Via a circuitous route, I found this article on the NYT last night: Flying Behemoth May Find Its Way Home. Some background:
Glenn L. Martin was an early aviation pioneer, a contemporary (and one-time partner of) the Wright Brothers, who started out building trainers for the US Army Air Corps, and later several successful bomber designs used by the Army and the US Postal Service. Starting out in Cleveland, he bought a huge parcel of land in Middle River, Maryland, and moved the company there in 1929. The Martin company became known for its bombers, and, more visibly, its flying boats, including one version of the famous China Clipper, which flew the San Francisco to Manila route before World War Two.
During the war, they designed and built several medium bombers (the infamous B-26 and its lesser-known British-used cousin, the Baltimore) and flying boats (the PBM Mariner, and the JRM Mars), and after the war the company enjoyed fewer successes in a consolidating marketplace. After Martin’s death in 1955, the company ended production of airplanes in 1960 to focus on missiles, and after few mergers in the 60’s, the company became Lockheed Martin. Production on missiles was already happening elsewhere, and employment at the Baltimore aircraft plants was scaled back dramatically from a wartime high of 53,000.
This story circles back to a famous plane Martin built during the war, though: The JRM Mars, originally conceived in 1935 as a “battleship of the sky”, was designed with a 200′ wingspan—greater than a 747. The first model was built and flown through the early years of the war until the Navy realized that huge armed seaplanes were more of a target than an offensive weapon. However, they recognized a need for a long distance cargo carrier, and in 1944 they requested 20 Mars flying boats. The Martin company redesigned the plane for its new role and began production. After the surrender of Japan in 1945, they scaled back the order and six planes were eventually built. They were christened with exotic names: Two Hawaiis (the first was destroyed in a fire in 1945), the Caroline, the Marianas, the Phillippine, and the Marshall. The Marshall was lost off Hawaii in 1950, but the remaining Mars boats served the Navy until 1954, when they were retired and sold for scrap metal.
They were then bought by an enterprising Canadian pilot in 1959, who converted them for use as water bombers on the Pacific coast. The Marianas Mars was converted first, and had a few successful months before it was crashed by an overzealous pilot in 1960. The Caroline Mars was converted next, but unfortunately was lost in a winter storm in 1962. The remaining two boats have remained in trouble-free service in British Columbia since then.
However, the 60-year-old planes have gotten more expensive to run, and their owner has put them up for sale. Several interested parties have expressed interest, including the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, and a consortium of Baltimore businessmen and avaition historians.
Personally, I’d love it if they were able to exhibit one here in Maryland, but I’d be afraid they’d have to keep it outside in the elements where it could decay in the weather. Pensacola is too far away but much more temperate, and the scope of the museum down there ensures the plane’s future preservation. A happy middle ground: The Udvar-Hazy museum out by Dulles—there’s plenty of room there, and the Smithsonian takes good care of its planes.
More reading:
Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company, from the Maryland Online Encyclopedia
Martin Aircraft History, The Maryland Aviation Museum
The Martin Flying Boats, Vectorsite
Thanks to this Ask MeFi question, I found some recommendations for new music to work by, something I’ve been lacking for the past couple of months. Specifically: Explosions In The Sky and Tulsa Drone.
Addendum: Do Make Say Think. This reminds me of Mogwai in a lot of good ways-solid melody, driving rythym, and just enough detail to keep me interested without drowning out my thought process.
And before I forget, let me throw out some birthday props to my Pops, who just turned four today. Happy Birthday, Dad.
My brain sort of resembles this storefront today. A little worn down, a little faded. I have a to-do list about a mile long and nothing completed on it yet. It’s one of those kind of days where in order to do Task A, I first must complete Task B. But Task B requires Tasks C, D, and E, and the methods of completing those tasks are foiled by technology (or my lack of understanding the technology.)
Anybody else having a day like this?
Well, several weeks of farting around have resulted in the first of a series of howidunit articles about the fireplace mantel, which you can see here. Comments are open and welcomed.
Disclaimer: I don’t claim to be a professional carpenter. I don’t even claim to be an amateur carpenter, because that would mean I might have read a book about carpentry at some point. This narrative is in no way the recommended method of completing this project; I’m just documenting my experience so that others can learn from my mistakes. All the materials here were purchased at my neighborhood Home Improvement Warehouse(s) and tool rental centers, which kept my costs way down.
