Buying Portland – Black Star Bags

Posted on 2012/05/12 by Ken

My old North Face backpack is looking pretty ratty after carrying my books through several years of schooling, and it has a few design issues that have only annoyed me more the longer I own it. I’ve also found myself wanting to buy local, to the extent possible, which rules out North Face for replacements. I also decided I’d like to give the messenger bag thing a try.

I shopped both Timbuk2 and Chrome offerings, but the fact that both companies have offshored production of some of their newest models left a bad taste in my mouth. In the case of Timbuk2, the stores I checked (REI and Powell’s) didn’t seem to carry the US made models. I came very close to buying a Chrome bag made in California from the PSU Bicycle co-op, but remembered I still had an option that was even closer to home.

I’d heard about Black Star Bags a couple years back and have had their web site bookmarked but never paid their store in southeast a visit until last week. The location tucked into the building next to the Cinemagic theater on Hawthorne is pretty small, the showroom a tiny sliver of the space with the lion’s share of the room dominated by materials and sewing equipment. When I stepped through the door Dave greeted me and asked me if I was looking for anything in particular. I said I was interested in one of the medium messenger bags and he launched into an animated rundown of the features designed into the bags and helped me find the configuration and color I was after.

$150 later I was the happy owner of a bright orange stock model (the very reasonably priced customization options were tempting though). I was surprised to find the pricing to be competitive with what the bigger players were charging for their US made products. I got to keep my money in Portland and it didn’t even cost me extra!

I’m only a couple days into my ownership but I’m extremely impressed so far. I keep finding new touches that improve the useability of the bag and it’s super comfortable even with a quite hefty load (17″ laptop, some notebooks, cables, tools, and random other stuff). Having handled Black Star, Chrome, and Timbuk2 bags I think even if the Black Star bag was more expensive I still would have made the purchase, both for the appeal of buying Portland, and because of the tangible difference in quality of materials, workmanship, and customer service.

Extraordinarily ballsy, yet pointless

Posted on 2012/04/22 by Ken

No clue why someone would think this was a good idea, but it cracked me up. The text reads ‘Occupy’. Parked in front of the Multnomah county courthouse.

Find of the Week

Posted on 2012/04/18 by Ken

Sometimes, all the Goodwill has in stock is in the tier of hideous “collectible” figurines with menacing expressions and missing limbs. At others, their appraisers have gotten ambitious, and there is a mountain of cool stuff in stock, but only because it is priced beyond the limits of even the harshest hipster markup. Fairly regularly though, there’s something neat among the picture puzzles and church retreat souvenir tumbler glasses.

Today I found gold lying on the test bench next to a bunch of TVs and old stereo components:

It’s a Craig model 1605 clock radio, manufactured by the Sanyo Electric Company.

The clock function doesn’t work, which is typical. Usually the motor is burned out or the gear train is damaged somehow. I’ve only run into a few that have worked when I tested them in the store, and of those the one that stayed running the longest lasted under a year.

It’s a very cool looking unit, and while the clock doesn’t work all the other functions do, and it has an output for external speakers. I’m going to use it as an FM tuner for my stereo for now.

I’ve been collecting old flip digit clocks for a while now since they’re still common enough that broken ones are cheap even for the rarer designs. What I’d like to do in the future is replace the fragile motor and gear train with a computer controlled servo to actuate the flip digit display. I’d love to be able to use one of them daily and not have to worry about when it will inevitably fail and leave me late for work or something.

I also found this neat old thing at Free Geek for two bucks. I bought it mostly for the old school Apple logo sticker on top but I’ll probably use it as a switch box for some stuff in the garage. I remember having something similar for my Apple IIE at some point, way back when.

Random snapshots March/April 2-month combo edition

Posted on 2012/04/14 by Ken

I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the sunny weather that’s been gracing us lately. Here’s some stuff that’s caught my eye while walking around this lovely city:

Soooooo…. I thought this was a Kei car that had been imported, but apparently it’s a North American market model. This Suzuki X-90 was parked in the bizzare quasi-urban Cascade Station shopping area.

Sixth generation Country Squire in woody trim. First generation Panther platform cars are one of my guilty pleasures. I think I like them so much because to me they’re iconic of their time. When I think of the 70s or 80s my point of reference is movies and television, and these cars (along with the competing Chevrolet Caprice) were ubiquitous on film. Fleets of taxi and police liveried LTDs teemed through city scenes, meanwhile in the suburbs families were piling into the last American full size station wagons to grace the screen before their displacement by SUVs and the minivan.

