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People who didn't believe the signs at the Norge Village telling you not to dry foam rubber items in the dryer. And then they'd put it on High, which was only good for linens, and even then sometimes it would scorch them. Needless to say, foam rubber pillows went up in flames very quickly.

An aside, but... An amusing story, although it wasn't amusing to the people it happend to at the time. Some friends of ours bought a new house, with an upstairs master bedroom. A few months after moving in, they decided to celebrate by getting a waterbed (this was back in 1991). They set it...

I was surprised at that too... I'm guessing they badge-engineered them.

Thanksgiving adventures with Garmin We have a unit that we bought about six months ago, when we needed to make a trip to Tampa for medical reasons. We were supposed to meet relatives for Thanksgiving at a hotel in the Buckhead area of Atlanta the other day. I wasn't sure I remembered the...

Retro, you might want to pull out the deed to your property and see what it says. Of course, you never know what you'll find on an old deed, but I've not seen a deed for a property in a platted neighborhood where you own property out into the street.

My guess is that heat pump dryers won't really be practical until the cost comes down of high-efficiency solid state Peltier devices. A drier that used these would not be much more complex or less reliable than a conventional electric dryer.

You've got a pair of winners there! Nice find!

The company that owns Hardees / Carl's Jr still owns the Burger Chef trademarks. Now and then they will offer some Burger Chef items in a few stores in order to keep the trademarks legally in force.

When we built our house, the GC chose an out-of-town company that we'd never heard of to install the HVAC. Six months later all three systems (one for each floor) needed charging. Why? The installers had taken the caps off of all the Schrader valves, hoping to generate a service call...

I never got to watch it, but I saw the setup a couple of times. They had a shielded room in the basement that they controlled it from. For some things they had a robotic mechanism that could do stuff like scan over a weld, but for others it was a process of set up a shot, run to the control...

I used to work in a building at NASA-MSFC where some of the International Space Station modules were built. From time to time they'd need to do "field x-raying" on things that were too large to go into the machine. Whenever they did this, they scheduled it for after hours, and the entire rest...

Yes, I think the cobalt-60 would look a lot the same after most of it decayed to nickel-60. Except that it wouldn't ionize the air around it.

I remember those GM ignition switches. You always left the car unlocked at home -- "Someone might need to move it". (Actually, this was true as far as my dad was concerned; in the evening his friends would come over to play basketball in the driveway.) And I can recall that when you went on a...

How long until the cobalt-60 is safe? Around 100 years, I'd guess.

Kind of reminds me of the designs of some Italian guitars of that era.

Can't help you on the first one, as I've never in my life used a rotisserie. As for the cobalt-60 (BTW, the reference I have gives cobalt 60's half life as about 5.2 years; minor difference), it probably won't look much different except maybe glowing a bit less. The primary decay mode for...

Sure wish the photo was hi-res enough to read what is written on the console...

Norge machines The Norge Village I'm familiar with usually had one or two machines that were either out of order or had the red "DO NOT USE" light lit (I think that light indicated that it was time for a filter inside the machine to be cleaned). But I don't ever recall walking in there and the...

Is that the normal cycle or permanant press?

Interesting to read about how big they thought the market was going to get. I was alson intrigued by the prediction of the "universal fabric machine" that never came to pass. It would be interesting to try to design such a thing -- what kind of chemistry and handling would be suitable for any...