In a recent copy of This Old House, I found a gatefold article titled “Installing A Mantel”, with diagrams, instructions, and a few prefab examples with links to manufacturers. What amazed me was not the simplistic, breezy instruction list, but the cost of the prefabbed examples-all of them were over $1,000, and none of the featured models matched the simple woodwork in my house.
A year before I found the article, I’d decided to build my own mantel to match the woodwork in our house, a 1925 foursquare. When we bought the house, my wife and I inherited a brick fireplace with a simple slab of oak as a mantel. The brick, from what I can gather, was originally a dark color, and the mortar was set back from the edges by 1/4″, an aesthetic I wouldn’t have appreciated in any decade. To top it off, it had been covered in successive coats of white paint and left to absorb years of cigarette smoke, so that it became a shade of what she dubbed “Phillip Morris White.” The brick hearth was painted black, and a square brass surround was installed (poorly), which kept the heat in the house when the fireplace was not in use.
The first thing I did was to build a simple skeleton around the existing brick, anchoring two support studs into the wall on their sides to reach out past the brickwork. To this framing, I added studs going across the front of the brickwork and down to the hearth, forming feet, and then built out a box for the mantel at the top.
To this skeleton, I stapled some cardboard and whitewashed it as well as possible so that we could get a feel for how large the finished box would be. And there it sat for about eight months, while we worked on the room around it-installing new electric wiring, recessed lighting, and putting in drywall to shore up the old plaster and lathe ceiling, etc.)
When the baseboards were finally ready to go back in permanently, I started to work out how the mantel would look in my head, and how I wanted the diferent elements to look in relation to one another.
Our woodworking is done in a simple style; the doors and windows are framed in 5″ boards with round beveled edges, topped with a 1/2″ beveled cap. Above the cap is another 5″ square-finished board, and on the top edge of this board is a cap molding in a size no longer mass-manufactured. The bottoms are finished off with a beveled “foot” which is a true 1″ thick board, at a height of 4″. (Finding wood to recreate this foot has been lots of fun, but I’ve found that better Lowe’s locations carry 1″ thick pine these days.)
For the face of the mantel, I started by selecting the best sheet of wood I could find in a 4×8′ size, which turned out to be 3/4″ sanded birch plywood. Later, on a return trip to the same store, I found a sheet of 5/8″ MDF for half the cost, hidden around the corner-oh, well. I’ve never worked with MDF before, but I imagine it’s a lot more forgiving than plywood. The moral of the story: Keep your eyes open.
For each of the sidewalls I used poplar, which comes in many of the same sizes as pine, but is usually a better grade and free of knots. It’s a harder wood, which can be more difficult to cut, but the flip side is that it’s usually dry and straight at the store (something the standard-grade pine is usually not.) Wood with knots is harder to smooth and paint, and often sap will drool out of the holes.
I first shimmed out the original frame I’d built to be as square and level as possible. The mantel is actually 3/4″ further from the wall on the left side than the right, so I knew milling the sidewalls was going to be difficult. Once everything was level, I measured off the front of the brickwork (figuring it had been put up level and square, and the house had settled around it) to make sure the front of my mantel wouldn’t stick farther out on one side than the other.
My first step was to cut the sidewalls so that I had square, leveled edges to work from. My original plan was to cut them shaped like an upside-down L so that the leg would form a box for the mantel itself. I measured off the brick once again so that the forward edges were both equally distant from the brick face, and cut two pieces on my table saw down to the right depth. Then I cranked the blade to a 45° angle and cut the bevels on the forward edges. Upstairs, after checking each side for fit, I used a hand planer to shape the backside of the planks to fit the, um, peculiar shape of the wall. After about eight hundred test fits, I got each side to fit the wall correctly and then tacked them into place with some 2″ nails. (Let me just take a moment to preach The Gospel of predrilling any nail holes used to construct anything serious. It’s almost important enough to warrant buying a second drill specifically for predrilling, so that a primary drill can be freed up for other tasks.)