Part of a collection of Nash and AMC cars that have been parked in the same vicinity for the entire time I’m lived in Portland.

Slap tags! I’m glad they’re popular here, usually way more visually interesting than marker or scratch tags.

Some terrible lazy sprayed tags. Only posting because the one on the right is the biggest example of that tag I’ve ever seen. Whoever does it usually sticks to street signs and such, working in marker. There used to be tons of smaller ones all around PSU. I’m assuming the maker got busted because they haven’t popped back up.

Green living goes out the window…

Posted on 2012/03/24 by Ken

…when you’ve got to move all of that shit. The winter term at PSU ended this week, and after they wrapped up their finals students from around the world vacated their dormitories and set off back to their homes. In the process, they threw away a lot of shit that really shouldn’t hit the landfill quite yet.

The combination of laziness and ignorance of the value of things means people send a lot of really nice stuff to the dump. Add in the pressure of having to fly home with only what will fit in your suitcase, and they start acting downright irrationally. Mix in the lack of foresight young adults are famous for, and the behavior around move out time starts approaching mass mental break territory.

If you happen to have a stable housing situation and live near a college campus, you can harness this insanity to your benefit. I made the rounds at some of the dumpsters around campus as I was going about my day, and came out with a decent haul. The only work required was taking a walk on an uncharacteristically nice spring day, and silencing my inner germophobe as I scaled the sides of the bins to get a better angle at the goods within.

The fruits of this labor were many:
-A Samsung Q70 laptop with its power supply. It wouldn’t boot (from what I can tell the integrated video card failed), but it has many salvageable parts, and the hard drive was helpfully pre-loaded with a considerable quantity of pirated music and pornography.
-A box full of camera gear.
-Lots of textbooks that I passed on but were quickly picked up by others, and enough paperbacks to net $20 in credit at Powell’s. Quickly redeemed to pick up Xerography Debt #29, The East Village Inky #47, and the compilation book of Scam #1-4.
-A D-Link DI-524M router/wireless access point.
-More office supplies than you can shake a stick at.
-A few baking trays, one of which was in fact brand new.

I could have fed myself for several weeks off of the vast quantities of still sealed packaged foods I found, but I had to draw the line somewhere. A kitchen could have been outfitted several times over with the cookware, cutlery, and flatware that had been thrown away. Several new in box pieces of Ikea furniture would have gotten a start on furnishing the rest of an apartment, not to mention the various used pieces of furniture to be found. And of course, there was a small mountain of clothing, which at least a few people were decent enough to bag separately and set off to the side.

I only checked out the outdoor, publicly accessible dumpsters. I know Broadway hall has one somewhere inside that the trash chutes dump into, but didn’t feel like getting my B&E on, even though I’m sure the pickings would have been good. There are also countless near campus apartment buildings that likely experience a similar exodus of students and the accompanying orgy of waste. Here’s a quick map of the sites I did hit up:

Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is this: Stop being so goddamn lazy, and donate your still useful housewares to Goodwill or something. Take the computers to Free Geek, or just leave them anywhere other than the dumpsters. Same with the other electronics. There are a lot of folks who do without and would love to have that stuff. Just tossing it in the trash is a despicable display of laziness and callous disregard for not just your fellow man, but the planet as well.

History in The Bins

Posted on 2012/03/22 by Ken

So today I decided to take a trip out to the Goodwill Bins. It’s a pain in the ass to get to, so I don’t visit that often, but when I do I hope for the kind of stuff I found today. A lot of the regulars are there to scrape stuff to resell, which I can respect. But that’s not my goal when I hit up those blue plastic troughs. I’m often after the occasionally bizzare, sometimes personal, and always interesting documents that are only brought to light when someone donates an entire household’s worth of accumulated junk to one of the largest charitable thrift store chains in existence.

Amidst the easily dismissed and disturbingly sticky mass of trash that is one of the toy bins, I found a cache of such things. The tattered stack of newspaper clippings and heavily creased newsletters seemed to be part of a larger collection of ephemera, but in all my scouring of the surrounding bins I found nothing similar. What I did take home was three issues of “The Maintaineer”, a newsletter put together by members of the 10th Armored division maintenance battalion in Georgia, dating to the summer of 1942. With the newsletters were a few clippings from the Seattle Times dated early in 1945, all concerning action by the 10th in Bastogne, Belgium. The last object was a Japanese issued Phillipine ten centavos note, with holes punched in it which seem to be typical of notes given to soldiers as souveneirs after the end of the war.

