was going up the outside wall, and walk up the wall while hand-over-handing up the pipe.

He made it to the very top before the little pipe-strap broke.

He held onto the top of the pipe the whole way while the pipe pivoted away from the wall.

...and crashed smash into the windshield of the owner's Dad's Cadillac,  which was amazingly parked in exactly the right spot.

He got cut up pretty bad.

The best memories are at someone else's expense.

[Huaco Kid]

And Ricky was laying in a bloody ball of windshield with a heavy pipe on top of him,  while an 80 year old man was cussing him, like a chicken on fire.

[Huaco Kid]

We took a piece of cardboard and made a "sold out" slot in the Coke machine and filled it full of beer.

One Christmas Eve (?),  the mayor came for a fill-up in his Cadillac(?) (with the steer horns on the hood, and everything),  only we were pretty  "sold out" and I couldn't find the gas hole.

I decided it was behind the license plate.  So I yanked it and it came off in my hand.  No hole there.

I gently placed the license plate back,  because no one had seen me do it.

The gas hole was in the front fender.

Hey,  license plates fall off by themselves all the time.

[Huaco Kid]

47 minutes ago, janice6 said:

He had to quit and undergo treatment for Lead poisoning for a couple of years.

I was scheduled to work at a smelter that required a blood test before and after working there.  (I was just a once-off,  many contractors worked there regularly)  If you failed the after-test,  you couldn't come back until your levels went down.

I failed the initial test.

[Huaco Kid]

I don't know where my brother got it,  but he had a vial of mercury in his dresser drawer. (like, the size of a golf ball)

When he wasn't around,  we'd take it out and play with it.

If you dropped some of it,  it would just go biff,  all into the carpet.

It's probably still there.

[janice6]

1 hour ago, Huaco Kid said:

I don't know where my brother got it,  but he had a vial of mercury in his dresser drawer. (like, the size of a golf ball)

When he wasn't around,  we'd take it out and play with it.

If you dropped some of it,  it would just go biff,  all into the carpet.

It's probably still there.

When I was a kid I found out that Mercury batteries had Mercury in them. Who knew!  So I went to all the jewelers in town and collected all the dead and expired batteries for hearing aids. 

I peeled them apart and put the mush into a big hanky.  Then I twisted the hanky until all the Mercury stopped coming out.  In the end of that summer, I had almost a quart of the stuff.

I couldn't think of what to do with it so I went out on our second floor balcony overlooking the entrance to the house and the sidewalk.

I would get a big mouthful and spit it onto the sidewalk below.  It was magnificent the way it splattered allover and into the street.

That was it.  I spit most of it all over the front walk and sidewalk and when it was gone, I did other equally creative things.

If the "experts" were right. I should  be dead now from the Carbon Tet, the Mercury , the airplane glue and dope fumes.

But here I am pissing everyone off that lives near me, and I believe I will outlive them all.  Ornery is as ornery does.

[Bish1309]

15 hours ago, pipedreams said:

NJ, 1959...

 

 

Wait....

 

Is this proof there was color back in '59?

[deputy tom]

15 hours ago, Huaco Kid said:

Dad was a chemical engineer for Gulf Oil from graduation to retirement.

I've still got a box of the "Gulf Wax" bars around here somewhere.  (i don't know what else they were used for, besides waxing the runners on your sled)

I worked at the Pinehurst Gulf (Texas) for several years.  I was kinda like the Goober.

No pictures. 

Gulf Wax was what we used to seal jars of homemade jelly. tom.

Edited September 2, 2019 by deputy tom

[janice6]

3 hours ago, Bish1309 said:

 

Wait....

 

Is this proof there was color back in '59?

I discovered color sometime in the early 60's when I turned on my Big Heathkit TV.

[janice6]

On 8/15/2019 at 11:50 AM, Dric902 said:

I well remember these

 

.

I have these.

[railfancwb]

My neighborhood has a plethora of gas station and convenience stores with no service.  We have one service station that had the pumps and tanks removed so all they do is rebuild engines.  Times they are a 'changing.

EPA requirements have eliminated many fuel sources. There was a requirement that tanks of a certain age be dug up and replaced. Some were dug up and the holes filled in, others dug up and replaced, and no doubt others just ignored.

Came time to do something about the fuel tanks at a large school system in the area, purchasing agent had them removed and issued discount purchasing cards useable in a local network of stations. The agent was delighted to be rid of the fueling responsibility.


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[railfancwb]

Looks like a still from Thunder Road.


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[Eric]

1 minute ago, railfancwb said:

Looks like a still from Thunder Road.


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It is from some movie. I never saw Thunder Road. 

[Eric]

9 hours ago, janice6 said:

I discovered color sometime in the early 60's when I turned on my Big Heathkit TV.

We got our first color TV in 1979. It was a Curtis Mathis 27” console unit. That thing weighed a ton. Anyway, I remember the first time I saw a Star Trek rerun in color. I was pissed. I had always assumed that Spock was green. 

[railfancwb]

A few years back a friend of mine was cleaning aircraft engine heads using a power wire brush.  He had to quit and undergo treatment for Lead poisoning for a couple of years.  No OSHA at the airport machine shop.  

Piston aircraft engines still use leaded gasoline. Ethanol free as well. Rather than antiknock, the lead is to lubricate the valve train.


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[janice6]

4 minutes ago, Eric said:

We got our first color TV in 1979. It was a Curtis Mathis 27” console unit. That thing weighed a ton. Anyway, I remember the first time I saw a Star Trek rerun in color. I was pissed. I had always assumed that Spock was green. 

Damn near the first time I knew Lucille Ball was a Redhead.  She was even more interesting then.

I am weak, but I'm a man.

[railfancwb]

When I was a kid I found out that Mercury batteries had Mercury in them. Who knew!  So I went to all the jewelers in town and collected all the dead and expired batteries for hearing aids. 
I peeled them apart and put the mush into a big hanky.  Then I twisted the hanky until all the Mercury stopped coming out.  In the end of that summer, I had almost a quart of the stuff.
I couldn't think of what to do with it so I went out on our second floor balcony overlooking the entrance to the house and the sidewalk.
I would get a big mouthful and spit it onto the sidewalk below.  It was magnificent the way it splattered allover and into the street.
That was it.  I spit most of it all over the front walk and sidewalk and when it was gone, I did other equally creative things.
If the "experts" were right. I should  be dead now from the Carbon Tet, the Mercury , the airplane glue and dope fumes.
But here I am pissing everyone off that lives near me, and I believe I will outlive them all.  Ornery is as ornery does.

There has been a thing for dentists to grind out the silver fillings and replace them with resin ones. Because mercury. Suspect the grinding them out exposed the patient to more risk of mercury poisoning than just leaving them. But hey! How much can be billed for not removing them?


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[janice6]

4 minutes ago, railfancwb said:

There has been a thing for dentists to grind out the silver fillings and replace them with resin ones. Because mercury. Suspect the grinding them out exposed the patient to more risk of mercury poisoning than just leaving them. But hey! How much can be billed for not removing them?


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Few people specify the specific conditions in which heavy metals are dangerous.  And many times to protect the worst of us from harm, the warnings are over done and offered out of context.

When Mercury is amalgamated it's bound up and not mobile.  But no one cares.

It's also interesting that the radio frequency output power electric field intensity of cell phones, on their particular frequency, is exactly what the maximum safe exposure limit is as specified in government regulations on safety relating frequency, distance and human exposure.

But, lawyers are always tempted to take on fact and elaborate on it till it's now fiction, then they  assume a correlation exists between it and some unrelated phenomenon.  It's where there money is, it's what they do!

Caution is good, fear is not.

Edited September 3, 2019 by janice6

[Bish1309]

13 hours ago, railfancwb said:

There has been a thing for dentists to grind out the silver fillings and replace them with resin ones. Because mercury. Suspect the grinding them out exposed the patient to more risk of mercury poisoning than just leaving them. But hey! How much can be billed for not removing them?


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Don't have them removed. Your thermostat will stop working.

[pipedreams]

1960 Buick

[pipedreams]

Somerset, PA, 1964...