Day 227 - Jan 5 - Home
So I am doing my best to keep to clean the house in between making messes. Seems I spend my home life doing one, the other or in a horizontal position. Projects unfinished expose themselves as I peel a few layers of between-tour-sediment away from the various clustering spots and low and behold, I find some old journals. Though most of the contents consist of cringingly unreadable babble and actually unreadable hieroglyphics, a quick scan through did reveal a few pages of interest.
The was written while on Black Flag tour. "Cel" was the bass player for the band that was riding with me and we were on our way to do a show at a club called Maxwell's in Hoboken. As you can most likely tell, the truck ran into a serious 'hitch in it's get-a-long' right about the time it's wheels were no longer on the pavement. Some idiot had cut our brake lines in San Francisco after him being tossed out of the club and our brakes never worked quite right since then. Well, also it did not help that we were doing about 60 in the fast lane that was actually not a fast lane but in reality a left handed freeway off ramp, downhill into a "T" intersection in a fully and completely overloaded truck. Anyway, I am pretty sure that I could had ground the gears down and pumped the brakes up enough to force that manual steering piece of crap truck around the right hand turn when a stressing and screeching and "POW," the actual box mount to the truck snapped and over we gover. Splash goes the window and I must say that to this day I still recall that it was the strangest sensation to have your head just 6 inches await from a window view consisting of sliding asphalt.
**** Sound Nerd Speak ****
For the next blast into the hand written past, I present some high resolution images of a PA design that never got built.
This was to the next incarnation of the system we carried on that tour
but due to the decision to pay rent and eat food rather than finance yet another PA from the ground up plus our in ability to locate satisfactory 8 inch drivers we ended up reconfiguring the "Brown System"
into the "Thin Fills."
For you sound nerds out there, I thought you may get a kick out of a line array based design that was based on dual 15", dual 8", dual compression driver components that is 48 inches wide and 18 inches high designed in 1986.
Anyway, the cool line array wave guides were still a decade away from being developed by L'Acoustics which was the true turning point in line array feasibility. I know most of the Rat site regulars are familiar with all this but for all our new friends, if you are curious about the development of the Rat PA systems, you may way want to check out the Evolution http://ratsound.com/evolution/evol1.html pages. I have not updated them in a while so it just stops about five years ago but you may find it kind of interesting.
**** End Sound Nerd Speak ****
Pondering. Air brakes are good, especially on big heavy trucks! For you non trucky mechanichy types out there, did you know that air brakes work the opposite way of the brakes in a car or small truck? In a car, you press the brakes and the brake fluid pushes these little pads to rub on either a disc or cylinder attached to your wheel. Brakes are normally 'off' and press to put them 'on.' Air brakes are normally 'on' and have big strong springs that push the pads against the cylinder and then when you start the motor, it builds up air pressure in the brake line hoses that forces the brakes to be 'off.' When you step on the brakes, it releases pressure and the brakes then go 'on.' This way if you have a leak in the system, the brakes get stuck 'on' rather than 'off.'
Ok, enough! Till we meet again in a day or two, good travels to all!
Dave Rat
