A friend of mine went to Sul Ross in the 70's and tells about working for a guy who had a big ranch they would load all the help and drive in to a big box canyon and camp then a helicopter would drive they remuda "who stayed in that pasture" into the canyon and the wagonboss would rope your horses for you some of them hadnt been rode in a year and before then werent really broke just topped off. He helped the same old man for 4 years and said he dreaded having to gather that pasture all year long. In four years they never gathered it that someone didnt have a runaway or get bucked off. And these were hands not town bred folks every since he told me that story I've wanted to go down there.

 

Our German Shorthair Pointer, Bella. Shes spoiled.

 

Some random pics:

Daughter was tired at the pumpkin patch:


Trying to learn to surf:


Wife running Susan G. Komen 5k:


Hawaiian dusk:


Big Island getaway:

 

Night dive off Kona

 

MMM is that the missing nieghbor or do you just happen to keep skeletons laying about?

 

Dont mind that old thing its just a chew toy.

 

Yeah, punch that one up in You Tube and watch the whole thing, it is very interesting.

 

Egads, that's a mean face.

 

Rig Blow out...




Halliburton truck with New emissions difuser Stack...



My Great Dane very worried if I will return from the store or not, LOL



My girl with the Durango we picked up off ebay...




My great dane and me about 6 months ago...




Merrick

 

some work pics
1. 765KV shunt reactor

2. de-energize testing a 138KV breaker bank

3.trucks

 

I didn't realise that was in the pic till my buddy pointed it out

I make them into these for are Halloween display

 

Here is a pic of the crack finding robot I helped to build at Tennessee Tech for one of my engineering classes. I got to keep the robot, its in my room right now.


My girlfriend and I "hosting" Bristols Channel 5 news. The pic is real!


Us riding on the beach at Jekyll Island, Ga.

 

DaveB.inVA - - Gotta love the Duct tape! LOL Thats great!

 

Matt,

Is this reactor on the Wyoming - Jackson Ferry 765 kV line?

I see you're from Kingsport. I'm there daily for work, my girlfriend lives there too. Since you work for AEP I'd say you probably know my cousin, he works out of Gate City, Va.

Nice truck! I'll keep a lookout for you. If you see a guy in a debadged black 2007 Quad Cab hollering at you it might be me. It'll be a while before I get back to driving it though. I'm laid up right now with a broke femur from a car crash. I can push in the clutch but not well enough to drive it... so I'll be driving an auto for a while.

Welcome to the site!


VZdude,

The duct tape didn't make it to the final product. On that picture its covering a reduction gear drive between the motor and bevel gear. We had to send that robot through a pipe and detect cracks using the photocells on top of the battery then process it using a Motorola HC12 board, plus display everything on some 7 segment displays.

The reduction drive was just a bit too wide to make it through the pipe so a couple of the ME's on the team just shaved the side of the case off till it fit. They got really nervous about contamination of the reduction gear and covered it with duct tape. I finally convinced them that it didnt really matter because for the amount of time we were going to use it contamination was the least of our worries. Besides people thought the open geartrain was really cool.

I did most of the soldering and all of the power work on the robot. We had one guy who was the programming dude who knew it all so he got to write all that nasty code. The ME's built the chassis. I got to keep it because I bought all the electrical stuff. Rather than have them pay me back they agreed to let me have it.

With all the other classes and projects going on everyones robots looked pretty ghetto. We ended up doing alright and detected all but one crack I believe. They dinged us though because we had a screw up and weren't able to determine how many cracks were in each section of 3 sections of pipe. Only one team got all that right and a lot didn't even get as far as we did.

The whole engineering school experience was like A Tale of Two Cities... it was the best of times, it was the worst of times!

 

Small world. Spent my undergrad years at ETSU, class of 03. Wifey grew up in Bloomingdale and her parents live in Telford, just outside Jonesborough.