Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Biodiesel


The poetic justice is almost too much.

Steve Richter, who culls used fry oil from falafel houses and Japanese restaurants in Philadelphia and New Jersey (tip: Japanese restaurants end with cleaner oil than fry joints start with), sails oil tankers for a living. Is it the equivalent to a carbon offset? Say a conscience offset? I'm sure Steve would have a thoughtful answer to this, but I'm not going to call and put him on the spot.

I've witnessed a couple biodiesel operations. Most appear dirtier than a used car mechanics garage. Congealing oil, leftover kerosene in coffee cans, rusted-out 50-gallon tanks.

Steve, through his genius, has managed to set up the cleanest, most efficient operation I've ever seen in a space the size of a garage. Well, it's in a garage. He has built a loftspace for the the filtered down oil, with a series of valves and strainers to get the biodiesel down to five microns.



Steve has contacted the state of Pennsylvania, in earnest hopes of paying his road taxes. They don't know where to start with him. Indeed, they can't even wrap their head around his operation, and so ignore him.

Filling up is about as enjoyable as it gets. Pull up next to the garage, unload the five Sun & Earth containers, and start fillin 'em up. Steve has his trusty pink rag on hand to take care of any overflow. We use a funnel - and I consistently overestimate what the tank will hold. I take it down to empty and trust that the 26.5 gallon tank can take another twenty - not so. The nice thing is biodiesel is a solvent - so it's not the worst thing to have spill on the sidewalk.

At a recently bachelor party I ran into a guy working for the Department of Energy. Obama had asked him to look into the long-term possibilities of biodiesel. His research showed him that investment into biodiesel wasn't feasible; the creation of infrastructure, a biodiesel factory, shipment of raw materials, distribution, would not be practical on a large scale.

At the time, I had four five-gallon containers of bio swishing around in the bed of the GMC. I took him outside and had him smell the stuff, look at it, its straw-colored beauty, Rumpelstiltskin's liquid dream.

"Yeah, that's a pretty small-minded view," I said (it was a bachelor party, I had had a few too many).

"What about encouraging grass-roots growth that's already happening?"

I told him about Greensgrow in Philadelphia and their biodiesel operation, Steve Richter, and other local outfits. Why not, instead of using the old top-down model, instead empower community leaders to build smaller, more efficient biodiesel factories? Almost like a cottage industry.

He said it was a brilliant idea, that he'd bring it up at the next meeting. I think he was pretty drunk too.

For now, I'm quite content supporting the good work Steve does. He does it well, it's enjoyable to get fuel, and his stories of operating oil tankers make it all worth it.




filling bucket
posted by Brendan Jones @ 8:49 AM   0 comments
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Rebuilding J.P. Morgan’s Shelves, with a Little Help from the Past


The call came as any monumental call seems to: in the middle of hanging upper cabinets.
“My name is D—, and I need you to build me two walk-in closets from J.P. Morgan’s Library.”
I sent a tack into the cabinet, stepped onto the porch, and asked D— to please repeat herself.
“I’m purchasing about twenty pieces of J.P. Morgan’s Library – the financier, who lived at 36th and Madison in New York? The shelving is warehoused in West Philadelphia. I need you to look at it, take it apart, and rebuild it into closets.”



One day later, MagLite in hand, on an August day that makes you remember how close Philadelphia is to the Mason-Dixon Line, I cast eye on the shelves. They were being stored in a church warehouse near the city limits that had no lights but did have water – on the ground, in huge foul-smelling puddles threatening to overtake the palettes on which the shelves sat.
And, as the beam of light revealed, shelves they were, almost ten feet high, built in cells of three or four, each measuring about three feet across. I clattered over a pile of tarnished brass railings to get a better look. The backs and uprights were made from walnut veneer with an oak core. The crown was huge, built up from solid walnut. Instead of fascia board there were inset panels with proper rails and stiles, a raised medallion in the middle with a copper number affixed – the metal long-since oxidized to a chalky green. Pediments separated individual runs; dadoed dentils were affixed with horsehair glue, with handcarved teeth beneath the cove at the top of the molding. Half-inch cut glass made up the actual shelves. Brass registers fit neatly into the bottom panels. On the back side of each cell was a scrawl of yellow chalk in a looping, seemingly foreign hand.





A week later, after working out a number with D— that I will regret for the rest of my life, I rented a box truck and, a couple slipped discs and hernias later, we had the oak beasts tamed and strapped down in the back. As I rolled down Interstate 95 the absurdity struck: I’ve got J.P. Morgan’s shelves in the back here, covered with a patina of his cigar smoke, repository of Leondardos, Rubens, Degas - what was America’s most esteemed private collections of books and art.
Now it was our job to take them apart.




