Movie: The Right Stuff

Great movie. Click here to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnA8FvaAnI

Not only a great movie, but the book is outstanding.
Tom Wolfe's writing was far-ranging and generally brilliant.
The beginning of the book has stuff they really couldn't film & show to audiences.

I agree, it is a great movie.
For some reason the original link I posted wouldn't open. I have posted a link that should work in my original post.

Thought provoking book,
entertaining movie that sold a lot of tickets.

This post made me realize that the selection of humans to put into space “maybe” was first to go “Woke”.

Maybe,
because the peacetime USA selection of Generals versus wartime selection of Generals
showed similar problems even before 1862

If you are into aviation or war history, you have to read "Yeager" - what a great story about a GREAT man & his incredible career. THEN watch this movie. RIP Mr. Yeager. Another really great book is about the life of Jimmy Doolittle. Doolittle was not only a genius, but he was truly one of the fathers of flight & aviation fuel development, as well as one of the pioneers of flight navigation. What an incredible man!

"Who's the best pilot I ever saw? Well....yer lookin at him!"

General Chuck Yeager had a cameo part in the movie The Right Stuff. He played Fred the Bartender.
His line was: ”Hey, y’all want to drink whiskey?”
Go to 52:58 in the video to see him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnA8FvaAnI

My favorite movie. Frequently quoted in certain company...

An old mentor of mine, who had an "in" at the Pentagon, said that the ONLY guy who could just park in front of the Pentagon entrance was Gen. Yeager.

I don't know if that's true, but always thought it was a good story...

Yeager, and test pilots in general, definitely qualify as heroes in my estimation.

What a crock of male bovine feces.
Those guys were real men. You didn't see any of them playing girly dress-up.

Wolfe went into the backgrounds of the test pilots and the astronauts, and with brilliant writing.
I suggest people read the book before judging reality by a movie.
As good as the movie was, it would last longer than most theater audiences if all the info was shown.

I visited an old shop several weeks ago and was unexpectedly happy to see an old but large vertical lathe was still there and had not been sold for scrap like I feared.

When this old vertical lathe lived in a machine shop in Cincinnati it turned the heat shields for the Mercury capsules.

The original owner was in ill health and in a wheelchair when he told me the story at the end of an auction of his shop’s equipment.

We had to repair several items and pour a concrete mounting base with below floor basement,
and put in Sumitomo “opposing cone” variable speed drives,
but it paid for itself turning large conveyor belt drive drums. and truing large pump parts.

What I did not foresee is that my steel fabrication foremen began using the very stiff and big diameter chuck table’s many attachment points to “pull down” welded parts so they became square and true. By slowly turning the chuck you could “eyeball” the rise and fall of even small faults on big pieces.

Previously you had to repeatedly move around a heavy just welded object with bubble levels and T-squares.

do you recall what brand of machine that was, and the table diameter ?

Five foot table and could swing 10 feet in diameter.

Two tool posts on opposite sides.

It was a make that went out of business in the late 1930s.

The name may pop up up in memory.

When we bought it two Model T Ford gearboxes had been put in series to drive the table at different rpms

The two Sumitomo stepless variable speed drives, one for table rpm, one for tool travel worked well with no detectable slippage.

We were selling large amounts of metallurgical coal to Japan through Sumitomo Trading Company in Chicago at the time.

Our Sumitomo representative tried to get me to buy an RX-7 in its first year at a big discount.
I declined but shoulda taken the offer.
Sumitomo owned a large % share of Mazda at that time, and was their banker.

Sumitomo used American Commercial Barge Lines to barge the coal to New Orleans.
ACBL kept offering to get me to ride a tug boat from Cincinnati to New Orleans.
Told me I would never forget the trip or the food on the tugboats.
Ingram Barge and Caperton family barge companies offered that river trip.
Stupidly declined those offers too.
“We are too soon old and too late smart.”

as a machinist, i'm always interested in equipment like that.
thanks for the description of that machine.
when i first started my career, the company was Rockwell International. there was an in-floor Bullard vertical mill with a 5 foot table we used to machine 6 foot long gas meter bodies used in the field pipe lines.
these bodies were stood on end, one end machined, then inverted to machine the other.
after a few years, that machine was retired, and an above ground Bullard vertical mill was used until around 1978 or so, when that operation was switched over to the first of the large CNC machines were bought to machine large castings.

Click here to see the trailer to the Aussie movie 'The Dish' staring Sam Neil, a light hearted comedy on how Australia sent the live moon landing broadcast around the World, an amazing story which nearly never happened due to Neil Armstrong deciding not to have a rest period before stepping onto the moon. The movie 'The 'Right 'Stuff' is partly filmed in Australia at the Honeysuckle radio telescope station.

The Trailer'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFHBmoM4pFA

Second Trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dyGpXcQl-g

So you know the appeal of those big iron machines..
At the auction I was outbid on a nice above ground Bullard.


To create the below floor sump pit, I was pretty worried about jack-hammering the concrete shop floor next to other lathes, drill dresses and horizontal milling machines.

But it was suggested that since we had core drilling rigs of various sizes that we just bring in the smallest such rig and drill a circle of small diameter hole through the concrete steel rebar reinforced floor to create the below floor pit. This worked with almost no vibration and the grouting under the existing machines did not crack or show any damage. The tungsten carbide core drill bits bits cut through what rebar happened to be in the way and we lifted out the concrete circle of floor in one piece.

20 years later by myself I had to create a hole in the un-reinforced concrete floor of a house on slab to get at a leaking copper water line below. I used a half inch hammer drill to make a much smaller circle of holes through the concrete. The leak was caused where a copper city water line that touched a galvanized steel conduit with 240 volt wires inside. This created the shocking situation of seeing clear water squirting out of the elbow cover plate below the electric company meter!

Grissom grew up in the county south of me. The State park there has a display and looped short film that people can watch.

Over the years, his impact has influenced at least two more astronauts (Bowersox is one) from that county that now has only about 40,000 people. My cousin’s husband went to school with one. How do you top a guy who attends a 25 year high school reunion, who brings photos from space?