OK Now we’re talking about something I know a little sumthin about.....crown vics and par excellence do not belong in the same sentence.
They were just a mid level utility car that ford made available to law enforcement at fleet prices. I’ve outrun a few (that style was just hitting the streets back when my outlaw days were ending, the previous body style were junk also)in vehicles that should not have been on the road!
They were just a mid level utility car that ford made available to law enforcement at fleet prices. I’ve outrun a few (that style was just hitting the streets back when my outlaw days were ending, the previous body style were junk also)in vehicles that should not have been on the road!
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That reminds of the joke "What's big and red and throbs..."
Sorry, I can't complete that joke on a family show, but here's a photographic clue.
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We'll need any pics you have, Bob! And I'd think talking about our foolish younger years would be considered on-topic for this thread.
I should definitely duck off to bed right now, before I ruin my reputation.
What is hard and pink in the morning?
Might get away with it. We are an adult forum. 😀
What is hard and pink in the morning?
Might get away with it. We are an adult forum. 😀
Hah....even in my my foolish youth I knew enough not to take pics that could be used against me in court! 😀
Edit.....here’s a interesting tale of Bob V. Po-Po, a buddy of mine who had a side job supplying cannabis to the masses (frowned upon in them days) got raided and they found a pic of me smoking a lefty, well stupid cops put out a warrant for my arrest and picked me up a few weeks later, showed me the pic and said I was under arrest for possession of a controlled substance! I said, you better have that tested because it’s just a home rolled cigarette.....didn’t know tobacco was illegal (I was old enough).
You wanna talk about some kinda p’d off! I’m sure I paid for that down the road though. 😀
Edit.....here’s a interesting tale of Bob V. Po-Po, a buddy of mine who had a side job supplying cannabis to the masses (frowned upon in them days) got raided and they found a pic of me smoking a lefty, well stupid cops put out a warrant for my arrest and picked me up a few weeks later, showed me the pic and said I was under arrest for possession of a controlled substance! I said, you better have that tested because it’s just a home rolled cigarette.....didn’t know tobacco was illegal (I was old enough).
You wanna talk about some kinda p’d off! I’m sure I paid for that down the road though. 😀
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No. We regretted, but "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM". (Much IBM was leased, not bought.)
Internet in mid 1990s? I was on that in 1978 or so. Before TCP/IP and IMPs. Certainly before DNS, because there was a massive weekly print-out of addresses. But sites were named .MIL and .EDU, we connected, tried to find anonymous services, often just an unsecure game of startrek. 300 baud at best (in underclass labs, I think the backbones were 4800 baud dedicated data lines). A friend met a girl 400 miles away that way, and they are still married.
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The late model Challenger in your picture is in reality a Mercedes Benz E-class sedan from several generations back with a body style (and grill) derived from the classic 1970 Challenger with adaptations to accommodate modern safety standards.
Chrysler used to be owned by MB several years ago and they got the tooling, equipment, and rights to the then current E-class sedan when MB revamped the line to a newer design. Chrysler then took the E-class chassis and created 4 distinct body styles to go over it. The 4 door Charger (the modern RWD cop car), the Challenger (shown in your picture), the 300, a large 4 door "luxury" sedan, and the Magnum, a station wagon that died off after a few years.
It was an attempt to make the disguised MB sedan look as closely like the 1970 Challenger as the modern safety regulations would allow....huge Chrome bumpers are still OK on pickup trucks, but absent from cars.
I believe that their attempts are more faithful to the original 1970's styling than the Camaro or Mustang is to the car that GM and Ford copied. The hood (bonnet) is a nearly exact copy of the 1970 original. Enclosed is a picture of the 1970 Challenger. When the MB derived car first debuted it had a 5.7 L Hemi engine with somewhere around 350 HP. The current "Hellcat" versions of both the Charger and Challenger can be had today with a 715 HP supercharged 6.7 L V8 engine.
My Challenger handled like a brick being pushed from behind. It was severely traction limited with the torque of that big V8 coming on hard at low RPMs.
