WTF. No one reads me anymore?

I read you, buster. But I don't know jack about football, much less peewee football in the 1950s. I do like the one kid in the back row making fists, though.

Same here. BTW, why do the names read left to right but are to people from right to left?

BTW, buster. If you ever decide to open a B&B let me know. Scotch eggs for breakfast, BBQ for dinner, and maybe a cane extracting demonstration using restoreD antiques in between.

I do read your posts and you have some very cool hobbies.:thumb: It would make for an awesome Cellar Road Trip.

BTW, was it you who told us that you were turned away from a church shelter during Katrina? Did anything ever come from that?

I didn't know they had midget football in the fifties. I think its relatively new here.

I read you Busterb. It's just I don't always have a comment. I don't know anything about football, never mind peewee football. I still enjoy your posts, though.

The kid with his dukes up was a jr. collage football for years. I see a preacher, 2 state farm agents, a banker, a refinery manager, a pharmacist, a school teacher.
A HVAC contractor. One who worked with flight sims. One went to air force academy.
1 known died. The one on my left got polio, still around.
Not sure what rest did.
Back then, was no jr. high ball. Just peewee and varisity.
Back to eye dr. the 28th.


37

Dog robbers, Bill, Cockatoos and Opals.
Well since I’m almost 70 years old and this is the only record of my BS. I need to up date a bit.
My friend BILL. I meet Bill in the jungles of Peru, Back in 1976.
He came in to help me with my job. I heard someone ask where was from. He said” Birmingham” Well I hear that and think brit. But come to find out he was from above Birmingham, Ala.
He had been downunder for about 15 years and had a family at Margerts River, which he spent last winter with.
We worked in Peru, Sumatra, and S. La. Together.. And boy do I have a few tales to bring here.
Bill called me collect from downunder, needed fair for home, had 2 cockatoos. At that time I had money, so I paid the deal with air lines..

Bill showed up with 2 birds and about that time my wife was going home, to Sumatra for a visit.. So we got loaded and let the !@#$% birds out.. They crapped allover!
Bill has and English school in Hondusis. Maybe a house of ill report.


Anyway Bill was working, inspection for the fracking folks., He called me other day and said.” Was on way to Basil, About time I did something for my self.
Bill must be about 75 or over, but he’s a work wise and great dude. More if I can get someone to type for me.

Where do opals fit into Bill's story?

He went back downunder while we were in Sumatra and brought me 5 or 6 nice ones, Xwife go them.

Dog robbers, Bill, Cockatoos and Opals.
Had nothing to do with this. Guess it was on page from where I was doing a book search.
Only thing I found was a book, The Opal Serpent.

When I can find someone who can type and spell, I'll update this about Project Azorian and
the links that Bruce sent me about project Pluto. I worked on the first reel barge in gulf. u 303 later barge 101

Project Pluto
 

Project Pluto
Bruce sent me a link about this, because he knew I once did this kind of work. The link . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv9lBqPVuoE

This I found after a little searching.
Historically, the technique of laying undersea fluid-carrying pipelines had its rudimentary beginnings in England in the 1940's in a War-time project known as "Operation Pluto". In the summer of 1944, 3-inch nominal bore steel tubes, electrically flash-welded together, were coiled around floating drums. One end of the pipe was fixed to a terminal point; as the floating drums were towed across the English Channel, the pipe was pulled off the drum. In this manner, pipeline connections were made between the fuel supply depots in England and distribution points on the European continent to support the Allied invasion of Europe.
No known further development work or commercial use of the technique of laying pipe offshore from reels was carried out after World War II. After a hiatus of about fifteen years, research into the reel pipelaying technique was renewed and was carried on by Gurtler, Herbert & Co, Inc of New Orleans, La. (USA); by 1961, Gurtler, Herbert had sufficiently advanced the reel pipelaying technique to make it a commercially acceptable and viable method of laying pipe in the offshore petroleum industry, able to compete with the traditional stovepiping technique. The first known commercial pipelaying reel barge, called the U-303 was built by Aquatic Contractors and Engineers, Inc, a subsidiary of Gurtler, Herbert, in 1961. The U-303 utilised a large vertical-axis reel, permanently mounted on a barge and having horizontally orientated flanges (generally referred to in the trade as a "horizontal reel"). A combined straightener/level winder was employed for spooling pipe onto the reel and for straightening pipe as it was unspooled. The U-303 first laid pipe commercially in September 1961, in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana and was used successfully during the 1960's to lay several million linear feet of pipe of up to 6 inches diameter.
I worked a few times on the U-303, which I think was a converted hull from an old LST. The oil industry used a bunch. Chevron had 4 or 5 which I also work on or off of.
Anyway the main supervision on the U-303 were named Larry, Moe and Curley. Once we laid some small pipe to be pulled up a J-tube and the jughead was telling the tug to pull, pull. But he was talking to wrong tug which pulled the barge anchors back across the pipe we had just laid.
A deck full of cut up scrap.
A link to where I found some of this. A popup will come up. Just close then hit the back button. If you’d like to read. Maybe I’ll add to this later.
Also in upper right corner is more junk
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...-pipelayer.htm

Good stuff.

Tnxs. I was about to give up on this. I do have more that might be of interest to some.

