The journey begins - purchased a truck.

The latest victims, as requested.

There is a part two, featuring @tramm01 that I have yet to edit/cut/process - hang tight.

 

Take this one down to Armadillo tomorrow for a Tuesday am crane appointment.

 

Well - Wayyyy past my bedtime, but there you go - @tramm01 has spoken.

 

Well, 5 weeks slipped by pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, my top agent and friend passed away at the age of 53, I went to the visitation and visited with her daughter who will be continuing the agency with the help of all of us that can assist her. She's a tough girl at 34, but lost her father when she was 18, now her mother.

I'll miss Kelly, there were some weeks I spent more time on the phone with her than I did my bride. We'd stayed at each others houses a few times, and she was responsible for putting a lot of bread on our table over the years.

Gretchen decided to take in a grand nephew for a few weeks, 19 years old. His life so far hasn't been the best, but he's a good kid and just needed a bit of help. I helped him get his drivers license and TWIC card, and he just returned back to Louisiana. Nice having some help around, tried to teach him all I could and get him some labor work while he was here, but I forgot how exhausting a 19 year old can be when I'm knocking on 48.

Due to various forms of incarceration for the last 5 years, he has barely a 6th grade level of education - and it became apparent how difficult this was going to make his life. I would have liked to get him on the road to a GED, but it would have taken quite some time to catch him up, and I'm not the smartest cookie in the jar when it comes to education.

 

This is an interesting place. A B-52 fuselage.



Someone got creative with the welder on a slow day.



More B-52 pieces.



I did two of these. They are KC-135 stabilizers.



And more miscellaneous parts.



So, what this place does is basically reverse engineer aircraft parts (primarily B52) for the Air Force, using salvage parts, they figure out how to replace parts from the aircraft in the most expedient fashion without tearing up more than they have to.

In a word - they write the 'Haynes Manual' on how to do it, and send the information for tooling/indexing and instructions back to the military.

He said the salvage parts they can access now have less hours on them than the planes in service.

This place was about as rednecky as you would find - very unassuming, yet plays a critical role in keeping the planes in service. Real nice guys too.