St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery

The GlassStacker and I were out driving the other day and we happened on a Greek Orthodox Monastery. Let me back up a little bit... Leaving Red Wing we went west to I35, then south on I35 to I40, then west on I40 to I17, south on I17 to I10, then east on I-10 to exit 185 for Coolidge, then continue on toward Florence, bear right and take Route 79 south. At mile marker 124 turn left onto Piasano Drive. Follow this to the monastery parking lot.

We thought, "Wow, All this in the middle of the desert." The first thing we noticed as we exited the car was a sign that said "Modest clothing required" For me, long sleeves, long pants, for the GlassStacker, long sleeves, modest blouse, skirt, headcovering. We looked at each other... Fortunately the temperature was in the 60s so I was covered, but the boss had to borrow a skirt and babushka. She rolled up her pants, put on the borrowed skirt and scarf and we went on a tour.

A young priest/monk met us as we came in the gate. He was very eager to welcome us to the monastery and to get us started on the tour. He provided the requisite headgear and skirt as well as a tasty Greek cookie for each of us. I will say that the cookie was good, but it had a liberal dose of coconut, so I don't really know. The GlassStacker ate mine with a smile on her face.

St. Andrew's was established in 1995 by 6 monks from the Holy Mountain, Athos, Greece. The monastery has several chapels, each dedicated to a particular saint, gardens, pathways, orchards, vineyards, living quarters and guest facilities.

The monastery itself is dedicated to St. Anthony the Great, 251-356, and the main chapel is dedicated to St. Andrew and St. Nectarios the Wonder Worker. Other chapels are named for St. John the Baptist, Seraphim of Sarov, Demetrios of Thessalonica, George the Great Martyr, Nicholas the Wonder Worker, Panteleimon the Healer and the Prophet Elijah.

Incidentally, George The Great Martyr is none other than George the Dragon Slayer. If I have to have a favorite saint, this would be the one. There were several depictions of George with his sword stuck well into a dragon.

Each chapel is well adorned with chandeliers and many icons. There are no pews, worship is standing. There is a separate area for non-orthodox contemplation in each chapel and a very private area behind the altar for clergy.

The grounds are stellar. There are many plants from the desert, fountains, walkways and areas that invite meditation and contemplation. Stone and tile work abound. It is a magnificent oasis in the Sonoran Desert.

When we finished our tour we were at the gift shop. Since we had heard about the bread that is baked on the grounds each day, I headed right into the shop with a loaf on my mind. I got the last one for the day. We have been eating on it for a couple days now and I will say that it is pretty good. (Way too many carbs for an old man with blood sugar issues.)

While we were in the shop I eavesdropped on a conversation about "the Great Separation". Here is my take on it. The Roman patriarch (pope) in the 9th century made some changes in the church that were unacceptable to the other 4 patriarchs of the time. Rome went its own way, Roman Catholicism, and the others, Eastern Orthodox, continued in their traditional way. The schism became official when the Roman church severed itself from the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1054.

Just another beautiful day in the life.

The GlassStacker's Assistant

The Earth's Orbit

We are at a point in the earth's orbit that is closest to the sun.
The autumn and spring equinoxes are separated by approximately 1/2 year. In fact, there are three more days in the period from the spring equinox, about March 20,21, to the fall equinox, about September 20,21, than there are in the September to March time. This discrepancy was probably known to the ancients, as all calendars marked these times as important for migrations, agriculture and other cultural needs. The actual explanation for the differing day count came from Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630. Kepler realized that the orbit of the earth was not a perfect circle but an ellipse with the sun at one focal point. This meant that we were closer to the sun at certain times of the year and orbiting faster during those periods. He did not fully realize that gravity was the cause of our orbital motion so only could hypothesize rules based on observations that would describe the orbital motions of the planets. The physics community would have to wait for Isaac Newton, 1642-1727, for the idea of "action at a distance" and a quantifying rule for gravity.
In a modern introductory Celestial Mechanics course, Kepler's three laws form the basis for that course. The laws are:

1. The orbits of the planets are ellipses with the sun at one focus.
2. The equal area rule which states that if you connect a line from a planet to the sun, that line will sweep out a certain unit of area for a given time at any point in the orbit.
3. The Harmonic Law, K = R cubed/T squared. Please excuse the non-mathematical notation, I'll get the format figured out eventually. This law states that for any object orbiting another object, the ratio of the radius of the orbit cubed to the period of the orbit squared is a constant value. To calculate the value of K for the sun we can use the earth's orbital parameters. Therefore K for the sun = 1 astronomical unit cubed/year squared. Mars is about 1.5 times further from the sun and takes 687 earth days to complete an orbit. The K value calculated from this data is 0.97 au cubed/ yr squared. The other planets return values very close to these numbers. Kepler did not know about Neptune, Uranus and Pluto, but we can calculate their K values and we find that they are also very close to 1.