After shimming and fitting the sides so that they were level and equidistant (measure from side to side and then in an X shape from each corner), I moved on to the face of the mantel. First, I set up a straight jig for a circular saw along a short edge of the board and cut down the length with the blade at 45°. Measuring the width of the front face one last time, I set the jig up on the other side and cut it down, making sure I made a straight line with the saw.
Next, measuring the opening, I marked up the back of the plywood for the cutout on the inside. I’ve read in various places about minimum firebox clearances (essentially, keeping anything flammable away from what is called “heat and glow”) and several places mentioned 16″ as a firm number. The This Old House article says “The National Fire Code says that all combustible material must be 1 inch away from the firebox opening for every 1/8 inch it protrudes from the surface, with a minimum 6-inch clearance all around.” I had to contend with the damper handle above the opening, so I used that as my point of reference and measured the sides to fit aesthetically with it. My sidewalls are a little inside 6″, but I found that anything thinner on the sides began to look spindly and weak. (Please don’t rat me out.) The inside walls of the mantel were also going to be beveled so that I could fit it snug to the edge of the brick, but I knew this would get tricky quickly. For the left side of the mantel, the job was easy. I made another jig and ran the saw up to my line.
I clamped a fence for a jigsaw along the top edge, adding 1/2″ to the final measurement so that I’d have some excess on my finished board. Then, I drilled a pilot hole on one side and cut the top edge out. My scrollsaw has a very thin, pliable blade, so it can’t be counted on for a straight 90° cut. I’ll come back to this in a little while.
But here’s where the fun starts. The circular saw will do a 45° angle going one way, but won’t adjust to go the other way, even if the board is flipped on its back. I had to be creative here. Looking through the tools at the store, I found a bit for my router which cut a 45° angle at a depth slightly more than 1/2″, which wasn’t deep enough to go through the entire board.
However, when I thought about it a little while longer, I found a straight bit which cut a square groove at a width of 1/2″, which was exactly what I needed.
What I finally worked out on a scrap plank was this: First, I made a straight 90° cut along the edge so that I could take the entire interior piece out. Then, I flipped the board and routed two parallel grooves along the interior of the cut so that the depth of the remaining board was less than the depth of the 45° router bit. Next, I measured the distance between the edge of the angled router bit and the edge of the router deck, and made a fence for the router to guide it in a straight line. Finally, I cut the edge of the board with the router slowly and carefully, stopping the router about 1/2″ before the 90° angle at the top of the mantel.
Finally, I clamped a fence on the top horizontal cut to clean it up—this is where I used the jigsaw with the flexible blade, remember—and cut as much as I could going one way with the circular saw, then measured, realigned the fence, and cut it to the edge going the other way. Cleaning the edges up with a handsaw, I had both the beveled cuts completed and the face ready to go.
With the mantel and its sidewalls cut, it was time for the first test-fitting. I pulled out the level and tape measure, and tacked the sidewalls into place on the framework. Then, I fitted the mantel face up to the sidewalls and made sure everything aligned and leveled correctly. With some minor trimming to the bottom of the face, the board fit up almost exactly to the sidewalls.
Yeah, I know—I’m as surprised as you are. But it actually worked.
Next: Building the box on the top, take one.
On the way back from Dave’s house yesterday afternoon, I stopped to shoot a few pictures of the Enchanted Forest through the gate that surrounds the old park. I love this guy.
RJD2 at Sonar 3.24.07 Here in town. I don’t know what his new album will sound like, but I’d like to check this show out.
There’s a hamburger joint out on Rt. 40 with a huge sign that used to be red neon, the last of the old-skool signage left on that stretch of roadway. It’s been painted and the patina is gone now, but for years it was a lovely peeling white and black, just waiting for a long lens to capture its beauty. In the back of the parking lot, almost hidden by bushes, sits this entrance sign, equally as retro and time-worn, but ignored by the march of progress.
Hey, before I forget, special dark props to our buddy Jason, who sent up a can of french roast Cafe Du Monde coffee from New Orleans. (We bought a yellow can of coffee & chickory at the local asian supermarket, and after the first few cups we started complaining about the taste.) This is very, very good coffee. We’ve finally killed the can, and I think I’m going to be buying some more, along with a T-shirt or two.
Speaking of coffee, I stopped by Zeke’s on Sunday to git me sum beans, but they were closed due to lousy weather. I’ll be back!