Once while working on above barge, A diver was driving the crane operator nuts with pick a little , no down and so forth. The sob was under the barge holding onto an anode. They later hired him as a deck foreman.
Later on another job, not same company. I was knocked overboard by pipe jumping the rollers and some bright guy tried to throw me the welding cable. Me in salt water. Hello salt water and electricity don't work well together.
Stories I might could tell about working offshore in the 60s are almost endless. Before there was an OSHA.

Buster, I love your stories. You have lived quite the life of adventure. I tip my hat to you sir

I love the stories too. Even when I can't quite understand them.

How was the diver driving the crane operator nuts? Intentionally or just by doing something dumb? I get that a diver might be under water, but was he just holding on to the anode so he had something to grab and stay underwater as a prank to freak the guy out?

Well the crane was hooked up to what he was suppose to be working on. As he wasn't down where he was suppose to be, he was talking to crane like he was. And wasting time.
Not a prank. He was just lazy or sorry sob.

Amazing you survived it.

He used to work for the railroad but he got fired for being a poor conductor...

...he wasn't shocked.



TIHAW

So, what is his current occupation?

Just had to amp it up, didn't you?

I do get a charge from wordplay like this.

Some people who aren't in the circuit, are negative because they aren't positive about the meaning of the symbols.

OTOH they're pretty good with abbreviations like abbreviating Volt with a BigV.

I'm sorry, watt are we talking about, again?

Whether or not you're AC/DC.

Well, I don't currently alternate. I'll state that much, directly.

Also, don't question my orientation, it hertz.

I don't think I've been so repelled since my hand got stuck in the mangle.

Like someone kicked you in the family joules?

I think it's time we switched the subject.

Why, what are you on about?

perhaps you should conduct a pole before you discharge this topic.

That's a step towards finding common ground.

the path of least resistance can transform the setting of a for-ohm and get it in a solid state.

More power to the people!

ohmygod, enough of the punific battery, you're grounded.

I guess the spark just isn't there anymore.

Don't take a hell of alot to entertain some folks. When the childerns get through playing, I might have something else to post. Of interest or not. :bolt:

We were just occupying time while we waited for your next story. If you're revolted, we didn't mean it.

If these puns don't stop, I'm gonna have to plug somebody.

We'd better stop, before someone blows a fuse.

Modern offshore pipe laying.

That's all auto welding. I've never worked around that. Another video that popped up showed manual welding. What the valve things on end of pipe are, I have no clue. Maybe for testing.

I'm not seeing the valve things on end of pipe?

Look here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02qzEHzR6wI

Oh, you mean this thing.

http://cellar.org/2014/pipelayer.jpg
That is strange. First I thought maybe it's a cap they can grapple up to continue the line later. The 5 valves could to be for letting the air out, or something under pressure to blow the line out.

Now the end where the cable is attached looks like it's for pulling, but it's on the butt end so it can't be. Must be for keeping tension on the pipe while it's lowered, but why are they lowering the end in the middle of nowhere?

Oh, you may know. Does one company lay the line out to where they plan a platform, them another company comes along and ties it into the system when they're ready?

The video referred to it as a startup head. One reference I found referred to a laydown head as a:

"Piece of pipe with a wire attachment, welded on to the end of a pipe string to facilitate later retrieval. The laydown head at the start of pipelaying [sic] is called an initiation head, and may be provided with valves and pigs for dewatering of the line."

Other references I found said it could also be used for cleaning the pipeline (introducing and removing solutions I believe) and pressure testing with some instrumentation actually inside the startup head pipes. It's accessible by ROV for those procedures.

Maybe startup head was a misnomer in the video since it seemed to be only at the end of the pipe laying process; or, perhaps it's commonly called that in practice at either end.

Bingo! Sexobon nails it.

http://cellar.org/2014/laydown head.jpg

So I was on the right track with the pipeline being laid to about where the wellhead or floating pumping station will be, then lays capped on the bottom till they need it.

Still don't know how the Laydown head works with the PLEM (pipeline end manifold). I suspect they attach to each other and work in conjunction, but I may be way off on that.

buster - that must have been one hell of a job. how many years did you do it??

Sounds about right to me. Tnxs.

Sarge. I did this work from right after the storm in 1965 until early 80s, If IRRC. But I still worked offshore until later 80s

I have some stories about de-watering the line Well I was going to use this in another story, but, once the welder boss told me me to take a poly-pig down to galley and tell them to put in freezer. It had been wrapped in sheet metal and strapped with banding. For de-watering after a lay down for rough weather.
Well I'd been around enough to smell BS. Go get someone else, I'm not pissing off the cooks. but it was true. To shrink so would fit in pipe.
Hey the oil field runs on rumors,lies, and bullshit.
In summer all the kids of the wheel's get a job. Do you see anything wrong with sending them after a roll of slack, concrete welding rods?

When you're in a profession that has a lot of specialized tools with strange, even sometimes nonsensical names, there's bound to be newbie abuse. :blush:

we had a lot of fun in the army with that, too. Ok, Buster lets hear some more about your work. I have never met anyone who has come close to doing the things you did

He's seen some things, man.

And some stuff.

I wouldn't recommend it.

I'm alive. Puter down, trying to use tablet.
Upper GI good, liver test tomorrow and lower GI on 2nd July
BB

Hooray for alive!

...and posting. :thumb2: