Dad's APH-5 Flight Helmet

Spent some time restoring Dad's APH-5 old flight helmet today. The helmet is from around 1957. In the early 70's Dad had stripped the helmet of the headphones and microphone for use with his ham radio. And then the visor was broken and the knob to retain it lost, probably due to my playing with it as a kid!

I was able to source original replacement parts on eBay and from a helpful person on the forum at usmilitariaforum.com. I disassembled the helmet cleaned it slightly and then carefully soldered some wires and fitted the pieces back together. It will be a great display piece!

More pictures:

And here is a funny card Dad received during his helicopter training. It appears they handed these out after the student mastered hovering and some other maneuvers.

Even the back is a little strange! This must have had some strange meaning to the pilots...

Bosch GLL 100 Green-Beam vs Bosch GLL 2-15 Comparison Test and Review

Bosch GLL-100 vs Bosch GLL 2-15 outdoors on an overcast day in the buildings shadow.

These lasers were set up 7 feet from the wall.

The arrows point to the crossing point of the respective beams.

My trusty Bosch laser level is a great thing but it just doesn't work in daylight. I'm always waiting for dusk to use it on outdoor projects. I've heard these new green lasers are better, and the manufacturers advertise them as 4x brighter. So I decided to get one and try it.

Outcome: The new Bosch GLL-100 is not much better than my old GLL 2-15. And it is much larger. I will not be keeping it. Note the attached photo, taken on an overcast day in the building's shadow. The green laser is just barely visible, a bit better than the red laser. But still not usable outside. If you are using this indoors and do not mind the size and price, or just need a new unit, it is great. But I wouldn't recommend it as an "upgrade".

A Garage Attic Design

I've seen a couple posts about garage attics lately and that prompted me to document mine a little better. Having done it, frankly, I think it is a mistake to build any garage that has a good pitched roof without an attic (unless you are doing a cathedral type ceiling for your car lift or something).

We moved from a larger home to a much smaller one in the city, and the new home is a 1926 Craftsman, with very limited closet space. We knew we were going to build a garage and a very usable attic became a priority. I'm mostly a motorcycle guy so the garage didn't need high ceilings for a lift and I kept 8' ceilings in there. But the city also limits the heights of garages to 15' so my attic space was destined to be cramped.

I decided it was very important to have a great garage stairway, and I documented that a while back here:
http://www.vintageveloce.com/2016/11/the-garage-attic-retracting-stairway.html

I found getting the trusses I wanted a bit of an exercise. The truss company was run by a fairly ornery codger and communicating with him was tough. He was happy to design the trusses for free as part of the truss order, but I wasn't sure he was really optimizing the truss to my needs. But I found he had the trusses stamped by an outside engineer, and I just contacted that guy and he was very happy to help.

Given that I wanted to maximize my headroom, we used a triangle at the apex of the truss, instead of the typical cross piece that would have reduced headroom.

Also, my trusses are "strangely" spaced, as I wanted a larger gap for a wider stairway, and the building itself wasn't designed in an increment of 2' for the trusses to be evenly spaced.

My design was checked for 200# per truss for the stairs, plus 40 PSF total load in the 9’ wide attic area. Note also that my truss is worse case design at 28.5” on-center, with the trusses at 1’-4” and 2’ on center not carrying as much load.
The wide spacing was to accommodate the stairway, and that is only in one spot. Most of the trusses are on 24" centers, so that effectively makes things more robust than the calcs show.

These are still pretty basic trusses made of 2x6, 21' long, 6/12 pitch. 13 trusses (9 attic plus 2 end trusses) cost me $1870, delivered, here in expensive San Diego.

Here the attic truss design. Note the triangle at the peak, and the maximized attic area. It's not quite tall enough for a short person like me to stand it, but you can move around up there.

Here are the end trusses. A wider space open in the center is for the attic fan on one end. On the other end we have a fancy vent, so the verticals were spaced to match that design.

Here are two shots during construction.

And on this shot shows the fan end vent from the inside. Also note the 3/4" plywood floor.

A garage attic. I highly recommend it.