I built several hot rods in my life, with this being my last and the most powerful of the Camaro (1968 convertible), Mustang (1966 convertible), Challenger trio. I also built a 2.2 L FWD Dodge Omni that did well in autocross racing, and could smoke 5.0L Mustangs in a drag race.
True, but they could take the abuse dealt out by cops and teenage kids and keep on running until they literally fell apart.
I learned these words before I even had my drivers license...."You can outrun the cop, but you can't outrun Motorola," referring to the police radios system.
By the time I outran the cops at 140 MPH in a POS Pontiac with bald tires, I knew that you could jam the Motorola with a military scrap GE! This was before I got a job there...and now that I think about it even before the Motorola plant was built.
My youthful STUPID antics did involve being quite camera shy, especially when involving behavior somewhat beyond legality.....and whatever happens on a boat more than 3 miles offshore is NOT legal evidence in a US court....proving those 3 miles is a different story.
Dade county Florida put on free rock concerts on alternate weekends in the summer to keep us kids off the street, and "out of trouble." This was the late 60's and early 70's. They were in a field west of Miami, or on Virginia beach in Biscayne Bay. The cops were ever present, but they seemed to ignore the blatant marijuana use. These concerts went on for 3 or 4 years in the summer, and flew under every one's radar until a reporter published several pictures of "school age kids using drugs" on the front page of the local section in the Miami Herald newspaper. I might have been visible in one of those pictures, but I was not identifiable. Myself and the people around me were the only ones who knew. Some of my friends from school were not so lucky. One of the guys I knew from school was blatantly identifiable, and it cost him his job and standing as an honor student at school.
Let's just say that there is no evidence that I ever hit 154 MPH on a public road, but Mr. Gold Chains in his 80's Disco Edition Corvette was seriously embarrassed when a 1982 Dodge Dodge Omni with peeling paint passed him at 154. (Big turbo, lots of boost and some help from a guy named Shelby....he left Ford for Chrysler in the 80's, made some fast 4 cylinder cars, and sold go-fast parts on the side.
Long after the statute of limitations had passed some pictures of a few things did surface. There is someone who looks like me holding up a fluorescent light tube near the CB antenna on this 1973 Road Runner. Do you think that radio was putting out more than 5 watts? Would a 5KW Gates short wave broadcast transmitter be legal on CB in 1975?
So, now that I am an old fart, I retired from Florida, moved north, and drive slow.....bumper sticker that only old Floridians would remember.
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Tubelab, you should seriously consider a second career as a Novelist. That was a good effort. Enjoyed it. 🙂
That has been suggested, or I should write a technical book about my vacuum tube and electricity experiments over the past 50+ years. The truth is that it takes me far too long to arrange my random disconnected thoughts into a coherent paragraph so that it would take me longer than I have left on this earth to write a whole book.
A video or two of me blowing some stuff up on Youtube, maybe....
A video or two of me blowing some stuff up on Youtube, maybe....
George,
I think we can all agree that a Tubelab Youtube channel would be fantastic and very entertaining.
I think we can all agree that a Tubelab Youtube channel would be fantastic and very entertaining.
Tubelab, or can I call you George?
This is poetry or wisdom or something:
Plenty of time left. Look at James Lee Burke, he's ancient:
James Lee Burke | Author
Still knocking out those Robicheaux novels that still grip me.
You just need to figure out your metier. I don't think books about electronics is the most immediate thing. But car chases with the Cops, the odd shooting and fight. Maybe some murder. Some loose women. Yeah, I'd buy it. 🙂
This is poetry or wisdom or something:
Plenty of time left. Look at James Lee Burke, he's ancient:
James Lee Burke | Author
Still knocking out those Robicheaux novels that still grip me.
You just need to figure out your metier. I don't think books about electronics is the most immediate thing. But car chases with the Cops, the odd shooting and fight. Maybe some murder. Some loose women. Yeah, I'd buy it. 🙂
It exists now, but there is not much there yet. I will try to stay at least one video ahead of my oldest grandkid...just to keep him motivated.