There we are. We orbit the sun in an elliptical path and we happen to be nearest the sun on about 4 January each year. Our ellipse is very nearly a circle so we stay at nearly the same distance from the sun all year.

The Kepler Museum in Regensburg, Germany has a very informative and interesting display regarding Kepler's life and work.

This is not an official federal paid holiday, but I hope that you will celebrate anyway.

The GlassStacker in a babushka

The GlassStacker wore a babushka and a skirt today. Wonders will never cease.

As always, The GlassStacker's Assistant

Our Big Healey, 1957 100-6

This note was originally written for the Healey Enthusiast in the summer of 2010.

It happened. Our big Healey was running, see the March, 2009 Enthusiast, and had been driven to several MAHC events and to a few car shows around the state. Things were looking good and we were starting to think about fixing the seats using real foam padding and leather covers, not the Salvation Army boat cushions on plywood that are currently in use. When I picked the car up from storage this spring and started to get it ready for the summer season I soon noticed there was coolant in the oil. The block had a crack. Julie and I were the proud owners of a busted car.

The block with the crack is not the original engine for the car. That original motor is still resting in our daughter’s garage. It is an early 2.6 liter 6 cylinder with the integral intake manifold. It has been in storage for the past 5 years with a load of penetrating oil in the cylinders, and it is still stuck. Since I didn’t have the fortitude to start a rebuild on the venerable Longbridge 6, I had to think of an alternate plan to get our car back on the road.

A little research brought me to the 250 cubic inch 6 cylinder engine that Ford used in the 70s for the Pinto, Mustang, Maverick and other models in the Ford/Mercury line. The engine is physically a little smaller, weighs a little less and has a greater displacement than the Healey. So off I went to Joe’s Auto Sales in Vermillion, Minnesota to have a look around. Joe specializes in Ford products and is very knowledgeable about what fits where. He had an engine from a 1975 Maverick out behind the shop that turned freely. I left Joe’s yard that day with the engine and carburetor from the Maverick and a flywheel, starter, bell housing, water pump pulley and clutch linkage from various other Ford/Mercury products.

Once I pulled the pan and put assembly lubricant on all the crankshaft bearing surfaces and on the camshaft lobes, I started to worry about how to put the Ford motor in the Healey. I did not want to cut into the Healey chassis or intrude in any way into the foot well spaces. The installation was completed with only a few new screw holes in the chassis; one to hold the bracket for the clutch slave cylinder hydraulic line on the driver‘s side of the frame rail and four more to hold the ignition module on the fender strut.

I took the bell housing off the Healey transmission and took it and the Ford bell housing to Outlaw Machine in Red Wing. I needed a spacer that was 2.25 inches thick, would fit the Ford bell housing on one side and look like the Austin Healey bell housing on the other side. This one-off took a little time. When I got it home and bolted it up, the splines on the Healey transmission would only barely engage the clutch disk. That wasn’t good. It turns out that the Healey has a longer distance between the flywheel pilot bearing and the clutch plate than a Ford does. The Healey has a long pilot bearing surface on the end of the transmission mainshaft to accommodate this distance. I had taken my measurements using the end of the shaft as a reference so everything was off by ¾ inch.

The fix turned out to be fairly easy. I cut 0.75 inch from the pilot end of the Healey mainshaft, mea culpa, it is my transmission, and went back to Outlaw Machine to get 0.75 inch milled off the Ford side of the spacer plate. The job setup was still in the computer so that operation went pretty fast. Now I have a spacer plate that is 1.50 inch thick and fits neatly between the Ford bell housing and the Healey transmission. The only other things needed were to cut about an inch off the clutch arm to keep it away from the driver side foot well and to countersink a Ford bell housing bolt that interfered with the transmission body on the lower left side. The engine and transmission bolted together like they were meant for each other.

The clutch is a Ford 10 inch pressure plate squeezing a Healey 10 inch disk. The throwout bearing is a Ford unit sliding on the input sleeve from a Mustang transmission. Healey motor mounts are used with adapter plates for the Ford block. The steel adapter plates are 0.25 inch thick and have bolt holes drilled in the appropriate places for the block and the motor mounts. The clutch slave cylinder is positioned on the left side of the engine and bolts to a plate that is also bolted to the block. The slave is upside down with the inlet and bleed ports interchanged. The Lucas generator is located near its original spot on a mount adapted from a Ford AC mounting fixture. The Ford ignition system uses the Maverick distributor, an electronic control unit from a Bronco and a coil from my old F-250. The start button activates a SPDT relay that bypasses the ballast resistor during starting. A 14 inch Flex-a-Lite belt driven fan with a 1 inch spacer is used for cooling a Griffin aluminum radiator. The Motorcraft 1 barrel carburetor was rebuilt using a kit from CarQuest and the automatic choke was removed in favor of the Healey cable. A custom 2 inch exhaust is routed under the oil pan from the right side of the engine and over the left frame rail to the left side of the car. The engine has no provision for a cable drive tachometer so the tachometer’s mechanical guts were removed and replaced with an Auto Meter 2891 Mini Tach. Incidentally, the staff at the CarQuest store in Red Wing are very good about having or getting the parts I have needed for this project.