Designed by Charles McKim of the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, the shelves were meant to embody and define the uniquely American “Age of Elegance.” Drawn up by McKim himself, built between 1902 and 1906 next to Morgan’s residence at 36th and Madison, the library housed thousands of autographs, including those of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. In 2005, architect Renzo Piano undertook the renovation of the library, replacing walnut, brass and copper with steel and glass.
All well and good, I thought, but who actually built the shelves?




A German cabinetmaker, I was told by the sellers, hired by Charles McKim. I could not verify this from another source. Nevertheless, I imagined him, newly emigrated from Germany, dressed in suspenders and a clean white shirt, riding the ferry from Queens, nervous about his broken English, swallowing repeatedly as he prepared for his meeting with J.P. Morgan himself. “I want a gem,” Morgan apparently told McKim. Surely the selection of the builder of the shelves would not be a decision taken lightly.



And when he finally did finish the shelves, wrapping them neatly in cotton blankets, covering them in canvas and carting them by horse cart from his woodshop across the east river, did he know he had blown this job out of the water? As he unloaded and installed as J.P. Morgan himself looked on, the pocked nostrils of the businessman flaring, the perpetual cigar like an oversized toothpick in the big man’s mouth, did the cabinetmaker know he had done good?

Whether he existed in real life or not, the German artisan took on a life of his own in our shop, shuffling here and there in his leather apron, making inappropriate comments to the dog, twirling his yellow chalk in his fingers, and peering over our shoulders.
Oh, he says, in a raspy, thick Bavarian accent, as we set up the crown on the chopsaw for a compound miter.
“Zees wheel neva verk… and zee dentils? Zee order veel be all wrong…”




We learned to pick words out of his thick accent, and took his advice for constructing a plywood jig for cutting miters, dusting off the 24” pullsaw, and muscling that crown into shape with arms atrophied from our dependence on power tools. It was like anatomy, understanding the vivisection of the crown, how each individual piece fit together. Seeing small numbers of yellow chalk on the backs, hearing his yavol and neins in our heads, doing our best to be attentive to the lessons of the old-timer.
As the shelves began to take shape we moved on to the details of the millwork, creating the drawer fronts by using the back from one cell, laying out a continuous grain with minimal walnut trim around the perimeter. We made low-angle shoe shelves from another pilfered backing, and did the same for individual cabinets. Schun, I imagined him saying, nodding his head. At other times he felt conflicted, yanking out his last remaining strands of gray hair as we dismantled and reconstituted his babies.

When we finally did the install we were put up in a bed & breakfast on Fifth Avenue. Niko, an Albanian on our crew, and ingenious craftsman, had not spent much time New York City, and came armed with his deep fryer. Beneath a huge oil painting of a white-wigged man he peeled potatoes, arranging the skins on the marble hearth, and made French fries. We ate heartily, and our German friend approved but did not partake.
The following day, as we reconstructed the shelving, each piece nestling into its rabbet, we realized we hadn’t paid close attention to the solid brass standards – and the brass pins for the glass shelves would not line up. But this was a fix we could take care of.

We finished the shelves with Waterlox, unsure whether the fumes or just the high of accomplishment created the vision of our German disappearing back into the grain of the walnut, looking back at us as if in a mirror. And if we looked very closely, as he receded from view, we all swore we could see him wink.
posted by Brendan Jones @ 7:59 AM   0 comments
Hunting Bass in the Modern Age

I first noticed the bass on an afternoon walk around the lake. He made his rounds, carving a semicircle around the dock, the lowering sun catching the grey band along his side. A scar the color of pig’s skin dappled his lower lip, marking his progress through the lakescape of rocks, sticks, and blackened rhododendron leaves.

At the age of 32, the urge to catch fish, though refined, had not lessened. I had made the move from spin-cast to fly-fishing; yet standing on that dock, I resolved to do whatever it took to lift this leviathan from the water – and save myself the 45-minute trip to the Pennsdale butcher for a rib eye.

The day previous young Emmett and I set anchor – a stone wrapped in nylon rope – a couple hundred feet off Edgemere dock. Fourteen years my junior, Emmett and I had fished annually at the Memorial Day gathering for a good ten years. Emmett used my spin-cast rod, an old stick with rusted guides and an ancient Zebco reel. I used my fly rod.

“Is that hook tied off properly?” I asked him, as he dropped his weighted line to the lake bottom.