TubelabCom - YouTube
Either one works fine.
I worked at Motorola in various jobs from assembly line tech to principal staff design engineer. I worked my into engineering after 10 years, and 20 years after I started Motorola paid for me to get a college degree. Most of my class mates were 20 to 24 years old. I was 40.
I changed jobs within the company every 3 to 5 years as part of my "never stop learning" philosophy. I spent about 5 years in the cell phone design group where I was about 25 to 30 years older than the average age of my coworkers. We developed a new radical departure for the cell phone tech of the day, the iDEN walkie talkie phone (Nextel, Mike, Clearnet...), playing catch up to turn a brick like dispatch radio into a flip-phone in less than two years during the late 90's.
The average work week was 60 to 70 hours, we worked hard, but played hard. Once a day we would take some sort of break for a non work related activity. Parking lot street hockey was common (played with tennis balls to avoid damaging cars and each other) as were other physical sports. Several of us racer cars in sanction events, and the company sponsored off campus recreational events to keep morale up. Laser tag or paintball games (shooting at each other with lasers or paint) were common. This "old guy" as I was called managed to keep up with most of them in these activities.
Working, playing, with younger people and living with a teenage daughter and her friends has kept me connected with the "youngers." Now she has 4 kids of her own, but I can't quite "connect" with today's video game, phone connected world.....maybe I need to keep learning that world.....NAH, but as stated I'll try to stay ahead of the oldest grandkid on Youtube videos, but his are all just screen grabs from his video games, so content is easier....I'm trying to teach him how to do "real" videos with the phone I gave him (same phone that I "one handedly" shot the 6550 triode amp video with). So far he is not interested.
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I had an i700. That thing pissed me off SO MUCH (more like the networks of the time just sucked) that I whipped it out of my car. It hit a curb at 60 km/h. The antenna broke but the rest of it was fine. I replaced the antenna with a 10 gauge wire and sold the phone LOL
Those old Motorola phones made Nokia look fragile.
Those old Motorola phones made Nokia look fragile.
I don't remember that phone, but it looks like a slightly redesigned version of the i500, which came after I left the phone group. There were several
derivative" phones based on the i85 design. The i500, i550 and possibly the i700 were in that group. All were based on the i600 that preceded them by a year or two. The original i85 survived all sorts of torture including being spiked down a 5 story concrete stairwell to prove a point to an ignorant boss. Some of the derivatives had thinner, cheaper plastic. That 700 looked like one of the ruggedized phones. I had a blue one for a while. I don't remember the number, but it did not survive being run over by multiple cars.....an unintentional accident that occurred when I ran across a 6 lane road in front of the plant to catch my buddies at lunch time.
Even though I was no longer in that group, I had a reputation for "thoroughly testing" things in ways the development engineers wouldn't think of, but some customers would, and did. Most of the managers who were interested in doing the right thing gave me a phone to "test." Some phones did not live long, some I just didn't like, and some I kept for a while. Nextel kept "optimizing" their coverage as the subscriber base grew faster then the network could handle it. The final straw came when I could no longer get service at my house. I switched to AT&T.
I had an i85 for a while and I did discover a software bug (picture). Note the two battery icons, and otherwise blank screen. Note the two battery icons with different results.
The i500 was conceived as a "budget" phone, with more than a few corners cut. It worked OK in strong signal, but had some issues in poor coverage. Overall it didn't suck as much as some of the later phones.
I lost my patience with a certain quadraphonic car 8 track player and it met the same fate.....with different results. It happened on my way home from a long night shift at 2 AM on an 8 lane expressway. I saw some of the remains the next morning. There wasn't much left. It was a Motorola product that I had purchased in the employee sales store. I dug my old Craig Pioneer out of the closet replaced the blown output transistors, and it played on for a few more years.
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Wait, you're saying that I'm supposed to have cell service at home? Whaa?!
I get about 0-1 bars of service with AT&T where I live, and I'm a few blocks from the state capital. I can make a phone call *sometimes*, but it never works when it's important.