It drives great. The torque is much greater than stock. Starts in 2nd are easy and it is even possible to start in 3rd and use 3rd and overdrive around town. The engine is lighter, consequently the front of the car feels much lighter in the steering. I have made several 10 mile trips, remembering what Ma said back in the 60s, “ don’t drive that thing any further than what you want to walk back”, and the cooling system, oil pressure, and the engine in general have performed well.

There have been some teething problems. When the engine was first started, it only ran on 4 cylinders. Two intake valves were stuck open and the pushrods had dropped out of their spots. Lots of penetrating oil and elbow grease got the valves moving and doing their jobs. Timing the engine was fun with no timing marks to be found, so I went back to the days of finding TDC using a screwdriver in the #1 hole then using the timing specs found on the valve cover sticker. It runs cool and doesn’t ping. The clutch is still very stiff, there will either need to be some adjustment of the hydraulics, some strengthening of the actuating leg or both.

A few items remain at this time. The original differential has a 4.11 ratio and I hope to find a modern unit with a ratio around 3.0 - 3.5 that can be adapted to the Healey chassis. The differential change will also necessitate a change in the speedometer.

We now have our very own “Nasty Boy” Healey 4100-6. At least as nasty as we can be with 6 cylinders of Maverick power fed by a 1 barrel carburetor. That is what happened in Red Wing this summer. The seats are still boat pads over plywood.

Here is a link to the Minnesota Austin Healey Club's newsletter for my big Healey article
http://www.mnhealey.com/mnhealey/newsletter/2009/Mar%202009%20enthusiast.pdf

The Cuban Cigar

OOOH, it has been so long I had to be completely retrained to get this thing going again.

The GlassStacker and I were in Cabo San Lucas last week and I thought it would be fun to smoke a Cuban cigar. Finding a place to buy the cigar was easy, apparently a good fraction of the gringo tourists want this experience so the cigars are very readily available, for a price. So I bought the stogie, not a small or large cigar, just a medium, very mild, smoke. The store clerk said it would take about a half hour or so to smoke.
Toward the end of our stay I realized that I might not be able to import this purchase into the US of A. This necessitated my smoking the cigar in Cabo San Lucas. Our week was nearly gone so the deed had to be done now.
On Thursday afternoon, I took a regular pair of scissors and just cut the end off the cigar. That done I hunted around for a book of matches, not easy to find in a non-smokers domain. I eventually found a book in the bathroom supplies. Now I had my stuff together.
Where to have this illicit pleasure. The Boss was adamant about one thing and suggestive about another. She was not going to have this event polluting her airspace. That seemed non-negotiable to me, so I planned around her airspace by going out on the beach to a location not too close to anybody. I had my own airspace. The other item that concerned her was that I might be sick. I had not even considered that possibility. How could that happen? Now I had to be isolated in case the unthinkable did happen. The beach was a good choice.
The beach was a good choice until I tried to light the cigar. A fresh breeze made that tough. Never mind that I am a reformed smoker who knows how to light a smoke in the wind. It took several tries, many tries, to get it going. On about the middle try, I burned my thumb! Rats. But joy, eventually I got it lit.
Joy is a fleeting thing, as only about five minutes elapsed before I decided to put the cigar out. I'd had enough. I will rationalize and say that I had all that I needed. Just that initial taste... Now that I was done, I couldn't leave a hot ember in the sand, somebody would step on it, so I had to get it all out and take the stub to a trash can. I enhanced my experience by burning my index finger putting the cigar out.
I didn't get sick, my thumb and finger are nearly healed, my moustache and beard only smelled of tobacco for a couple hours and I have enough money to pay my Visa bill when it comes next week. It was all worth it.

Knees for the Future

Two weeks ago on September 28, I had both knees totally replaced. Things are good, physical therapy is hard but there is a goal in sight. My family and friends are very supportive and caring. What more could I ask. There is one tiny thing, when can I drive my truck?
The weather has been most agreeable and I have been able to walk the neighborhood. I am already going farther afield than I could before the surgery. I truly appreciate this.
That is all for now. Eat, sleep, read, exercise and keep 'em running.