He had caught his first fish at about the same spot. I had him reach into the gills of the bass, find the soft dimple behind the neck with his thumb, and break the neck. I told him the local Indians would eat the eyeballs of the fish they caught, and we should do the same. He did so – perhaps my first experience with the power of passing on tradition, invented or not.
After problems in high school, Emmett went to Idaho and got his GED. At the age of 18, he now lived in Washington D.C. I liked to think of myself as something between older brother and father to him.

He reached now over the gunwales to take a look at his knot.

“Should work,” he said. And it did. He caught two perch to my none.

I came down later in the evening with my fly rod and the same spin rod Emmett had used the day before. As my nuclear option, I brought along a plastic container of “Baby Nightcrawlers.”

Slightly lethargic from their nap in the fridge, the worms rallied to my touch in the black dirt, less than five feet as the net flies from my bass, who perambulated around the dock piers.

A man on a neighboring dock watched as I threaded the guides of the fly rod. He smoked while taking occasional glances at the newspaper in his lap.

“You going for trout?” he asked.

“Bass.”

“The one with the pink lip?”

I tied on the wooly bugger, a fly made from olive pipe cleaner and a burnished brass bead, and listened only to the click of the gears on the reel as I worked out line. I cast the bugger well beyond the fish, let the wet fly sink to his cruising depth, and began stripping line. The bass made the slightest re-adjustment of direction – out of the path of my bugger – but otherwise paid no attention.

For the next hour I tried various flies – muddler minnow, Dave’s hopper, even a ghoulish frog in desperation. I experimented with retrieves, letting the imitation ride high and dip, bringing it in straight and fast, letting the minnow bounce along the bottom.

Meanwhile, a cigarette butt floated on the lake waves in front of my dock.

I looked over at the man, who held a red keg cup in one hand for ash. He had folded up the collar of his Navy blue polo, and lit one cigarette off another.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“Workin’ at it.”

I took up the same rod Emmett had used, imagining that some of his luck from the previous day might rub off.

The pink of my baby nightcrawler matched almost perfectly the dapple on the bass’ lower lip. I set a bobber to just about that height. He cruised up and, like an embarrassed teenager, curved his head off to the side.

Each time the fish changed location, I chased him down. Finally, perhaps drawing on his years of experience, the bass left his orbit and traveled over to a neighboring dock. Still, I could make out the pink of his lip, ever so faint in the gunmetal water.
I cast over. Almost immediately the bobber began to skate along the surface, then jerked from view. I gave a flick of the wrist, and it was on. He torpedoed under the dock. I held the rod out from my body, keeping the tip high, reeling in quickly. He exploded in a flurry of whitewater, beaver-slapping the water’s surface.

He dove again, then suddenly surfaced on his side, resting, the thick grey band facing me now. The dog, usually disinterested when it came to trout and smaller fish, came over to check out this creature in the same way he checks out smaller dogs.
In my haste to catch this fish, I had not brought my net. So I tightened up the line, wrapped the filament around my palm, and lay on my stomach. As I reached toward the water I heard the man click his tongue.

The gills of the fish flapped as I lifted, two sand dollars of armor. I got him just far enough out to see the glory of his 20 inches and the thousand-volt line of his back before a single twitch did its work – the line broke, the water splashed, and the monster retreated beneath the leaves of a mountain laurel.

There is a silence after you have lost a fish that echoes to the ends of the earth. Even the guy watching me with his polo and cigarette had the decency not to break it. Such a deep prehistoric disappointment, that drop from electricity and everything sharp and meaningful to nothing.

I looked at the line. Instead of a clean break, there was a squiggle at the end. The knot had failed. I looked at the fish, now finning near the bank. The hook and line extended from the side of its mouth like a gossamer of drool.

“Helps to have a net,” the fellow said, rubbing out his cigarette in his beer cup.

Truth is, as much as I wanted to de-limb him as he said this, he was right. Present this fish with a worm, and he will eat it. He has little choice in this calculus.

I too as hunter have an end of the bargain to uphold. It consists of attention to detail, a conscientiousness of tradition, and a devotion of thought and reflection to the task at hand. It means arriving with a sharpened knife, a proper knot, and a net to lift a fish from the water.
posted by Brendan Jones @ 7:15 AM   0 comments
A blog addressing the importance of re-using material, and building with existing structures. A strong emphasis on architectural salvage, as well as the people that make the difficult work possible.
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Name: Brendan Jones
Home: Philadelphia, PA, United States
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Greensaw is dedicated to using architectural salvage to enhance modern living spaces. We respect history, our environment, and the material with which we work. We recognize our clients as partners in the process of using old to build new.

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