I’ve scanned the Maintaineer issues, which can be found linked below. They’re an interesting snapshot of a very different time and place.
Volume 1, Number 1 (August 17th, 1942)
Volume 1, Number 3 (August 22nd, 1942)
Volume 1, Number 4 (September 5th, 1942)

On the road in Portland

Posted on 2012/03/09 by Ken

I’m far from an advocate of the automobile as a primary mode of transportation, but I still love me some vintage cars. Here’s some neat ones I’ve spotted in the wild.

T3 Volkswagen bus with a woody kit… As far as I know there wasn’t any kind of option for this (though you could get factory woody kits on American cars up into the 80s; there’s a factory turbocharged, woody kit, K-car wagon in one of the Portland Pick-n-pull lots). Someone put a lot of effort into this thing.

1951(pretty sure anyway) Chevrolet pickup with a utility bed. Digging the vintage visor.

Kinda doubt the bed is as old as the rest of the truck but the period tail lights are a nice touch.

Nike Site Summit 2005

Posted on 2012/03/09 by Ken

Another Anchorage NIKE site, Summit, is located near the Arctic Valley ski area in the Chugach mountains. Since being decommissioned in 1979 it had deteriorated considerably, thanks to the harsh weather, vandals, and military training exercises. I paid a visit to the launch bunkers and surrounding buildings in 2005.

They were rather decrepit, and completely open to the elements. While the situation for the site looked rather grim back when I checked it out, it seems to have improved considerably since. Friends of Nike Site Summit and the Alaska Association for Historic Preservation seem to have been successful in their push to get the site recognition as historic. Since the summer of 2010 FONSS have been performing restoration work at the site.

Most of the equipment inside has been stripped, or is lying in pieces. Larger components are left in place though, including the missile carriages.

The works of the carriages are far less intact than at Point.

Several murals original to the site can be found. This one is on the ceiling in the lower level of one of the bunkers.

Another mural, I believe it was in the hallway to the back rooms of one of the launch bunkers.

The support buildings fared worse than the bunkers. Wood construction and the harsh climate don’t agree well.

A lot more of the old fixtures were present in this group of buildings. Lots of trash from training exercises was scattered around.

It was quite the hike from the ski area parking lot. Rest of the set below, lots of equipment detail and a few more interior shots.

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Castelli DSC 106 tear down

Posted on 2012/02/27 by Ken

The upholstery on the Castelli DSC 106 I bought was torn, and rather discolored from damp storage, not worth trying to salvage. I decided to pull it all off and see what the plywood underneath looked like.

First step was to take out the screws, and knock the frame apart. Surprisingly easy, only took a couple whacks with a rubber mallet and it came right apart.

The seat and back fit into notches in the cast frame pieces.

The vinyl covering was stapled into place with what look to be brass plated steel staples.

The back cover is odd. It has a zipper for one of the seams.

The wood underneath was not perfect, but it’s not bad for plywood. The back has a few cracks in the top layer of plywood, and marring from the production process. I’m going to sand things a bit, mostly to get rid of splinters on the edges, and varnish it. Should look pretty decent at the end, if a little bit richer in character than the ones originally produced with a wood finish.

The rest of the pictures I took of the tear down process are in the gallery below. Lots of detail shots of the upholstery seams and fasteners, so I can get as close to original as possible if I decide I want to put a new cover on in the future.

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Find of the day – Castelli DSC 106

Posted on 2012/02/27 by Ken

Picked up this sweet old Castelli DSC 106 chair for $30 from City Liquidators today! It was part of a pair but the other one was missing some of the feet, and I’m pretty sure they are made of unobtanium.

It’s apparently a 1965 design, by the Castelli company. It’s a pretty handsome, and cleverly engineered. Only four screws are used in the entire thing. The chairs consist of cast aluminum side brackets, with tube steel legs and under-seat crossbars clad in grey plastic. Small nylon stops set into the bottom of the side brackets keep them from clanking when stacked up. The seat and back are molded plywood, and can be found upholstered in vinyl, cloth, or bare with a varnished finish.

They’re still made today, sold as the Haworth DSC Axis 106, and retail between $570 and $787 depending on finish. More info from the company here.

Not sure how you can date one of these chairs accurately. One of the differentiating characteristics seems to be a number cast above the logo on the inside of the side brackets. My chair’s logo has an 8, and I’ve found examples of the logo with castings of 22, 73/7, and 69/6. I think it’s safe to say that the latter two are year/month combos, but I’m not so sure about the single and double digit ones. Maybe month of production since launch?